After 28 years of teaching, I still get excited about the first day of school. The desks may be the same. Hamlet is still Hamlet. But when 180 students walk through the door, the world gets created again.
The week before students arrive is less exciting. It’s a time when districts roll out the next “big idea,” often in language that sounds vaguely pharmaceutical. What really works is far removed from these mandates—things like smaller classes. Serious tutoring. More time for teachers to plan.
None of this is mysterious. Much of it is expensive. You can understand why districts go looking for something they can control—the inexpensive miracle.
I have quite a bit of sympathy for anyone trying to make systemic change in a state as chronically underfunded as ours. I’m much less sympathetic when I’m asked to believe in fiction. Take, for example, the latest trend—posting learning intentions and success criteria.
The Washoe County School District presents research on its effectiveness with a confidence the evidence doesn’t support. The idea seems sensible enough: Students can benefit from knowing where they are going. Goals can focus attention. Clear expectations can help. But all of that comes with an important caveat: There are lessons when specificity helps, and there are other lessons when destinations need to be discovered.
A lesson teaching the difference between dependent and independent clauses benefits from being specific. On the other hand, an English-language arts lesson might begin with the simple question, “Why doesn’t Hamlet just kill him?” Fifty minutes later, students have wandered through cowardice, conscience, theater, religion, self-disgust, evidence, mortality and the possibility that Hamlet himself has no idea why Hamlet does what Hamlet does.
Imagine what a teacher following the district mandates might write on the board: “I am learning to analyze how Shakespeare develops characterization through internal conflict in order to understand how complex characters contribute to thematic meaning.” That would look spectacular during a walkthrough. It would also produce far less learning.
Robert Marzano, a researcher frequently cited by the district on learning intentions, had a warning. He writes that “setting a goal focuses students’ attention to such a degree that they ignore information not specifically related to the goal.” In other words, goals work partly because they narrow attention. They tell us what to notice. Which means, inevitably, they also tell us what to ignore.
The inexpensive miracle requires the imaginary student. But classroom teachers know that human beings are messy.
That should lead to a serious professional conversation about when explicit goals help, when they constrain, and how teachers can tell the difference. Instead, this useful tool has become pedagogical bureaucracy. Consider how it might play out: Principals are told to look for learning intentions. Teachers dutifully write learning intentions. The district reports that 93 percent of observed classrooms displayed them. Huzzah? The district has measured the spread of learning intentions. It has learned almost nothing about the spread of learning.
It’s easy to disparage these educators and say they’re gaming the system, that they discovered the pedagogical equivalent of a tax shelter. But think about what teachers don’t game. A teacher who believes calling parents helps students will pick up the phone even if nobody is checking. A teacher who discovers that reading the first scene aloud transforms a class will keep doing it. If teachers were encountering these ideas and thinking, “My God, students understand the lesson so much better when I do this,” the district wouldn’t need to check for compliance.
Some will argue this is teacher cynicism defeating educational reform. They’re wrong. These are educators trying to restore the flexibility that bureaucracy has removed. The unfortunate reality is that many of the people advocating these initiatives haven’t taught in a classroom for years, sometimes decades. That makes it easier to replace actual students with “the student.” Give “the student” a learning intention, and they focus. Give “the student” success criteria, and they achieve.
I’ve never met “the student.” Perhaps that’s the dilemma at the heart of all these beginning-of-the-year mandates: The inexpensive miracle requires the imaginary student. But classroom teachers know that human beings are messy. They show up hungry, brilliant, exhausted, hilarious, anxious, distracted, curious, hostile, lovesick, caffeinated, shy, competitive, ambitious, bored—and that’s just first period. Again and again, students arrive and ruin the elegance of our theories.
Brent Busboom has taught English for 28 years and has two children currently attending schools in the Washoe County School District. He also serves as a national trainer, teaching AP English literature educators from across the country how to score the AP exam.