Teaching Middle School ELA
Welcome to the Teaching Middle School ELA podcast, where we are dedicated to helping English Language Arts teachers create dynamic and engaging lessons for their students, while also managing the day-to-day responsibilities that come with being a Middle School ELA teacher.
As educators ourselves, we understand the challenges of finding a work-life balance that allows us to pursue our passion for teaching while also enjoying our personal lives. That's why each Tuesday, hosts Caitlin Mitchell and Jessica Cannata share practical and innovative solutions for managing your workload and staying inspired in your teaching practice.
Whether you are looking for fresh ideas to inspire your students, strategies for improving your writing instruction, or tips for managing your time more effectively, this podcast is designed to provide you with the tools you need to thrive as a Middle School ELA teacher.
Join us each week for curriculum and lesson ideas, classroom stories, and interviews with fellow educators who are experts in the field. We believe that with the right support and resources, you can create a classroom environment that encourages students to become strong and passionate learners.
If you teach reading and writing to middle schoolers and want to stay up-to-date with the latest trends and best practices in ELA education, then this is the podcast for you! Tune in every week and let us help you make a difference in the lives of your students and in your own teaching career.
Teaching Middle School ELA
Episode 299: Creating Learning Targets that Include the School Custodian, News Reporters, and a Whole Lot of Fun
On this episode of The Teaching Middle School ELA Podcast, Caitlin, Jessica, and Megan are breaking down how a well-defined learning target can actually move your classroom from confusion and chaos to clarity and engagement. You'll learn from many of their personal journeys and impactful experiences, illustrating how setting clear and specific goals will boost student growth and your teaching methods. Listen in to hear how learning targets can also create a unified front among educators working with the same students.
After listening, you'll understand exactly how to break down broad educational standards into precise learning objectives that heighten student mastery and make teaching a more intentional endeavor. You'll also hear inventive strategies to involve students in this process in creative ways. Tune in for these valuable insights and practical tips for crafting learning targets that are both impactful and enjoyable!
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All right, you guys, welcome back to another episode. Hopefully today's title got you interested in what the heck we're going to talk about in terms of creating learning targets that include the school custodian, news, reporters and a whole lot of fun. So let's dive into it. Let's talk about learning targets. Maybe these are things that are a requirement in your school. Maybe you are of the ilk that you love learning targets but you don't like creating them. Maybe that's a drag for you. Maybe you literally have no idea what we're talking about when we say learning targets, and no matter where you fall on the spectrum of this as a teacher, this episode is really going to help you learn how to create effective learning targets easily right, that's the goal is easily, so that you can successfully target your instruction to hit your standards and elevate your students' learning Okay. So first of all, we need to talk about what is a learning target, how is it defined, etc. So a learning target can be written in many ways, and we'll go over two of these ways today, but essentially, it is what it sounds like it is a clear and specific goal for what students should know or be able to do by the end of a lesson, and so I'll just share a quick little anecdote of my own so that you don't feel like you're on an island alone if you have no idea what a learning target is At my very first school that I taught at.
Speaker 1:Well, first of all, my undergraduate degree is in communications, so I never took an education class and I got hired as a 22-year-old five days before school started. Here are your books, here's your keys Go teach English. I was like great, this is excellent. And so I enrolled in a master's program at LMU so I could learn how to be a teacher, but I was still teaching. Right, while I was learning how to be a teacher, and my school did not have learning targets, there was no direction for me for anything at all, and so I just didn't know what the hell I was doing. I'm sorry. We're going to have to put an explicit on this podcast episode, I think because of that, just now, you're very passionate about it.
Speaker 1:I had no idea what I was doing, right? Like, why am I even teaching? I'll bring up Anne Bradstreet again Nothing against Anne Bradstreet, like I mentioned in the last podcast episode but like, why am I even doing this? What is the purpose? Right, and it wasn't until I was starting to take classes in my master's program that I had someone coming and observing me on a weekly basis, that I even fully understood what a learning target was, how they were to be required or utilized, rather, in my classroom.
Speaker 1:And then, when I started utilizing them, putting them on the board, telling my students what they were and why we were using them, it was like, all of a sudden, my students, we were all on the same page of like, oh, this is why we're doing what. It was like, all of a sudden, my students, we were all on the same page of like, oh, this is why we're doing what we're doing. Right, it's not like just to be an English class, it's for a reason. And it made the students needed the why and it made such a difference as to how they were showing up in the classroom. It made such a difference for me and what I was teaching and like why I was even doing what I'm doing was doing so like it was just a really interesting experience for me, going from not knowing what it was, not utilizing them at all, to all of a sudden. I have this like roadmap for what I'm doing in my classroom. Jessica Megan, do you guys have similar experiences or what?
