Ron Berger:
She created learning targets in all her college classes, and other kids wanted to buy them from her. And so she ended up photocopying her college learning targets for her classes, and just handing them out to other kids for free just because she thought we all should understand what we're trying to learn here.

Alec Patton:
This is High Tech High Unboxed. I'm Alec Patton, and that was the voice of Ron Berger. Ron is the senior advisor on teaching, and learning at EL Education. He's the author, and co-author of several indispensable books on education, and he was an elementary school teacher for 28 years, from 1975 to 2003. Ron came on the show to talk about learning targets. To get started, I'm going to read the definition of learning target that appears in the book Leaders of Their Own Learning, which Ron Co-wrote with Libby Woodfin, and Leah Rugen. Here's the definition. Learning targets are goals for lessons, projects, units, and courses. They're derived from standards, and used to assess growth, and achievement. They're written in concrete student-friendly language beginning with the stem, "I can", shared with students, posted in the classroom, and tracked carefully by students, and teachers during the process of learning.
Students spend a good deal of time discussing, and analyzing them, and maybe involved in modifying, or creating them. There's a whole lot to unpack in that definition, and we'll be getting into every little bit of it, but we're going to start with a story that illustrates the power, and profundity of learning targets. Here's Ron.

Ron Berger:
I work with a high school in Springfield, Massachusetts, Springfield Renaissance School that at that time it had every single graduating class, maybe 12 years, I can't remember how many at that point, now it's been almost 20 years, where every single graduate had gotten into college. And so it was an impressive record, especially for an urban school where the kids were mostly first generation to college, low-income students of color, and they were just hitting it out of the park in terms of success. And 98% of the kids were graduating on time, so it was like there was not a lot of attrition. Things were really working. And so the governor of the state of Massachusetts at that time was Deval Patrick, came west, which he rarely did to Springfield Massachusetts to visit the school basically to honor them for their great record of getting every kid into college every year.
And I was asked to come down, and help shepherd the visit. And when I got there, I met the governor, and his entourage, but of course I didn't give the visit. The tour was done by student ambassadors, and the student ambassadors were amazing as always, High Tech High students, like EL students always are like any students that have been empowered in their school. They were much more eloquent than I could have been, and genuine than I could have been. And so on the tour, Deval Patrick turned to one of the students, and said, "Tanisha, can I ask you a question? Are you a good student?" And she said, "Mr. governor, that's a really hard question. It's a very broad topic, am I a good student?" And he said, "Well, I mean, do you get good grades? It's pretty simple, I think." And she said, "Well, let me tell you about my learning targets."
"I have met, and exceeded many of the learning targets for my major courses. So, for example, in mathematics, I've met all of my learning targets so far this year, and I'm on pace to I think meet all of my targets. And in history, I've met all of my targets, but right now I'm taking Latin. I'm really struggling to meet certain targets, so there's certain things that I know I can't yet do, and I can tell you exactly what I'm struggling with across the whole range of my targets, and what things I'm meeting, or exceeding easily in all of my subjects in the targets I'm supposed to reach." And he said, "Excuse me, learning targets, what are those?" And she said, "Those are the expectations of all the content, and skills, and competencies that we're supposed to have." And he said, "Oh, those are your learning objectives."
When I taught, I had learning objectives for my classes. And she said, "Well, sir, I apologize. I don't mean to disagree, but I do disagree with you here, sir, because it's not like lesson objectives that the teacher holds. These learning targets are mine. No adult in this building knows all of the learning targets I'm expected to reach. I am the only one who knows that. And I know exactly where I am in meeting my targets for every single discipline, and every single subject, and I can explain to you which targets I'm meeting, and exceeding, and which are not. No teacher could do that. These are my targets, my pathway to graduation, and college acceptance, and I know I'm charting that myself." And he just stood back, and he was like, "This is really remarkable to hear." And it was such a different ownership of her path toward college. And I think learning targets were just a really big part of it because it wasn't just she was determined to go to college.
It was she knew exactly in every single subject what were the skills, and competencies, and content that she needed to cover, and where she was struggling, and where she was not, and where she was exceeding. So, it's a very different kind of ownership when it works well. And when I was a student in public schools growing up, I was a good student, but basically I just did what I was told. I came to school, and whatever the teacher told me to do, I did. And when I left, I left. I was not tracking my own progress with my own goals. And in contrast, the students that I am privileged to work with now in the schools that are part of our network, and similar networks, or schools around the country have a clear idea of what are the things I'm trying to learn this day, this week, this semester, and how close am I.
So, an example of a learning target is if you're taking algebra in high school, what are the five to 10 main things in this semester that you should be able to do? So, I can graph linear equations, I can graph nonlinear equations. I can find any point on the coordinate plane, things that are very clear. They're always I can statements. And once you have those targets, it empowers the student because in truth, what's important is that the student can do those things, and it doesn't actually matter that much where she gets that skill, or that knowledge. And so if she gets it from her teacher, great, but if she gets it from Khan Academy, that's fine, too. If she gets it from her older sister at home tutoring her, that's great too because the goal is can she do those things?
Does she have that knowledge, and those competencies, and skills? And there's learning targets everywhere from pre-kindergarten through 12th grade that can be really useful for kids to think, "Oh, that's what you want me to do? I can understand that target. I can make it my own, and then I can work toward that."

