Success Criteria, Learning Targets, Standards Oh My! by Kristen Fusaro-Pizzo

 Success Criteria, Learning Targets, Standards Oh My! by Kristen Fusaro-Pizzo

Keeping up with the latest educational rhetoric may be more fast-paced than Tik Tok, Twitch, and Snapchat combined, which can leave teachers feeling exhausted and overwhelmed. 

We're hoping to bring some clarity to the confusion and put your mind at ease. 

If we’re looking at it through a physical metaphor:

1. Standards

   1. Curricula

      1. Learning Targets

         1. Content & Skills

            1. Success Criteria

               1. Assessment

                  1. Single-Point Rubric

                     1. Feedback

                        1. Reflection

Standards:  Educational standards are the learning goals for what students should know and be able to do at each grade level. These are NOT to be confused with curricula. 

Curricula: How students will achieve the learning goals for each grade level (the standards). The curricula are comprised of content and skills. This will combine the “big picture” of the course - themes, units, assessments, essential questions, deeper understandings - and how they all intertwine. 

Learning Targets: These have traditionally been called “Aims.” They consist of content, skills, or sometimes both, that students should achieve “daily” (we put “daily” in quotes because we recognize some Learning Targets are more complex than others).

Content:  The specific material chosen for the course. For example, a physical education class may focus on HIIT workouts for one unit of content and yoga/restorative practices for another unit of content. 

Skills: Skills are the methods by which students learn the content. These should be transferable to any content. For example, understanding what “sine, cosine, and tangent” are is a necessary skill for the course contents of geometry and trigonometry. 

Success Criteria: These are, essentially, the tasks necessary to get students to achieve the Learning Target (whether that’s part of the daily task or a bigger assessment). We like to think of it as a “checklist” of explicit and clear steps that students need to take to achieve the bigger goal. Students should then be able, on their own or with each other, to reflectively review the criteria to note how he/she is doing.  

Assessment: Assessments are the means by which we understand student progress.  This is how we determine how much learning a student has acquired over a period of time. Assessments can be summative, which is meant to evaluate students at the end of a learning experience. More frequently, assessments are formative, which evaluates students throughout a learning experience. Assessments should be aligned to success criteria so that students can evaluate their own progress.

Single-Point Rubric: The Single-Point Rubric outlines the success criteria for how a student will be evaluated on an assessment. It allows for a more holistic approach to offering feedback.  While a traditional rubric would scale “Not Yet (1), Developing (2), Approaching (3), Mastery (4),” Single-Point Rubric addresses only on the “Mastery” end of the spectrum focusing solely on high expectations. 

Feedback: Feedback is how students receive information about their learning and progress. Feedback can be direct from educator-to-student, from student-to-student, or from student-to-self. Feedback is how a student can understand where he/she needs more support to achieve mastery. 

Reflection: The ultimate and final goal of the whole educational process is reflection because the point of reflection is the epitome of independent learning. Reflection asks students (and educators) to deconstruct and analyze the process. What went right? What went wrong? Why?  This is the point where students should be able to refer back to the feedback they received and the success criteria to determine what level of mastery they have achieved. 

Are there any other terms you would like clarification on or strategies for how to use these in your classroom?  Let us know by sending an email to teacherleaders@sitechhs.com. 

It Starts With Standards: Translating Success Criteria into Student-Friendly Language for Designing Learning Tasks by Kristen Fusaro-Pizzo

I have been teaching English for 14 years and I can say that standards are terrifying. In those 14 years, I have been asked to evaluate and reevaluate at least seven different collections of standards: New York State Standards, Common Core Standards, Priority Learning Standards, Learning Maps, Next Generation Standards, Advanced Placement Standards, Regents Standards. While I idealistically like to believe that each evolution of standards has gotten educators closer to closing the achievement gap presented in A Nation at Risk (1983), the standards continuously fail to show educators how to use them.


Over time, I have come to understand that a major part of developing and designing an effective curriculum is first deconstructing the standards for students. While this may seem obvious, most of the conversations I have had with students around standards relate back to rote memorization and regurgitation. “The teacher told me to ‘Examine and analyze what makes a claim valid by determining if supporting evidence is relevant and sufficient” (Priority Learning Standard R7 & 8, 11th-12th grade English). Great. What does that mean?


