So who decides what kids are going to learn? Who really should decide what 21^st century kids “need to know and be able to do”? What is the connection between what we teach, how we teach and whether or not kids actually learn any thing new?! Is the educational delivery system that we utilize today even relevant in the current market place? Is there a causal link between learning targets, the student engagement problem and the “why do I need to learn this stuff” lament so often heard in the classroom?

These questions were probably on the agenda when Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle metaphysically sat around the campfire in the cave and philosophized about the relevancy question. I contend that these questions are still extremely relevant today. What is your take on these questions, what are you doing to try and help your students make connections between today’s learning targets and the instructional methods that your teachers employ? Do your students have any input into the selection of their learning targets? If not, how will they come to value them? If they do not value the learning targets they are asked to pursue, what makes you think they will put in sufficient effort to achieve or attain these prescribed targets?  What is the professional development response to this dilemma?

Can we develop and nurture more effective and responsive teachers or are we waiting for the next generation of cave dwellers to show us the way out of our school accountability malaise?! As a reflective, Socrates might have said to himself and then to his fellow cave dwellers, “just because I taught it does not guarantee that you boys learned it”! How do we know if students actually learned anything and how would we know if they can apply their learning to new and novel situations?! Is there a connection between the articulation of learning targets and the collection of evidence about student learning?

Thirty-five years ago, I read a powerful little book by Barbara Bateman called The Essentials of Teaching (1971).  It outlined the essential things an educator needed to know and be able to do if they actually wanted to “teach” students something they did not already know how to do. I have utilized this little book in many ways over the past thirty- five years to try to constantly understand and improve my own approach to teaching and the teacher training that I have been involved in for three plus decades.

To quote Bateman, “this book is not the product of a position about teaching, it is quite literally the process of trying to reach a position. What are the main things a teacher must be able to do? Surely for some occupations, perhaps dentistry, automobile repair or bridge building it is easy to list major skills or prerequisite behaviors. For me, it was difficult, beyond anything I envisioned, to do this for teaching. Often I thought how difficult it would be for fish to discuss the main features of water.”

I suggest that you check out this little book or your own “little books” that shape your views of teaching and learning so that you can describe the “features of water” for today’s classroom.

According to Bateman, the first essential of teaching is: “get the attention of the learner”.

The best way to get some ones attention is to present a learning target that they are actually interested in hitting.  Consider the reason and manner in which you pursue your leisure time activities or hobbies! When you look at it objectively, it really isn’t a mystery why so many kids are disengaged and off task at school, they simply are not interested in achieving the learning targets that they are presented.  No one bothers to attend very long to tasks that they have no interest in pursuing. Grant Wiggins contends that authentic performance tasks work because they have relevance for students and they are worth pursuing! How can we learn to effectively negotiate the balance between what must be taught (i.e. content standards) and what students would actually like to learn?

When we can begin to see the connection between engaged students and truly differentiated classrooms, we start to make the causal links that were referred to earlier.

Some teachers get off to a good start by engaging students in a dialogue concerning the things they are interested in learning and then they kill that enthusiasm by presenting material in a manner that would knock a koala bear right out of his gum tree. Other teachers fail more quickly because the prescribed educational offering they force down students' throats has no connection to students' interest, passions, readiness or learning styles.

As you pursue the challenges of engaging your students in learning this fall, I urge you to consider a more recent professional resource that you might wish to consult as you consider the art and science of establishing learning targets.  Check out any of the many books written by Carol Ann Tomlinson (i.e. How to Differentiate Instruction in Mixed- Ability Classrooms) or, better yet, take a LAPDA class on DI.

As I stated in my earlier blog on integrated professional development, these dots all connect and they all must be considered synergistically by this new generation of professional educators, the cave dwellers of the 21^st century!