Formative assessment - the power of clear learning intentions

This is the second blog in a series. You can find the first blog here: Formative assessment – the secret to lasting improvement in schools

Formative assessment is a powerful tool in effective teaching, guiding both students and teachers toward meaningful learning outcomes. The first critical aspect of formative assessment is the clear communication and understanding of learning intentions. These intentions set the foundation for what students are expected to achieve, helping teachers align their instruction and ensuring students can monitor their own progress. However, this process can often go awry if not executed with precision and intent. In this blog, we'll explore the pitfalls of poorly defined learning intentions and offer practical strategies to make them more effective in the classroom.

Imagine learning intentions as the roadmap for your students' journey. Without clarity and shared understanding, these intentions become nothing more than vague aspirations, leaving both teachers and students unsure of the destination. While it might seem obvious that learning intentions need to be clear, it's all too common for them to be diluted or misinterpreted in practice. Across schools, we still see objectives split into categories like "all, most, and some," lesson objectives that merely list tasks to be completed, or too much time spent copying down tiered goals. When this happens, the principle of setting clear intentions becomes lost in the strategy, undermining the learning process.

Below, we’ll discuss common mistakes with learning intentions and provide practical suggestions to make them a more productive and powerful part of your teaching.

Reflecting on my own early experiences as a teacher, I now realise how much I struggled with effectively implementing learning intentions. In my first term, I was placed in a school under special measures, and I faced the challenge of the "curse of knowledge." Coming from a mathematics background, I found it difficult to empathize with students whose attainment levels were below the national average. What seemed simple to me was challenging for them, and I quickly realised I wasn’t truly teaching— I was merely presenting activities.

Instead of focusing on what I wanted my students to learn, I was led by engaging tasks and worksheets that others had created. The result? A series of chaotic lessons. My mistake was assuming that completing a task equated to learning. This experience became a turning point for me. I began to understand that effective teaching requires a deep connection to the curriculum, combined with a clear understanding of what I want my students to learn at any given moment.

Another significant learning curve for me was moving away from viewing the individual lesson as the core unit of teaching. The length of a lesson is arbitrary and shouldn’t dictate the learning process. It’s a common misconception that learning can be neatly packaged into bite-sized chunks within the confines of a single lesson. Instead, I’ve found that focusing on long-term learning goals helps better prepare students for deeper understanding. I’ve written more extensively about this here, using the example of teaching students to estimate the mean from frequency tables.

A common myth, possibly perpetuated by external pressures like Ofsted, is that students need to know exactly what they’re learning at every moment of every lesson. This often leads to learning intentions being shared at the start of the lesson. However, we should question whether this is always the most effective approach. Think of a comedian—would sharing the punchline before the setup enhance the joke? Similarly, revealing the learning intention too early can rob students of the opportunity to engage in discovery and critical thinking.

In some contexts, it’s more impactful to share the learning intention later in the lesson, allowing students to explore and think deeply before clarifying the goal. A technique I’ve observed in Japanese classrooms involves students summarising their learning at the end of the lesson to check if it aligns with the intended objectives. This can be a brilliant way to gauge understanding and reinforce learning.

Research by Graham Nuthall, in The Hidden Lives of Learners, shows that many students already know about 40-50% of what’s being taught. Therefore, correctly pitching learning intentions requires a thorough assessment of students' starting points. If the intentions are either too simple or too advanced, learning is unlikely to succeed. The goal is to find the sweet spot where the learning intention challenges students just enough to promote growth. Achieving this balance requires continuous assessment and adjustment throughout the lesson.

While students may not need to grasp the full scope of the learning objective initially, providing a glimpse of the broader picture can help them connect new learning to previous knowledge. This concept, rooted in the Elaboration Theory of Instruction, allows students to place their current learning within a larger framework, helping them better integrate it into their existing knowledge. Although some argue that too much emphasis on the big picture can distract students, simple strategies can help them see the journey ahead without overwhelming them.

Thanks to the Ofsted framework focusing on intent, implementation, and impact, I now view this strategy as more than just setting individual learning intentions. It's about ensuring that teachers across a team share a common understanding of those intentions. This requires a shared vocabulary and consistent communication, especially when teachers work with parallel groups. Discussing and clarifying learning intentions as a team can be a valuable use of CPD time, and it’s important to regularly revisit what success criteria should look like for different learning intentions.

• Ensure clarity and specificity. Review your learning intentions to ensure they don’t fall into any of the common pitfalls mentioned above.
• Add a "so that…" to your intention. This helps provide a concrete rationale for the learning. For example: "We are learning how to apply the order of operations so that we can use this in algebraic calculations next term."
• Collaborate with colleagues. Take time to discuss upcoming learning intentions with your colleagues and clarify what the success criteria should look like.
• Share curriculum maps with students and parents. Where possible, provide student and parent-friendly versions of your curriculum to help them understand the learning journey.
• Use WAGOLLs (What A Good One Looks Like). Students benefit from seeing models and worked examples, which can serve as success criteria. These might include examples of previous students' work.
• Incorporate exam-type questions. Even if students aren’t ready to answer them yet, exposing them to the types of questions they’ll encounter later helps them understand the end goals.
• Make connections to past and future learning explicit. Detailing these connections within the curriculum can help students see how current learning fits into the bigger picture.
• Check for alignment. Regularly check whether students can describe what they’re learning and ensure it aligns with your intentions.

Our secondary advisers are experienced in providing curriculum reviews to support this process. If you’d like to learn more, please reach out via the contact form below.