Speaker 3:was yours. I mean, it's interesting because I was at three different schools in my teaching career and no one required me to have learning targets, but because in college that's how we had to write our lesson plans. It just stuck with me Like it's funny I was thinking about this right now. We had to write the learner will so what is that TLW? On all our lesson plans. And so for like 10 years in my lesson plans that's what I wrote TLW, tlw, the learner will.
Speaker 3:And then I put the objective and toward the end I was like not writing it out like that, but I would do it for myself. And then I always did write it on the board. And I think I did it because I was that type A personality where I was like what if today's the day a principal comes in? Like I just want to be like and here are my objectives and my students know what we're doing, and like I am so prepared and I knew if I didn't make it a habit, like then of course I'd forget, like the one day they come in. So I really tried to do that every day and I was in a unique situation, like my last few years in the classroom where I was a literacy coach so it was really important that I put the learning objective or the target on the board, not just for my students and myself, but there were two other teachers who were going to go like take students away and we all needed to be like on the same page and make sure that every kid was getting, you know, the same lesson and the same quality of what we were teaching.
Speaker 3:So I think that's why it really stuck with me. But it was like you said, it was so helpful to have that roadmap and it was like it kept me in check, right, like okay, are we really accomplishing what we need? To get back on track, we have not completed this part of our learning target or whatever it was. So I feel lucky in the sense that I wasn't required to, but I kind of put it on myself because I know so many teachers are required to. Like Pat on our team, she had to for all her lessons and she said most of her observations were just surprise drop-ins and they could talk to the students and say what are you working on? What's your learning target?
Speaker 2:So she was really intentional about it. Yeah, I had a similar experience because I came to teaching through an alternative certification and we did not have to use learning targets where I taught. But my two mentors my first year had been public school teachers. So I was at a private school and they had been public school teachers where they were very much like hardcore learning targets got to be on the board. So in their mentorship of me, they drilled the idea into my head. And yet, you know and this could just be their own perspectives they kind of looked at it as a negative thing of that. They used to have to put this up and I I don't know that it's a negative thing. I think it's a great thing for students to be able to see what they're doing. And I will tell you I, you know, I've been working on my master's program in ed leadership and I've been working with the new principal at my former school and next year she's going to start acquiring it.
Speaker 2:So because she sees the benefits, and the way she's going to present professional development around it. I think it's going to be really good and kind of framing it that way, but hopefully this episode kind of clears up any misconceptions about it, cause I think it's a great thing. So absolutely, I agree.
Speaker 3:And it doesn't have to be this really like long drawn out process. It can be a few bullet points on the board and like just become part of your habits.
Speaker 1:Totally. Ours was students will be able to. Yeah, students will be able to have a discussion about well, you know whatever.
Speaker 3:Yeah, exactly. So you might be wondering, like, well, how do I go about creating a learning target? And the thing is really, it always goes back to the standards, right? We always say those are your North Star and by using the language of your standards you can make sure that you're aligning your lessons and your assessments to the standards that you're trying to teach your students. So let's like, look at an example. I think it'll be clearer.
Speaker 3:But if we take a common core standard like reading for literature 5.3, which is compare and contrast two or more characters, settings or events in a story or drama, drawing on specific details in the text, okay, so that's your standard. Now what do you do with it? Like, how are you going to teach that to your students? How are they going to show that they can do that thing? How can they compare and contrast those characters? So imagine they're reading the novel Esperanza Rising. So what you could do is take a sentence frame and use the information from your standards and your lesson or assessment, and that frame looks like this Students will be able to blank by blank, as shown by blank, blank by blank, as shown by blank.
Speaker 3:So with this example you could have, students will be able to compare and contrast two or more characters in a story by listing multiple similarities and differences between Esperanza and Miguel in Esperanza Rising, as shown by a Venn diagram. So if you notice, in that example you have the target, the task and the activity or the assessment, that Venn diagram at the end and they're all in alignment. If you want to be fancy, you can call these the target, the success criteria and the performance task. But can you see how, when you have a learning target like that, it really forces you to be intentional with how you plan right? How are you going to make sure that your students know what a Venn diagram is? How many similarities and differences are you requiring?
Speaker 3:Is it the specific characters of Esperanza and Miguel that they're comparing? Are you going to review this with two different characters? Like you really start thinking about the lesson at hand. And something that always stuck with me from college when I was developing those learning targets was we were always told never make the word understand part of your learning target because it's so vague, right, like, how can students prove that it's not measurable? So instead, your target, your success criteria and the task should be easily measurable and identifiable so that if someone does come into your classroom like it's so clear to them as an outsider, seeing what students are learning and if they're meeting that target, and identifiable, so that if someone does come into your classroom like it's so clear to them as an outsider, seeing what students are learning and if they're meeting that target I love this.