Alec Patton:
How is the learning target developed? Who's developing it, and how?

Ron Berger:
All teachers have a body of content, and skills that they have to address during a year, or a semester, or a week, and those standards come from their state, or district standards, their content, and skills standards in their state, or their district that they know in the course of this year of teaching third grade, or teaching high school English in 10th grade. These are the things I have to make sure kids understand, and can know, and do. And so those standards are the basis of learning targets, taking those standards, and distilling them, and prioritizing them, and taking the most important ones, and making them the main learning targets is the basis of the learning targets that then kids adopt.
So, they're based on standards. The difference is that the more kids use learning targets, and the more they become empowered learners, the more they might tweak the learning targets, or critique them, or push them, or work with the teacher to change them. I've been in many classrooms where the kids will say, "Mr. Patton that learning target. I don't think it's the right target. I mean, here's how I would word what we really need to do." And kids start realizing that the targets are created with the goal of having kids understand the competencies, and content that they have to do, and the teacher isn't perfect in them, and so kids can even have input. Sometimes kids will eventually create targets, or refine targets, or critique, and change targets with the teacher in the goal of reaching those competencies.

Alec Patton:
What's the process by which, as a teacher, you turn a set of standards into a set of learning targets?

Ron Berger:
That question of how do we take standards, and switch them into learning targets has become a central part of my organization, Yale education in the coaching that we do with teachers, and in the collaborative work we do in setting up professional learning communities, or teacher groups. It becomes a big part of the art of teaching if you adopt this model, and it becomes one of the most important parts of teaching, I think. And so there's not one answer to that, but I would say the first thing that's important is to prioritize one's standards. Not all standards are equally important. So, for example, when I meet with a high school math team, and they're making the transition to try to make learning targets, I'll sit with a group of high school math teachers, and discuss what's most important to you that kids learn this year? And they'll often say, "Well, the whole book, everything, they're supposed to learn everything."
And I have to back them off, and say, "Do students all learn all of that every year? Do they all become fully competent in everything in the book every year?" And they say, "No, they don't." I say, "So, which are the things that you think are most important for their mathematical foundations? Which algebraic concepts, and processes, and algorithms are most important for them. If by Christmas they couldn't do these things, you'd be really disappointed. Can we name our top ones?" And I think the math teachers will argue a little bit, but there's a lot of commonality to will they at least should be able to do this, and this. And if you can get six of those, they should at least by Christmas be able to do this, whether it's in Spanish, or whether it's in algebra, or whether it's in history, or whatever the topic is.
These are the main concepts, or content that I really feel like kids need to know, foundationally. Those become your main learning targets for the semester, and then you break those down into targets on smaller realms for weekly targets, or daily targets based on the actual things you want to make sure kids know how to do. And it has to be in language that kids understand.

Alec Patton:
You said that it's important to be phrased as I can, and an obvious other way of phrasing it would be, I know. I know the components of a water molecule. Why is it I can rather than I know?

Ron Berger:
Oh, good. Well, I love this. So, I'm sorry. Now, I'm going to get geeky about learning targets

Alec Patton:
Please.

Ron Berger:
So, the most important thing about a learning target after the stem I can is the verb. And the verb is very important because a learning target has to be assessable, right? One has to be able to demonstrate one's competency, or knowledge. So, the learning target stem I can has to be followed with I can explain, or I can describe, or I can list, or I can analyze, or I can compare. So, the verb really matters. If it's facts you want kids to learn, you say, "I can list, or I can describe, or I can explain." Explain is a little bit more than listing, of course. But if the verb is passive like "I can understand this." It's not a very good learning target because kids can't demonstrate it. They might say, I can understand it, you just can't see it that I do. So, the verb has to be assessable.
If you say, "I can explain the water cycle, I can explain how the shape of a water molecule affects surface tension, and affects many things in osmosis." And if you can have a verb that's active, then the kid has to be able to explain it, or describe it, or write it, or compare it in some way. So, it's got to be an active verb that the student can assess herself, or that you can assess in hearing the student do it, or reading the student doing it.