Blank stare.


Unless students are able to specifically understand what the standards are asking them to do, they cannot properly perform the task to our expectations. This is what creates achievement gaps.


We hand back an assignment with a grade, probably even a standards-aligned rubric, circle the parts we thought were ineffective, the student looks at the grade, the circles, then the grade, and makes a decision whether to shrug and accept it or “argue” with the teacher.


I put the term “argue” in quotation marks because this is also part of the issue: The perception of the teacher is that he/she is being questioned on his/her authority as an educator based on the assessment.


Isn’t that ironic? Teachers question the ability of the student based on their performance of the assessment, and we don’t view that as presumptive or judgemental. Yet, did we provide masterful examples of the assessment… some by students, and one definitely by us? Were our directions absolutely clear? Did we outline and explain the standards in language where students could clearly understand and articulate success?


Instead, we must view these conversations as ways for us to reassess how we teach standards. And yes, I mean we actually have to teach the standards.

Image from Assessing with Respect by Starr Sackstein*



UNPACK THE STANDARDS

The first question is - What standards do I use if they are always changing? What I’ve done is taken the most recent few published standards and find their similarities: The specific skills, content, and learning targets. I started by reading the standards to look for repetitive language which could be confusing. This year, I’ve translated it to these Power Standards and Learning Targets which I believe best apply to my specific course, a 12th-grade college-level course called “Gods, Monsters, and the Apocalypse.”


As I craft an assessment (or learning task) that addresses Priority Learning Standards R7 & 8, I must first make sure students understand what “Examine and analyze what makes a claim valid by determining if supporting evidence is relevant and sufficient” means. I’ve noticed that educators toss around the word analyze with the expectation that this concept is clear. It’s not. Every time the standards address the word “analyze” (and that’s 23 references in the Priority Learning Standards for ELA), we are asking students to examine details to elicit meaning.


I can translate it to: “Students will investigate the information being presented in a claim to ensure it justifies the main argument with details.” Essentially, how will a student know he/she has been successful at this specific task?

• The student is able to identify the main argument (or claim).
• The student can identify and discern if the evidence supports the claim or if the evidence detracts from the claim.
• The student determines how many details and how in-depth the details need to be to make the argument sufficient.

The best way to work on this is to be mindful of your own steps while you perform the task. (And yes, you should always perform your own assessments to ensure your directions are crystal clear.) Write every single step down. (More on this in the How Does This Work section.)


When Designing a Learning Task

• Select the Priority Learning Standards to be addressed.
• Determine the content and skills embedded in the Priority Learning Standards.
• Construct the task to meet the Priority Learning Standards.
• Identify the theme or topic.

HOW DOES THIS WORK?

Whether co-constructed or teacher-constructed, a student must have the ability to knowledgeably speak to the standards being addressed in the learning task when discussing his/her own level of mastery of the topic. This is the ultimate goal that drives independent learning. If the student cannot understand what the criteria for success are, then he/she will probably have difficulty understanding your feedback. This is where you’ll find yourself giving the same feedback over and over again.


Math Example of How This Works

Peter Dellegrazie, a mathematics teacher, offers an example of how he uses Success Criteria in his daily formative assessments for Algebra II:

The Task: Draw a unit circle diagram rotating an angle through 60 degrees and determine the ordered pairs where the terminal ray intersects the circle.

As explained to me: “While [students] were working on an example, they had to find the ordered pairs where a 60-degree angle intersects a unit circle, so I set up the following [success criteria]:

• Can I draw a unit circle?
• Can I draw a 60-degree angle in standard position?
• Can I form a right triangle?
• Can I label the side lengths?
• Can I find the ordered pair where the angle intersects the circle?
• Can I connect this to the sine and cosine of 60 degrees?

If a student answers ‘no’ to any of these questions, we (teacher or classmate) know exactly where
the wheels came off.”

Peter’s example starts with standards: “Extend the domain of trigonometric functions using the unit circle” (Common Core).


I like to think of it as writing a recipe for baking. The completed cookie is the final outcome of your Project-Based Learning “summative assessment”, but all of the steps involved are the “formative assessments” used as the pathway to completion.