Speaker 2:That's super helpful for you as the teacher to kind of get your mind wrapped around. Okay, what am I wanting to see my students do? But then we need to think about how will we be? How will we have students show what they're actually learning, right? How can we word this target a little differently so that students can actually use it too? So let's change that target to an I can statement. So, for in this example we could say I can compare and contrast two or more characters in a story.
Speaker 2:I will show this by creating a Venn diagram that lists multiple similarities and differences between Esperanza and Miguel and Esperanza Rising, and so you can see how.
Speaker 2:That's like the original learning target, but it's reworded so that students know what they'll be learning and then they'll be showing what they're learning as well.
Speaker 2:This is just really powerful as a way to help students strengthen their metacognition as well. It helps them kind of understand how they know when they've actually mastered a concept, and that's super empowering for students, right? They? They know what they're supposed to be learning, they know when they've actually learned it and they can show that they've actually learned it. So we recommend just displaying your learning target on your board or on your screen and reviewing it with students before a lesson to help students understand their learning goal. I've even seen elementary classrooms where the teacher says the I can statement and the students say it back to the teacher, which I think would work in middle school too to kind of ingrain with their learning. Of course, some schools have their own format that they will want you to use in your learning targets, so yours may look a little bit different, but hopefully this again just shows you how you can formulate this learning target into an I can statement for students.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and that was super helpful for creating like one learning target right Per class period, like here's how we do it Right, but how do you plan your targets for a full year of learning? And I think that's maybe where, megan, some of like the negativity comes around it, like it just seems kind of daunting and like a lot to do. So, first, what we recommend doing is focusing on the essential standards versus the supporting standards as you map out your unit and in fact, jessica, this is kind of how we structured the portal with the skills that we have, as opposed to like all of those substandards and all of that type of stuff. So if you're an EB teacher portal member, you'll know, in like the skills slash standard sections, we just have, like reading for literature has what like seven main skills or eight main skills or something like that, and I think that helps you kind of like stay focused on that essential standard as opposed to like being distracted or stressed out maybe by the supporting standards.
Speaker 1:Um, and this is important to have a conversation among your grade levels because you want to have that vertical alignment right. Just can I really miss out on this with our sixth grade teacher at our school? Um, you know, just can I work together? Fifth grade, seventh grade and eighth grade were all aligned, but we had this like weird kind of gap situation because we didn't have the vertical alignment with that particular teacher, and sometimes that's just the case. You know what I mean. Sometimes that's just it is what it is, and when we accept it it makes it faster and easier to move on.
Speaker 1:So, to determine the essential standards, you want to look at the same standard in the grade level below and the grade level above you and you want to see what is necessary to focus on. So once you have the essential standard, you can create learning targets to give your students every chance to master those standards. So if an essential standard is very broad, it's okay to focus on just the part that applies for your specific lesson. So, for example, the standard that we used earlier includes characters, settings or events, but if you paid attention to the question that, or the learning target that Jessica shared, we just focused on characters. That was it right. We want the learning targets to be targeted, hence learning targets.
Speaker 3:Love it. You have more to add. Well, I think, like what you're saying, like, know your standards for your grade level and let the teacher next year focus on the setting or the event or whatever it is, you don't need to feel like I have to cover every single thing in that particular standard and I think once you kind of give yourself that grace, your teaching does become more intentional and your students benefit Right. So, now that we've got the basics down for, like, how to create an effective learning target using that that sentence stem, how can we add a little bit of fun into them? Because, like Megan was saying, here's teachers who might be like, oh, this seems so much, so much work or it's daunting. We don't want that right. So, if we can make it have a little bit of a wow factor, a little bit of pizzazz, like it makes it more fun for us, for our students, and the easiest way to do that is to get our students involved in those standards. So Megan shared that one way of like you could say the standard out loud or, excuse me, the learning target out loud and students could repeat it back. But we can also take it to another level. So if you do plan on putting your targets on the screen or on the board each day. You want to start that, ideally at the beginning of the year. So you're setting the routine and then you can explain to your students if this works for you that one of the class jobs is a class reporter and their task is to share the learning target each day with the rest of the class and you can make this fun. So, like, if your students can handle it, you can allow them to use a silly voice or use a pointer, pretend like they're actually a newscaster or weather forecaster and kind of like, get into character. You might need to model that for them about what's appropriate or not, but it makes it a little bit of fun. Or I know I can think of like a handful of my students who were like hamming it up in class, who would have loved this job every day to get out some of their energy and get everyone to laugh with them. So it's a really good opportunity, you know, to do public speaking skills, to share that learning target with the class, to get involvement from the group and if that seems like too much work, you could also just, you know, share the learning target with class, have them repeat it in small groups, turn to a partner, whatever it is, as long as you're talking about the learning target. So groups turn to a partner, whatever it is, as long as you're talking about the learning target. So you just want to draw attention to it each day.
