get a little enrichment in your inbox

Success Criteria- The HOW of Teaching

Facebook
Twitter
LinkedIn
Pinterest
Email
Success Criteria

Success criteria are a visual way to show and tell your students the steps they will take to be successful in meeting their learning targets. They can help your students take ownership over their learning as they can:

  • use it as a reference when they are working independently if they get stuck
  • come up with the success criteria themselves
  • track their progress in using the success criteria to meet their learning targets

To create success criteria:

  1. Think about what steps your students would need to take to successfully meet their learning target
    • For some skills and concepts, there may be only one way to be successful and may be done in a certain order
    • For other skills and concepts, there may be multiple ways to be successful
  2. List the steps in order of how they would be completed
    • If there is more than one right way, list all of them, so that your students can choose which criteria would work best for them
  3. You can color code the steps (or the different ways to be successful)
    • This helps your students with being overwhelmed by a lot of text
    • Your students can visually see where each step starts and ends
  4. You can also add pictures if there is room and the criteria lends itself to pictures

To use success criteria with your students:

  1. Go over the learning target with your students prior to the lesson
  2. Then talk about the success criteria either:
    • Right after you’ve discussed the learning target (so that students will have prior knowledge of what steps they will be taking as you are teaching)
    • After you’ve taught the lesson, when explaining what they will be doing when they are working independently
  3. For older students (or if it’s a skill you have practiced over and over), you can have them help you come up with the success criteria
  4. Continually refer back to the success criteria throughout your lesson (if you introduce it prior to the lesson) and in any small group or individual instruction
  5. Have the students do any or all of the below:
    • repeat the success criteria to you
    • tell a partner what the success criteria is
    • write the success criteria in their notebook
    • tell you (or someone else) the success criteria in their own words
    • write in their notebook which criteria they used to be successful (if there is more than one)

For ease and convenience:

  • Type up the success criteria beforehand so that you will not have to spend your valuable time thinking about how to word each success criteria, for each subject, for each lesson
  • Print them out and laminate for repeated use lesson after lesson, year after year
  • Print different subjects on different colors (ex: reading on yellow, math on blue…), especially if you are not chosing to color code the success criteria wording
  • Label them on the back or in the bottom corner with the specific standard, so you can match it with the learning targets you are using
  • Store them in a pocket chart or sheet protectors that are stapled to the wall for easy access and to keep them organized
  • Keep like subjects together

For pre-made Success Criteria for each grade that are based on the Common Core State Standards, check out these Success Criteria

They WHY- Real World Connections

If giving your students a purpose for learning and the tools to succeed in it isn’t enough, making real world connections would be like the icing on the cake. Knowing why they need to learn something is crucial and when given concrete examples of times they’ll use it, makes it all come together. I try to bring in real world examples as much as possible and when they come up unexpectedly we chant, “#realworld”!

For pre-made Success Criteria for each grade that are based on the Common Core State Standards, check out these Success Criteria

What about the WHAT?

Before students are given the how, the steps they need to take to reach their goals, they are given their purpose (the what). This is where learning targets comes into play. Head over to this blog post Learning Targets- The WHAT of Teaching to read all about learning targets.

Facebook
Twitter
LinkedIn
Pinterest
Email

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.

You may also enjoy...

Search

let's connect

get a little enrichment in your inbox