Learning Targets: Helping Students Aim for Understanding in Today's Lesson, July/2012

While content standards and instructional objectives are important, this book helps you grapple with the fundamental issue of what your students are actually doing to learn and achieve during today's lesson. It focuses your lesson planning on learning targets—lesson-sized chunks of information, skills, and reasoning processes that students need to know deeply. Discover how to write learning targets that are useful to you and your students. Learn how to convey learning targets to students throughout the lesson so that they guide student actions. And explore how you can connect learning targets across lessons to enable students to master a coherent series of challenges that ultimately lead to important curricular standards. Two popular ASCD authors equip you with what you need to start using learning targets right away, including

Strategies for designing learning targets that promote higher-order thinking and foster student goal setting, self-assessment, and self-regulation.

How to use learning targets to differentiate instruction.

Ways to use learning targets to generate student feedback and guide summative assessment and grading.

Ways to share learning targets with students to develop their sense of personal agency and enable them to take responsibility for their own learning.

The book includes reproducible planning forms, a classroom walkthrough guide, a lesson-planning process guide, and guides to teacher and student self-assessment.