Speaker 3:And then the second part of this is you want to tie in the school community if possible. So see if you can just even send one email, reach out to your principal, your colleagues, support staff, the custodian, like everyone involved at school, and ask them hey, if you're ever by my classroom and you'd see that I'm not like in the middle of a lecture or whatever I'm teaching can you just pop in and go up to one of my students and ask them you know, what is it that you're learning today, or what's your learning target, and see if my students can tell you. And I think doing this and like really being intentional, like making sure you walk in three visitors in that first week or two to set the tone, lets your students know, hey, everyone, three visitors in that first week or two to set the tone, lets your students know, hey, everyone's involved in my learning here, like everyone cares about what I'm learning. They're coming in saying, oh, what is it that you're doing? And oh, how do you know how to do that? And it gives them the opportunity to see like, wow, we're all one community here, we're not just in isolation in Miss Kanata's, you know, fifth grade classroom in the corner. But it's so cool that Mrs Mitchell came in and said, what are you learning about? And oh, and now she's gonna share a little story and say, wow, that's so great, you're learning that. Because when you're in my class in seventh grade, we actually go a step further and do blah, blah, blah and it like allows for all this cross communication. It's just, it's so cool and I think it's worth going to the trouble of doing that.
Speaker 3:And I did this at the school Caitlin and I worked at. We had SLEs student learning expectations and I had them on my students' desk. We talked about them daily and then they had to know like which one was being applied to a particular lesson. They actually had to write it on their assignment so that when Chris did our principal, come into the classroom he could say, connor, what are you working on? And Connor could say Connor, what are you working on? And Connor could say you know I'm being an effective communicator. Here's how I'm doing it. And like it sounds so cheesy and everything, but like gosh, it did help the students feel empowered to talk about their learning that way and it was all because, you know, we set them up for success that way.
Speaker 1:Well, and I think it just speaks into, like the why matters. You know, we talked to our EB teachers about this. Anytime a new EB teacher joins our community, we ask them what's your why? What's your why for joining, why are you here? Right, and when we have a why for why we're doing what we're doing, it starts to build just that initial motivation toward that goal or that end result that we're after. Right, motivation isn't always going to get us there, right, we've got to have discipline, we've got to have grit, we've got to have all of these other things too. But that why is that first piece? And, a lot of the times, that why is the thing that keeps you going? When you really don't actually want to get up and do whatever, the thing is that you're going to get up and do. So our students are no different. So when they know, like, why are we doing this?
Speaker 1:If someone had told me why math mattered, maybe I would have cared. You know what I mean. Like, maybe I would have ended up being an architect, like I wanted to be, but because I didn't have a great math teacher and I didn't have an understanding of why algebra was going to be important to my life in some capacity, I just didn't care. But then I had great English teachers who were sharing with me like this is important, because learning how to be an effective communicator is going to help you in whatever it is that you choose to do in your life. It's going to help you be successful right.
Speaker 1:So, like, even though that's not a learning target, it's still a why right? So we can utilize our learning targets as those little like micro wise on a daily basis for our students. Like class is not a waste of time. Like English is not a waste of time. As much as you don't want to talk about Esperanza and Miguel, it actually is not about Esperanza and Miguel, it's actually about this other intended end result.
Speaker 1:So I just think learning targets are going to be whatever. You choose to see them as right, because life is choice and we can choose to see them as these super beneficial things that, if we utilize them properly, are going to make the world of a difference for our kids to actually show up and understand why we're doing what we're doing, and also you too, why are you even doing what you're doing? Right in the classroom. And I think, and when we have that perspective, we just lead a much happier life, to be quite frank. So adopt learning targets as a super awesome, positive, wonderful thing in your teaching life. I think is the takeaway from all of this. Do you guys have anything to add? As we wrap up? I don't think so. Nope.
Speaker 2:I agree with all of that. It's great, excellent, mic drop.
Speaker 1:Appreciate it Cool. All right, you guys. Thanks so much for joining us on the podcast as we wrap up our month of August together. We will see you as we head into September. Cannot even believe that it is back to school time. Hope that you guys are having a great back to school year. If you ever need anything from us, never hesitate to reach out. We are reachable on Instagram. You can always send us an email and if you're one of our portal teachers, make sure that you are asking questions in the community and participating over there, cause our whole goal here at EB is to help you be a successful teacher and have a life outside of the classroom, because teaching is just one piece of who you are, not the entire identity. All right, you guys, thank you so much for everything and we'll see you next week on the podcast. Bye, everybody, bye.