You can’t hit a target you cannot see, and you cannot see a target you do not have.
Zig Ziglar
Our last blog entry was about criteria and how we can’t provide a helpful assessment without them. Recall that Duffin wanted feedback on his bubble blowing but until we had criteria for that performance, we were dead in the water (sorry, Duffin).
We needed to know the criteria for Duffin’s targeted performance—where to LOOK in order to give the desired feedback. And Duffin needed our feedback in order to know what to DO to achieve his targeted performance.
It usually works the other way around in the classroom: We know the criteria of any targeted performance we assign to students (what we want to SEE) and share those criteria, effectively describing the targeted performance for our students (what we want them to DO). What could be more straightforward?
At base, it doesn’t matter if our students are in kindergarten or at the post-doctoral level; their understanding of a performance we want from them is not the same as our understanding of it. If we’re past our first year of teaching, we will have seen many instances of the performance we’re asking of them and we will have spent a lot of time thinking about the criteria that define the performance target we want them to hit. Hitting the target is what it’s all about; none of us are trying to hide it from our students. On the contrary, we want them to see it clearly! This is why we share performance criteria with them. It’s also why we provide them with feedback based on those criteria.
Unfortunately, to students it often sounds like we’re saying, “I want you to hit the target over there,” and clarifying its location by sharing latitude and longitude coordinates.
What can help to fill the gap between the way we see the target and the way our students see and work to hit it, is a model. If a picture is worth a thousand words, a model of a target performance is worth a thousand performance criteria, at least when students are unfamiliar with the performance. It shows them, in a way no criteria list can, what and where the target is. Once they see the target, they can do the work to hit it…and at that point, the criteria start to make sense because they now refer to something real that can be pointed to, discussed, and assessed, instead of an abstract performance not yet begun.