Alec Patton:
Yeah. A friend of mine who's a research psychologist told me years ago that generally speaking, if you ask people if they know how the mechanism of a toilet flushing works, they'll tell you that they do. And then if you ask them to explain it, they'll quickly discover that they don't.

Ron Berger:
Right. Yeah. I mean that's why explain is one of my favorite verbs in a learning target. I very often use explain, because you do have to understand something pretty well if you're going to explain it to somebody else. Here's an example of an artful job that a teacher did with translating a standard into a learning target that was understandable by kids. So, the state standard was, and this is for first-graders, "I understand the monetary value of all standard US coinage students will", excuse me, "Students will understand the monetary value of all standard US coinage." That was the standard for first-graders. It's not an unreasonable standard for first-graders that they understand the value of coins basically. But if you just put I can in front of it, and you said to your first-graders, "I can", and you used even a good verb, "Explain the monetary value of all standard US coinage," kids would be like, "What?"
It's just not kid friendly. And what I loved about what this first grade teacher did was the learning target she created for that, which was a multi day learning target, was "I can explain many ways to make change for a dollar." And at first it doesn't sound like the same standard at all, but it actually is exactly that same standard because kids started saying, "Oh, I could explain one way to make change for a dollar. It's four quarters." And then another kid would say, "Yeah, but you could do three quarters, and then you could do two dimes, and then you could do one nickel", and then another kid say, "Or you could do five pennies." And pretty soon the kids are making charts of all the different ways they could make change for a dollar, and they're getting really excited about the charts they make, and how do you organize your charts so you don't do the same one twice, and how do you make sure you've covered every possible one.
And in the course of it, all the kids that don't understand the value of the play money they have there of the different coins are learning it very quickly. And by the end, they all actually can meet that state standard, because they all know the value of all US coins, but I can make change for a dollar in many different ways is something that the kids are like, "Cool, I could show you I could do that." And even their parents could understand, "Oh, that's a reasonable standard." And so what was beautiful about what she did was just put it in language that kids would understand, and also a challenge that sounded pretty exciting to try.

Alec Patton:
Do you have any advice for adding that excitement?

Ron Berger:
If there's a little challenge in it, like making change for dollars is kind of a cool challenge. How many different ways could you come up with? In the same way, if you are studying the Roman Empire, if your standard was around students understanding the Roman Empire, if your learning targets were, "I can explain many ways in which the Roman Empire was better than modern life, and many ways in which it was not as good as modern life", then kids would be like, "Oh, that's kind of intriguing. What are the differences?" Which are the ones that might've been better, if any, which are the ones that might've been worse, if any? And it gets you excited about digging into something where you actually have to learn a lot about life in the Roman Empire, and what was good, or bad about it in our modern vision of it, and think about our lives today. And there's not one quick right answer to it. Kids can start discussing it, and coming up with ideas, and getting excited by it. So, there's got to be some challenge in there that seems provocative to think about.

Alec Patton:
Yeah. And then in the actual process of planning your course, there may be, I'm sure that there's some flexibility here, but the process so far that we've talked about is you look at your required standards, you identify which one of those are really critical for everybody. You turn those into kid-friendly language starting with I can, and then a verb that will allow for assessment in the future. And then it seems like maybe the next step from that that you take these, and you go, okay, well what could I do that will give students an opportunity to learn, and demonstrate learning in some of these learning targets? Is that the process?

Ron Berger:
Yeah, yeah. And I would say the one thing I would add to that is that there's this sort of hierarchy of nested targets. What are the most important things you want to drive kids learning in this project, in this lesson, in this course, in this time? And then what are the sub ones? What are the five most important things that they would have to do? And then for each of those five, what are the important understandings, or skills they need to get to that one? So, what you're doing is building this sort of outline of the targets, nesting, nesting, nesting in each other until you get down to daily lesson targets, where when kids come in the morning, or they come in third period, they see a target, and you start by saying, "Okay, this is where we're trying to get today." Now, it is true that sometimes it's best not to present the learning target right away, because a lesson might be more powerful if it's a lesson level target to start with exploration.
Kids are exploring a problem that they don't know how to solve in mathematics, or some text that's inscrutable to them in history, or science where they're trying to make sense of it, but they don't understand it yet, and they're grappling with it individually, and then collectively. Or they're little kids getting some new materials, some manipulatives to play with, and they're trying to make sense of those manipulatives before they have a target. It may be that the first half of the lesson is all exploration, and discovery based, and then when you come back together, their target is introduced as, "This is where we're trying to get to." So, it's not that every lesson has to begin with a target, but the target then empowers kids to think, okay, now I understand what we're aiming for. And it may be for one lesson, it may be for a multi-day lesson, but once the kids have the target, then they have a little bit of power. They don't need to depend on the teacher for getting to that target necessarily, nor do they have to depend on only one assessment to show they can do it.

