Use this checklist to ensure that goal statements will be helpful to both you and your students.

- Focus on what is to be learned today, not over the next several weeks. If a lesson is going to extend over several days, try to determine the learning focus for each day and make that your goal statement.

- Explain the learning in the goal statement, not the assignment or activity. Just because students complete an activity, that doesn’t necessarily mean they learned anything. Be careful if you are including the task as well as the learning in the goal statement –many students will pay more attention to the task than to what they are expected to learn.

- Use verbs to indicate the kind of thinking students will be expected to do. Words like ‘summarize’, ‘evaluate’, and ‘identify’ are much better than ‘understand’, ‘learn’, or ‘know’.

- Write the goal so that successful achievement of it requires grade-level work. If students can achieve without working at grade level, they aren’t being given the opportunity to work to high expectations and you can’t use the results of their work in your evaluations.

- Visualize what a successful learner will be able to do as a result of achieving the goal (success criteria) and think about how your students might demonstrate this criteria. Good goals are assessable!

Coming next week: 4 Tests to Determine Goal Quality