Identify and weigh out all of the materials. (Standard)

• I can identify different measuring tools. (Success criteria)
• I can identify and measure ¾ cup of brown sugar. (Success Criteria)
• I can identify and measure 1 cup of butter (Success Criteria)
• I can identify and measure 1 tablespoon of baking soda. (Success criteria)

Combine wet ingredients. (Standard)

• I can measure ¾ cup brown sugar. (Success criteria)
• I can measure 1 cup of butter. (Success criteria)
• I can keep the 1 tablespoon of baking soda to the side because it is not considered a wet ingredient.
• I can melt the butter and mix it with brown sugar. (Success criteria)

It’s a matter of process-thinking. What are all of the steps necessary to achieve success and complete the task?


These steps become elevated depending on the level and point in the curriculum. For English, in 9th or 10th grade, I may ask students to identify the imagery in a poem by looking at the language related to the five senses. For an 11th grade class, I may ask students to explain how the imagery in a poem elicits mood and tone by first asking them to identify the imagery by looking at the language related to the five senses before any other steps.


AM I DOING THIS RIGHT?

I cannot stress enough the importance of examples. I challenge you to complete your own learning task by following your own directions. Essentially, the success criteria should be step-by-step guidelines that allow students to clearly see the steps towards mastery (completion). As you’re working on your task, pretend you are a student doing this for the first time. Is it meaningful? Is it engaging? Do the steps lead to the final outcome? IS IT CLEAR?


As a final self-check, I like to ask my husband (who is not an educator), or my colleagues in other departments to look at my learning tasks and the success criteria I have outlined for it to see if they can understand.


But more importantly, I use my own process thinking to demonstrate how I work on the assessment. This is an example I used when I taught Macbeth to high school sophomores: Click Here. I gave them this document, I talked them through the document, and then I extended beyond by asking them to define their own success criteria for the different stages of the writing process.


EXTENDING BEYOND

Phase I: Students will need to be reflective of their work via the success criteria to understand what level of mastery they have attained. This requires time allotted within the learning process and task design to allow for student reflection. This can be student-to-self, student-to-student, or student-to-teacher, but eventually must become student-to-self so they can be independent learners.


Phase II: Once teachers have a full understanding of the success criteria for their own learning tasks, and students are able to be reflective, the next level would be to co-construct success criteria with students. At this level, the teacher already knows all of the different steps but is asking students to deconstruct the process to identify the steps for themselves.


THE GOAL

Ultimately, the goal of success criteria is to create a clear outline for students to be able to be reflective, independent learners. They should be able to identify their own areas of struggle so that they can look to you for strategies of improvement on those areas, or use inquiry to discover pathways to guide them towards ultimate success.

FROM STUDENTS

A few of my seniors took a minute to offer their perspectives on working with standards this year: Flipgrid Videos.

--------------------


*This is an affiliate link.

The Importance of Reflection in Education by Kristen Fusaro-Pizzo

I was 100% the college student who rolled my eyes any time a professor mentioned writing a reflection piece. In fact, there were even points where I was offended by the task: Oh, right, because we're English majors, we have to live in the hippie-dippie world of reflection; that's why everyone makes fun of us. Fast forward to my first and second master's degrees in Education and Educational Leadership: This is why no one respects teachers - because we're too busy "reflecting on our feelings."

I am here to tell you, I was wrong. Not only was I deeply wrong, but I was also childish and arrogant. I made the bitter assumption that reflective practice was not acquiring new learning or innovation. How could I be analyzing, evaluating, and creating if I am busy talking about my feelings? My first mistake was assuming that reflective practice was missing analysis and evaluation; that it was solely feelings-driven.

It was only when I had an ah-ha moment for myself as an educator that I realized the power of reflection, and more so, how I was never actually taught how to properly reflect - which is why I held such disdain for it.

It was my first official 7-12 teaching gig in New York City (I was working part-time at a college prior to it). I was at a K-8 school; I was tasked as the secondary English Language Arts teacher to 150 8th graders - which meant that the students had a primary ELA teacher and were mandated to take two periods (approximately 90 minutes) of ELA per day - one period with her, and one period with me. 

When I was hired, I was literally told my job as the secondary ELA teacher was to "teach test sophistication." The principal explicitly instructed me to teach the students how to take the 8th grade ELA exam. 