Alec Patton:
How does assessment driven by learning targets differ from other assessment?

Ron Berger:
When the learning target becomes the goal, reaching that target becomes the objective of the kid, and then of the teacher that each kid meets all of her targets that she has built, or co-built with students, or her fellow teachers. And in some ways it takes the focus off the assessment, and rather on the competency, or skill itself. So, if students know that they are learning to factor linear, or non-linear equations, if they have a target around that, and you ask a student, the student will say, "Well, I know then if that's my target, I have to be able to demonstrate my ability to do that." And there's a lot of different ways I could demonstrate that, honestly. I could show you my test results for tests, and I've taken on that topic, or I can demonstrate for you right now you write an equation for me, I'll factor it for you right now.
I don't even have to show you any quizzes if I can do it on demand right now, or I can show you my reflection. I've done a number of problems where we were required to write a written reflection about the approach we took to factoring, and you can see metacognitively how I'm thinking about factoring on that. And so right away the student is saying, "The goal is for me to be able to do this thing, and understand this thing. There's a number of different assessments that could give you the evidence you need that I can do it." So, students will say, "I might be able to meet this target through a project I did. I might be able to meet this target through an essay I wrote, or some written explanation of it. I may be able to verbally demonstrate to defend that I've met this target by you quizzing me, and me defending my thinking."
It invites a constellation of different assessment modes, because in the end, you just want to show that you can do these things, or know these things, and it opens the world up a little bit to assessment just being the three quizzes, and one test.

Alec Patton:
Okay. In my personal mental map of learning targets, I've got a blank space that I'm hoping you can help fill in, which is that in our conversation we've got from the standards as far as getting down to daily learning targets, and sharing those. And then we've got this situation where students are very aware of, and conscious of, and clearly referring to, and driven by their own set of learning targets. And I'm wondering how do you get there?

Ron Berger:
The more you use targets in your teaching, and as you said, I wasn't the first one to come up with this. I was late to the game in many ways. 15 years ago when my colleagues were emphasizing the importance of learning targets, I was skeptical at first. Now that I'm a total convert to this, it starts to suffuse your whole teaching approach. So, the strongest teachers I've seen every assignment that they give, whether it's an essay assignment, an analysis, a synthesis piece, a experimental write up, a geometric proof, every assignment that kids are given has the learning targets at the top of it written. This is what targets this assignment addresses. And so one of the kinds of evidence kids can use to say, "I've met this target, or I'm meeting this target", is, "Oh, I did these three homework assignments related to that target, and showed my understanding in all three quite well."
So, there's a direct connect between all the work that kids are doing, and the targets they are aiming for. So, it becomes this sort of holistic way of looking at the class at the year we're always working for targets in our work. And so when you create an assignment as a teacher, you should be thinking, which targets am I connecting this assignment to? So, kids are always working towards showing evidence that they are having the content, and concepts, and understandings, and skills that we hope they will.

Alec Patton:
Something that I think you've talked about before, I think you've talked about a distinction between learning targets, and doing targets.

Ron Berger:
Yeah. One of the many mistakes that we all make when we're first getting into this learning target world is having a target about the thing you're creating rather than what you are learning, the content, and skills that you are showing. So, if your target is, "I can make a poster about the rock cycle", or "I can make a poster about the water cycle", it's not a really helpful target because in the end, what you want kids to be able to show you is that they understand the rock cycle, or the water cycle, not that they can make a poster about it. The poster is just a medium for them demonstrating their learning. So, that would be a doing target. I can make a poster that does this. If the target is rather, "I can describe, or explain the water cycle, or the rock cycle in a compelling, and inventive way in a poster format", then the target is about what you can explain, not what you can do.
It's sort of what you know, and what your competencies are. People often write targets. I can write a one paragraph essay on this topic, and that's just like I can create a poster, I can write a one paragraph topic on blank says nothing about the quality of understanding, and expression in that paragraph. So, I think we have to make sure that the targets are about what we most care about, which is the understanding, and the content knowledge, and the skills, not the I was able to write a paragraph, create a poster, do an experiment.

Alec Patton:
Except that if you want somebody to know how... Wanting someone to know how to write a five paragraph essay is a thing you might want them to know how to do though, right?

