High-Leverage Practice 11: Instruction

I am going to discuss High-Leverage Practices as mentioned on the CEC website organized around four aspects of practice. I hope you will join in the conversation!

“HLP11 -  Identify and prioritize long- and short-term learning goals.”

Using the data from pre-assessments, teachers need to develop long and short-term goals for the students.

It is important that goals and objectives need three parts: Condition, Behavior, and Criteria for Mastery. Goals and objectives need to be measurable.

Writing goals takes some practice but if written effectively, it can help direct instruction to meet the student’s needs.

First, I want to know what I want the students to be able to do by the end of the year. From that major goal, I want to break it down into specific objectives. I want to look at the skills the student must master in order to achieve this goal.

Once I have the list of skills, I need to write them as objectives. I need to write the skill out in a way that it is behavioral, observable, and measurable. Then I need to know how I will assess that the student has mastered the skill. I need to know specifically what I will use to assess this including how many questions, grade level, or word counts. I need to know what criteria I expect the student to meet to show me that the skill has been mastered. These criteria have to be specific including the number of answers correct, the percentage of accuracy or the number of trials they must complete accurately.

Once the student has mastered the skill, I will be able to move on to the next skill as we work towards achieving the long-term goal.

How do you come up with long and short term goals? Please share.

Photo by Isaac Smith on Unsplash