interesting!

Thank U.

I think we shouild start, in perfect honesty, by analysis what the teaching intentions are, or should be.

The art is to induce students to establish their own learning intentions.

Dear Dave,

I would certianly be more on the idea of having a flexible teacher rather than a rigid one. There are times when find it useful to overtly state your goals and there are other times when you engage students into activities and objectives are treated covertly. Flexibility must lead teachers to experiment and grow professionally.

Best,

Laura

Thanks for the replies.  I would like to probe a little more.  "The art is to induce to establish their own learning intentions".  This is common phrase in this subject.  However, I have watched lots of videos who say this, but then go into a lesson with predetermined phrase and that is what the children regurgitate if asked "What are you Learning Today?" (WALT)

I frequently read that learning intentions should be negotiated with the children and should be in "kid-speak".  Again what I see passing for kid speak is adult language poorly translated into what children might say.

What I liked about the blog example at the top of this post was the teacher did a great job in engaging the children.  While I am not sure if they were asked WALT that they would not simply answer by stating what they were doing.  While I agree with Laura about flexibility I think it is and this point of engagement that a teacher might find it beneficial to use effective questioning to get students to realise what they are learning from their efforts.  Comments welcome.

Hi Dave,

Thanks for your comments. I need to know more about your audience and learning environment (pre-school, K-12, college).

I am creating a library of free activities for pre K-12 for use with a Turtle type educational robot.  The "lesson" can be a formal or informal learning situation and the teacher can be anyone: a resident teacher to a master teacher or teacher leader.  They can be a completely untrained person like a parent helping out or even a peer student.  The school varies from a village school in Africa to a high achieving school anywhere in the world.  The teacher can have no technological experience or be the utmost techie.

Irrespective of who the teacher is, the activity needs to make sure the student gets the best out of their experience.  This can only really happen with teachers performing at their best.  For me AfL captures best practice.  So the activities are structured around that.  For the teachers not at that level I am building in a Moodle based just-just-in-time on the job training support.

That is the plan.  However, the devil is always in the detail.  The blog I referred to at the start of the post is full of confusion.  I agree with what Laura said about flexibility.  I am also coming to the conclusion that timing is important.  Just sticking up a set of learning intentions when the students have not engaged in the lesson is not really going to help them. 

Hi again Dave,

I think students should be reminded of learning objectives continuously throughout the entire course. However, they should be given a set of goals they can reach and expectations after they have completed the course.

In college or university, we often give and explain to students a syllabus at the beginning of the course outlining goals, grading mechanism, time and date corresponding to each class material, assignment, policy, and accomplishment you will gain at the end of the course. We also set up a regular office hour to help our students outside of the course and offer on-demand assistance via email. Blackboard platform is often used for course material delivering, sharing and homework assignment submission.

Thanks Jueshi  It is interesting to see similar mechanisms in place for an older age group.  With young children you try to implement the same ideas but in an age appropriate method.  However, AfL refers to a specific set of techniques aimed at helping the teacher manage the teacher student interactions in the classroom in a better way.  Setting the learning intentions is one of the techniques that helps to improve the quality of a lesson.  Easy to see how to do it in theory not so easy to do it in practice.  My current belief is that the benefits of AfL as demonstrated in research is being "lost in translation" in the journey to the classroom.  It is a problem with heuristics.  In the hands of the expert they are rules of thumb which they apply with skill.  In the hands of a novices they are a prescriptive formula to be followed religiously.

Well said Dave. At our school teachers are asked to put LIs up each lesson. The administrtors (some at least) are aware that this is a step in the process. As teachers use LIs they hopefully develop strategies to use them more effectively, even simply in the way they are written (linguistically) or the mode. eg My faculty hands them out on small cards at the strt of each lesson. Students store them and they become a review tool later. We re also beginning to see the benefits for us as teachers as they keep us on track without too much prescription.