Ron Berger:
Yeah. So, I mean this is a good push, Alec, I mean, this is what is your goal? So, if your goal is to have kids write a compelling essay, and I would push that five paragraph essay is a pretty contrived, and constraining way to think about what a compelling essay is.

Alec Patton:
Yeah, they're not my favorites.

Ron Berger:
Yeah. And I think teachers, and kids become wedded to them to a fault, and they end up being pretty dead, because kids follow a formulaic way. But I think the goal of having kids write a compelling about a topic is an excellent goal. And if you're content neutral on that, you really just trying to teach essay skills, then having a target around your ability to craft an engaging, and compelling essay is fine, even if it's not about any particular topic, it's just that the target should reflect what you really want kids to know, and be able to demonstrate.

Alec Patton:
All right, I have a very geeky question now.

Ron Berger:
Yeah.

Alec Patton:
If you aren't content neutral, let's say you're teaching a social studies class, everybody is learning, well, we're studying the Roman Empire, and you want students to write an essay, you want them to be able to craft a compelling written argument. How do you think about whether to make a content neutral learning target, because you want to isolate that particular skill versus because you're learning about the Roman Empire incorporating the content into that learning target?

Ron Berger:
Well, if you are both working on studying the civil rights movement, or the Roman Empire, or an historical period, the Harlem Renaissance, whatever it is you are studying, if you want kids to have the content about that, maybe that's the topic of your argumentative essay. And you also want kids to develop the skill to write an argumentative essay. You can combine those in one overarching main target for that time, but you're going to end up breaking down things into smaller targets. You might spend a few days on this where a daily target is, "I can create a compelling hook, a leading sentence to pull people into my essay, and grab their attention." And so you do a whole lesson just on what makes an opening sentence of an essay grab you. You read a lot of examples of it, you debate what is it that surprises you, and grabs you?
How do great essayists get your attention in the first sentence? What is it that makes a great opening sentence that's a hook for your piece? So, you might have a target that's so narrow, it's just about creating a great opening, or a great synthesis, and closing sentence for your essay. It might be about how you group your ideas within a topic paragraph. So, you might have a number of targets around the craft of creating a good argumentative essay. They could be content infused, or content neutral at that point, but the overarching target could be combining the content, and the craft. I mean, you can get narrower, and narrower with your targets more, and more specific.

Alec Patton:
You tend to be more knowledgeable than I am about multiple ways of saying the same thing that will make sense to different audiences. So, what I would call a model critique at the start of a project, doing a critique as a class of something created by a teacher, or created by a professional, or created by a former student. That is the kind of thing that students will be creating over the course of a project. And looking at the elements of quality in that together, and identifying those, how does that process fit in with learning targets?

Ron Berger:
Well, I think, in many ways, first of all, the clarity of what we're aiming for often comes from models. If we have a learning target on the board that kids discuss, and analyze the language in, I can write a compelling first sentence for my argumentative essay. That's a clear target, except kids have no idea what a compelling first sentence for an argumentative essay is in the abstract. If you then pull out five different models from essays from the New Yorker, or from a journal somewhere where you have found essays that begin with a sentence that really grabs your attention. If you have students in the last few years who've written essays that have amazing first sentences, then when you analyze those together, that target comes to life, people are like, "Oh, that's what a great opening sentence can be. Wow, that one really surprised me, and grabbed my attention."
Targets are important, but they're still just words. And I think if your target is a very clear geometric proof, having that written is a nice thing to have. But seeing students who have been able to do a geometric proof, and explain it really thoughtfully, and carefully, and doing it accurately gives kids a sense of, "Oh, that's what we're aiming for." And so I think the models end up bringing the targets to life by illustrating what they could look like.

Alec Patton:
We can kind of get into where things go wrong a little bit, but one that I think is a common one for teachers who are designing projects particularly for the first time, is that you end up with a project where the product that students are actually making, and that will require a significant portion of their time, doesn't really align with the learning targets that you set out at the start of the year. Does that sound like something you've seen?

Ron Berger:
Yeah, a very common thing that happens to all of us, I would say. Yeah.

Alec Patton:
How do you avoid that?

