Learning intentions – ironically these are used by well meaning teachers with the best intentions!
Learning intentions and success criteria are mentioned in the AITSL standards as good teacher practice. They are defined as ‘descriptions of what learners should know, understand and be able to do by the end of a learning period or unit’.
Learning intentions can be the basis for tracking student progress, providing feedback and assessing achievement.
Success criteria are the measures used to assess if and to what extent students have achieved the set learning intentions.
The research behind learning intentions is that they can support students to know where they’re going, provide unbiased feedback on success, support self reflection and encourage students to improve performance.
It is believed that the best learning intentions and success criteria are those that are challenging, have student buy in and generalisable to allow effective transfer of learnt skills to different contexts.
Learning intentions and success criteria certainly can play a part in a classroom. However, simplistic and rigid implementation of learning intentions may limit students.
They can be ambiguous and therefore time wasting, for example, ‘Students ‘understand’ what a procedure is’. In this example what does ‘understand’ mean? How well will students ‘understand’? What happens if they don’t ‘understand’? What happens if they do ‘understand’? Is that the end of learning about procedures?
Success criteria can also limit students, for example ‘Students will write a narrative using similes and metaphors’. What about the rest of the narrative, is that not important? Are students not successful in writing a narrative without similes and metaphors?
When students have voice, choice and ownership in their learning they engage deeply – where is this agency in these learning intentions and success criteria?
In fact, in an inquiry classroom, where students are able to come up with different answers and apply different strategies, I believe that it may even be more desirable to NOT share learning intentions, to support student agency in their learning.
At the heart of the research Hattie developed surrounding learning intentions is the idea that teaching must be targeted – and this certainly is true. We know that the best inquiry teachers are explicit teachers – certainly they are intentional. The learning is not haphazard, rather carefully choreographed, to support students to own their own learning, scaffolded where required just in time not just in case.
So what could learning intentions look like in an inquiry classroom? In an inquiry classroom we support students to not only be cognisant of what they are learning, but how they are learning it. Guy Claxton calls this ‘split screen learning’. Students understand the process of how they are going to learn what they want to learn, the knowledge, skills and attitudes they require.
It’s not a matter of ‘secret teacher business’, students are aware where they are going, there’s a map (the knowledge) and a kit the students need to organise (the skills and attitudes), but the (conceptual) journey is not written.
Split screen intentions are conceptual, and allow for a transdisciplinary transfer of skills across and throughout the curriculum. With conceptual ‘split screen’ learning intentions the teacher can toggle between them as the day continues using this language of learning all day. In the PYP the central idea, concepts, learner profile and ATLs can inform the split screen learning intention.
Another thought is that questions, both of students and teachers, can be intentional – and inform the learning in our classroom. In the PYP our teacher or student questions, lines of inquiry or student wonderings could form our learning intentions.
Open, relevant, authentic questions don’t limit students, rather they are a scaffold for a conversation that encourages the learner to synthesise and construct their own ideas in response.
How can we design our learning intentions to be agentic, authentic and engaging? Is it split-screen intentions, knowledge/skills/attitudes, questions… or something else?
https://allearssite.wordpress.com/2017/04/18/learning-objectives-a-waste-of-time/
FromtheForest 
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