I started as a good little soldier. I would give practice multiple choice questions and short writing prompts. I even wrote a Donor's Choose grant* so my students could have their own copies of practice test books. I was doing everything I was told, I couldn't understand why I had kids drawing penises on my desks, stuffing hamburgers into my harddrive, or urinating in my closet. I turned to the primary ELA teacher, who was a veteran, for help.

I quickly learned that all of the instruction I had in my master's program about collaboration would be going into the toilet, as the "primary" ELA teacher had the students doing sustained-silent reading 3-4 days of the week; this was her form of "teaching," as she flipped through Cosmopolitan. By the time the students came to my class, they were wired with energy and bored out of their minds because they had spent the last 45 minutes "reading." 

I threw away everything I was doing and started forming lessons around the books they were reading during their primary ELA class. I had them journaling, discussing, sharing, drawing, presenting. It was a huge difference; I finally was teaching, and while not all of my behavior issues disappeared (more on that in another post), the engagement and vibe made a drastic positive shift. I was proud! I was so proud that when my principal came around for my first unannounced observation in January, I was excited about the follow-up meeting. 

I was thrown for a whirlwind when my principal gave me the biggest verbal thrashing that I had ever had in my life. I was chastised for "not sticking to the instructional goals" for "giving students too much freedom" for "not having control over the curriculum," amongst others that my traumatized brain has hidden away after all these years. 

I didn't back down at that moment. I asked: "But isn't the point to have students learn? They can apply the skills to the exam...". I was cut-off and told she would be back in one week, that I had to submit all of my lesson plans to my assistant principal a week in advance, and the next observation would be formal.

That was the moment it hit me: I was being a reflective educator because I pivoted to do what I knew was best for kids. I used behavioral and anecdotal data (data doesn't always have to be ‘numbers’) and made changes in my practice. 

I wish this story had a happier ending for that school, but by the end of my second year of teaching, I packed everything up that June and started working on my resignation letter. It was by a stroke of good luck and perfect timing that there was an open English position at Staten Island Tech, my current school, and I landed the job there that August. I've been at Tech for the last 12 years and hope for many more.

I know that was a long story to get to the point about reflecting, but that is the reflection: Deconstruct and analyze the process. What went right? What went wrong? Why?

We must first reflect on our own practice as educators. This is hard work. What makes reflection especially hard, despite my initial dismissal of it, is the fact that true reflection must be constant.

As I began my 14th year of teaching this year in this new, remote universe, I realized that this would be the absolute best time to do a deep-dive of my curriculum and process. No better time than this Wild West approach to education to throw away old paradigms and finally make the changes I have been itching to make for years.

You see, (I am going to be bold, brazen, and challenge you here) if you are not questioning your philosophies of teaching, learning, and schooling every few years, you are doing your students a grave disservice. The art of reflection lies in challenging your belief systems to always do what's best for kids, even if that means starting over.



I asked myself these five driving questions:

1. What do I want my students to learn?
2. What do the standards say my students need to learn?
3. How do my students best learn this content and these skills?
4. How can they demonstrate their learning?
5. How can they learn how to improve their learning?

These questions led me in a few different directions. Breaking down each question specific to curriculum design, this was my process:

1. As a college-level course, what are my overarching themes, essential questions, concepts, and content?
2. There are NextGen Standards and Priority Learning Standards; I must marry these two to provide clarity about what specific skills students will need to learn.
3. Who are my students? What types of learners are they? What are their learning styles? What are their identities (culture, gender, race, sexual orientation, religion, etc.)? How do I approach curriculum design and lesson planning to give appeal and purpose for each type of learner?
4. Honoring the differences I discover in question three, how can I create multiple approaches and opportunities for students to demonstrate mastery over content and skills? How could I style and design pathways for student choice and voice to give them ownership over their learning?
5. As crucial as reflection has become for me, I realized reflection was also a necessary skill for my students to learn. I will not always be there to guide them with feedback, but they can always be there for themselves. If they constantly question their learning and practice, they will move from dependent to independent learners.

When teaching reflection to students, it's important to give clarity around what reflection is. This was my problem as an undergraduate; I never understood what it meant for me.