Ron Berger:
Well, I mean it's always a process of learning. I was a project-based teacher for 30 years. I made many mistakes often in projects that evolved in ways that they didn't end up meeting some of the skills, and content that I'd hoped for. I mean, that's always a learning process for all of us. As PBL-focused teachers, we have to keep working on getting better at that. But it's also true that when you have targets for the whole project, for the different parts of the project, for the different weeks leading up to that for daily, it makes us all with our students much more accountable to what are we supposed to be learning here while we're doing this project? So, the targets themselves are a good insurance of not drifting away, and it becoming all about just the craft of doing this without learning the content, or skills that also have to be a part of it.
It also may suggest that if your project migrates into a different place, that you have good conversations with your teaching partners, or your students, or both about how you might need to change some of the targets to make them more appropriate to what we're actually learning together. But I do think that in the best of classes, students are excited, and discuss the targets every day, and if it takes changing, they get right into that conversation about them.

Alec Patton:
How do you keep that from starting to feel dead with students?

Ron Berger:
That's a good question. Targets can become mundane just like everything else. So, students always come in, and the targets always sound the same, and they're always on the whiteboard, and the teacher says, "Write down your target at the top of your notebook on this page." And if it becomes so mundane in routine, the targets stop having much power. But if the targets are cleverly written, and sometimes intriguing, and they sometimes have interesting verbs, or interesting challenges in them, and if the teacher's discussing the targets with the kids, and encourages an environment where kids are questioning the target, "Well, what does that mean, and why did you write it that way? Why wouldn't we want our target to be this?" When the targets become more living, then it stops feeling so dead. And so in the best of classrooms, I've seen kids love discussing the targets, debating the targets, pushing back at the targets, asking to customize the targets because they're used to that rich conversation about them to begin things.
So, it shouldn't just be teachers have to have a target on the whiteboard. Principals walk through the school, make sure the teachers all have a target up. The kids come in, they just write down the target on there, then they move on. It's got to be a part of conversation, and dialogue, and debate about is this the right target? Did we word it right? Did we use the right verb for it? Maybe we need to change the target halfway through class when we're seeing it's not right. Keeping them alive, and doing fresh things like interesting, weird targets at times, fun targets, playful targets is important I think, to keep the classroom living.

Alec Patton:
I'm also hearing something there about a degree of confidence as a teacher that you need to be able to feel if students are challenging your targets that you're not being attacked.

Ron Berger:
Exactly. In fact, you should be excited. If kids are pushing on your targets. They think, "Oh, good, they're that engaged that they want to push." That's a wonderful thing if students are willing to push. And I think as teachers, we should be encouraging that. We want kids to grapple with what are we trying to learn here, and having them be a part of it. I often share some videos when I do workshops on learning targets. I have a student on video who as an eighth grader was incredibly eloquent at discussing the importance of learning targets in her eighth grade ELA classroom. And so she talked about, "It gives us a sense of what we're trying to learn every day. We come in, and it gives each other, and the teacher a sense of who's struggling with things? How close are we getting? Because there's always these assessments. How close to the target are you on a fist to five, or a Thumb-O-Meter in an exit ticket? So, it gives us all a sense of, "Are we getting closer, are we not?"
Anyway, she does a beautiful job of explaining targets as good as I could, or better. And it's a student that like many students I've followed over the years, and when she was in college, I invited her back to be a keynote speaker at our EL Education National Conference to 1500 educators. The first half of her keynote speech was all about learning targets. And she said, "I went to a EL education school from kindergarten through eighth grade, and then I went to a big traditional public high school, and I walked into class, and I just freaked out, because every class I went into, there was no learning target on the whiteboard. And I just thought, how are we supposed to know what we want to learn, where we're going? What's the goal of our learning?"
"And teachers just started talking at us, and I kept thinking, 'Yeah, but where are we going? What's the point of this? What am I supposed to be able to do at the end of when you're talking?" She said, "I was totally lost without learning targets. And then I just started opening my notebook every day, and listening, and just creating my own learning target based on what the teacher seemed to be saying, and what the book seemed to be suggesting. And once I had a learning target on my page, or two learning targets, I thought, 'Okay, I am focused now. And pretty soon the other students were like, what are those? And I explained what the learning targets were, and they said, 'Can we use your learning targets?' So, I started sharing my learning targets for a class, and since then I've written learning targets for every high school class for every day. And when I got to college, I did the same thing."
And it was interesting because she explained to me before she did her keynote that in college she would go to office hours for her professors, and say, "What are the learning targets for your course?" And the professors would say, "What are you talking about?" And she'd say, "Well, what's the most important knowledge, and skills you want me to come away from from your course?" The professors would say, "I gave you a syllabus." And she'd say, "Well, yes, this syllabus, it's a collection of readings, books, and articles I'm supposed to read, and it tells me how I'm going to be graded by what tests, or essays I have to write, but nowhere in the syllabus do you explain what do you want me to come away having learned from your class, what do you want me to do that's different, and know that's different from when I entered." And no professor had even in those terms. And so she ended up creating learning targets for all of her college classes as well.

Alec Patton:
That sounds like a terrifying conversation for a professor to be confronted with.

Ron Berger:
Well, I love... She created learning targets in all her college classes, and other kids wanted to buy them from her. And so she ended up photocopying her college learning targets for her classes, and just handing them out to other kids for free just because she thought we all should understand what we're trying to learn here.

Alec Patton:
That is a perfect spot to end it, but I want to give you the opportunity, two things that we didn't really get into that you are welcome to talk about. First of all, if there's other troubleshooting where learning targets go wrong commonly that you can just give people a heads-up about. And the second one would be you actually at Stone Brewery years ago we had a conversation where you told me that you'd spent a really long time trying to get project-based learning going in traditional school contexts with very mixed success. But that the thing you'd come away with realizing if you wanted to transform a very traditional place, and have it be a different place to walk into that learning targets were the secret.

Ron Berger:
Well, I would say if you are a high school science teacher, you're a high school history teacher, or you're a second grade teacher, you know what you want kids to learn, but you often, if you haven't had learning targets, you haven't gone through the process of naming exactly. What are the things that you think, most importantly, the concepts, and the content that you most importantly would want kids to do, what skills would be most important? Once you've named that, and made them into targets? It opens a door for projects because projects are one of the ways kids could show you that. If kids know I'm supposed to show my teacher, "I understand this, and can do this", a project may be a perfect way to show you that. So, it ends up making you feel as a teacher, then the project isn't an add-on cool thing that you're adding on to what the most important content of your class is, but you don't have time to do it most of the time.
Rather, the project can be the medium through which kids show you the most important things you want them to be able to show you. It makes projects seem more central, and important, and can be a key assessment for you, that kids do understand the concepts, and content that you want. So, I do think learning targets, the process of creating them clarifies for you, I don't actually just want my kids to get good test scores in physics. It's the concepts that matter to be the most. I want kids to really understand these concepts, or I want them to be able to show skills in this. And often students can figure out a way to show you that, that can be project-based. So, it makes projects seem less like an add-on, and more like it could be a central way to assess kids' understanding of the most important things. As to where do learning targets go wrong, there's so many places, I mean, and I've made every mistake possible with learning targets.
You mentioned, Alec, that the being just sort of so forma that you just put them on the whiteboard, you have kids do it, they're never exciting. Kids don't really own them. That can just make learning targets a nothing part of the class. Teachers often put learning targets on the board, but they don't, or we don't take enough time to make sure all kids understand them. So, just having a learning target on the board is not enough. You have to take time out of the class to say, "Do we all understand this target? What would it mean? How would we possibly show that we can get to this target?" So, digging into the target, not just putting it on the board is also important. We talked about verbs, that the verbs can be passive, and I've made the mistake many times of using a passive verb that's harder to assess.
I can understand rather than I can explain. And I've also made the mistake of having multiple verbs in my target. So, if you have a compound sentence learning target, I can explain this, and I can demonstrate that, and I can perform that. It's hard for a kid to say, "I've reached that target", because they might have done one of the three, they might have done two of the three. So, it's important not to take three targets, and blend them into one sentence, because you want a kid to be able to say, "I've reached that target, I've reached that target, I've reached that target." So, if you have three different things all baked into one target, split it into three targets so that kids can check them off with like, "I hit that target, I hit that target, I hit that target." So, I've made many mistakes along the way.

Alec Patton:
And I can see that writing a learning target with an eye towards how it'll be assessed is such a gift to your future self.

Ron Berger:
Yeah. And having that conversation with kids, how would we assess this? And sometimes you have to rewrite the target because you realize I wouldn't be able to assess that very well.

Alec Patton:
Yeah.

Ron Berger:
One thing I forgot to mention also, Alec, was that we believe that there's all these different kinds of targets, and that your target shouldn't all be content targets, right? Some of them should be understanding, and conceptual targets. And you also, I believe, teachers should always have character learning targets built in. So, if you're a first grade teacher, a second grade teacher, it's easy to have character targets in every lesson, because your lessons are so much around not just learning to write, learning to read, learning to speak, learning to do mathematics, but it's also learning how to get along with others, learning how to share supplies, learning how to be a good classmate to other children. And there's often character targets, but at a high school level, people often leave out the character targets. But I think character targets are great.
I think, again, I use mathematics often because people think that's the least connected to relationships, character, all those things. It's just math. You're just learning math. And I love math classrooms I go into where there's character targets. I can show mathematical courage by raising my hand, taking risks, speaking out, explaining things at the board. I can show mathematical collaboration by working with my classmates on problems that we can't solve individually. So, I think character targets are another way to build good thinkers, people, and citizens that your lessons can have targets, and concepts, targets, and content, and also targets, and character.