You can start with "The Big Three":

1. What am I learning?
2. Why am I learning it?
3. How will I use what I learned?

"The Big Three," as I call these reflection questions, are the main root questions you can adjust to any content area or grade level. These questions can drive your instruction, as well; imagine what the ideal responses would be to your lessons and design your instruction based on those goals.


Reflection lives in the greatest of all practice. Reflection is progress, not perfection. Reflection is the root of all growth: How can I (it, this, that, whatever pronoun) be better?



To help students move in the direction of reflection, here is a list of guiding questions adopted from the reflection worksheet I share with my high school senior students:

• What have you realized about yourself as a learner?
• What are your learning needs?
• How do you learn best?
• Where do you struggle?
• How did the teacher and/or your classmates help or hinder your learning?
• How did you come to understand your learning process?
• How do you connect with your learning?
• Has it inspired you?
• Has it created passionate responses in you?
• Has it made you question your own beliefs?
• Does it connect with any of your prior knowledge and/or learning experiences?
• How have you deepened your thinking?
• What pieces are you most proud of? What did you enjoy working on the most? Why?
• Where did you feel most engaged? Why?
• Where did you struggle the most? Why? How did you (or how are you) working to overcome that struggle?
• Is there anything you wish you were learning about? Is there anything you’ve learned that you found surprising?
• Did you ever procrastinate? Why? What strategies did you use to work through procrastination?
• Have you made a conference appointment with the teacher? If so, was it helpful or not? Why or why not? If not, why haven’t you made one?
• Have you ever conferred with a classmate? How are peer conferences effective for you?
• Do you use outlines, checklists, or other graphic organizers to assist you in improving your work? How does it help?
• What environment is best for you to learn? How did you come to this realization? How did you use this understanding to make you a better learner?
• Is there anything your teacher(s) have done that you have found to be helpful OR detrimental to your learning? What are those things?

Whether we are practicing reflection ourselves as educators, or teaching our students how to be reflective in their work, we are cultivating resilience. We are training students that reaching our goals requires motivation and discipline - the motivation to try, the discipline to keep trying when we fail, and the reflective combination of both to keep working at something to excel beyond satisfactory.

*This is a referral link.

Using Portfolio-Based Assessment

Assessment in any given year is always a complicated topic amongst educators.  Once we start deconstructing a purpose behind assessment, that's when educators start to divide. I will share my story of how I came to my own philosophy on assessment.

The same question is repeatedly asked:  What is the point of assessment?  There is one standard agreement, despite the philosophical perspective of assessment: To understand what a student knows.   It seems simple enough, but what if we also consider:  To understand what a student has learned.  To understand how a student can demonstrate his/her learning.  To understand where a student still has gaps in his/her learning.  To offer feedback to a student so she/he may grow and understand his/her own gaps in her/his learning.

As I started my 14th year of teaching in NYC public schools this year, I made the decision to eliminate all tests and quizzes from my curriculum.  This move was a radical shift, but one I wanted to be brave enough to make for a while.

As an English teacher who teaches high school seniors in a college-level course, I found myself constantly asking if my tests and quizzes were truly giving students enough feedback so they would grow and learn from the assessment experience.   

Time is our most valuable asset, and if students are not learning during the time of an assessment, then, to me, that is wasted time.  It is wasted time for the educator and certainly wasted precious time for the student.

Once we moved to remote/digital learning, I spent more time in my role as an Instructional Coach researching testing software for teachers than I did developing other ways for teachers (myself included) to assess students.  It hit me: Why are we forcing the issue of testing?  Why do we care so much about compliance and maintaining academic integrity during digital tests?  I know full well that for every way a teacher discovers how a student can cheat, the student is already light years ahead of that discovery. 

Unless the assessment is meaningful and process-driven.   If I have to sit and conference with a student several times and if the student is given multiple opportunities to demonstrate growth, then I am holding the student accountable, with high expectations, but the student is working earnestly. 

This is the year I throw away tests and move to Portfolio-Based Assessment.  Click this link to see my portfolio requirements.  This video is how I plan on utilizing the portfolio this year.

YouTube Link

I plan on writing a follow-up blog at the end of the year to be reflective of how this process worked out.

For now, I am happy to explain and/or share any materials about using portfolios in your class.