Alec Patton:
When you say character, is there a distinction between that, and what people call social-emotional learning?

Ron Berger:
Oh, I think they're overlapping. Social-emotional learning targets. If someone called it that, I would have no problem at all. I use the word character a little more broadly than the term social-emotional learning, which I would say is a subset of character, because there's a degree to which when people talk about SEL, social-emotional learning, there's an attempt often to make it values neutral so that it's about communication, and collaboration, but it's not specifically about any particular values. It's about how to work with other people, and get along, which I think is great, super important. But my concept of character is that there is performance character, there's being an effective person, and learner, and then there's ethical, moral character about being a good person of being honest, and being compassionate, and being kind, and having integrity. Those things are values. And so when I say character, I mean social-emotional learning, and virtuous character as well. Standing up for what's right, and treating everyone with respect. Those are value-laden for me, and in a good way, because I think we actually all share those values. We all want our kids to be that way.

Alec Patton:
One final question. When you're checking for understanding, which I think is such an important point about the learning targets, what's a good way to do that? Because obviously if you say, "Hey, does everyone understand the learning target?"

Ron Berger:
Yeah.

Alec Patton:
That's not going to work that well. Even if you say, "Hey, raise your hand if you understand the learning target." There's a lot of ways that can go wrong. So, what's a good way to check for understanding?

Ron Berger:
I wish I could answer that very quickly, but we have an entire chapter in the book, Leaders of Their Own Learning on checking for understanding, because there are so many strategies, and I think you really need to mix them up, and use all of them at different times. So, the least effective strategy is, do we all get it? Do we all get this? Are we all, because there's no way to know from that. A couple kids will say yes, and you think, "Okay, good. We're there." You have no idea. A slight improvement on that are things like the thumbs up, thumbs down, thumbs sideways, sometimes called Thumb-O-Meter where every kid is putting their thumb up if they get it, putting their thumb down, if they don't putting it in the middle, if they're part way, or there's 180 degrees there, you could have your thumb basically.
Some teachers will do that with a thumb on the chest. And so if she's looking at her students, they don't see each other, so they don't have to be shy when they're confused, because she can see them if the Thumb-O-Meter is on their chest rather than holding them up, fist to five is similar. Five, I get it fully. Fist is, I get none of it, one, two, three, four are gradations of understanding. So, those are quick checks. Those are checks in process during a lesson. But then there's all these other ways at the end of a lesson that you can assess progress toward target. So, you can do exit tickets where you ask questions of kids about how close are they to the targets. You can give them a demonstration question like a mathematical question, or an historical question, or a scientific question, and they write it on their exit ticket on a note card, and hand it to you on their way out.
And then you know which kids got it, and which kids don't, because you see the result of that right away. People have learning target trackers on their wall, like big chart paper where kids take sticky dots, little colored dots, and where are you today on the "I get to this learning... I'm totally, they're the learning target to I'm just beginning." And each day they're adding a dot to see are they getting closer? Are they moving up the chart with understanding, getting closer to reaching that target, or which targets have they met? And so there's many learning target trackers of different styles up in classrooms that I visit. So, when you say, "How do assess how close am I to a target?" There's many different ways. And I think we should never just depend on one way. We should use a myriad of assessment strategies.
Some of them real time in process during the lesson kind of checks, and other ones more at the end of a lesson, or in between lessons, ways of getting a sense from kids. Can they demonstrate that they can do that? Can they reflect on whether they can do it? Can they give themselves a rating of it? So, anyway, there's a wide range of checking for understanding strategies that I think are important for a teacher to have in her quiver of strategies.

Alec Patton:
Awesome. And we'll have a link to Leaders of Their Own Learning in the show notes. It's a fabulous book. I highly recommend it. Ron, thank you so much. I think we've covered learning targets.

Ron Berger:
Alec, thanks for, and to anyone who's listening, just thanks for tolerating my geekiness about this topic, because when you're a teacher a long time, you get geeky about all kinds of things, and this is the kind of thing that seems like a silly, small thing. But the more you get into it, the more you realize how much detail there is to doing it well, and how much we can all get better at doing it well. And then when you do, how powerful it can be.

Alec Patton:
High Tech High Unboxed is hosted, and edited by me, Alec Patton. Our theme music is by Brother Herschel. Huge thanks to Ron Berger for this conversation. We've got links to the book we talked about, Leaders of Their Own Learning in the show notes, along with links to Ron's, other appearances on the podcast. Thanks for listening.