Tweet: Showing what success looks like.

Showing what success looks like: the magic of models @HFletcherWood https://t.co/pnNzNVYet7
— Kiran Johny (@johnywrites) September 3, 2018

Students who know what success looks like have a goal and know how to achieve it.

But using learning objectives as a way to create goals of learning in each cases are not effective. Its because,”Objectives rely on concrete descriptors – slippery words like ‘persuasive’ and ‘methodical’. But knowing that an argument should be ‘persuasive’ does not show students how to make it persuasive: persuasiveness is the kind of idea “which cannot be specified in detail” and so “cannot be transmitted by prescription, since no prescription for it exists (Polanyi, 1962, p.53).

Show Me, Don’t Tell: Instead use concrete examples to demonstrate how success or end result looks like. Thus using an arsenal of exemplars instead of learning objectives. A sense of what success looks like “can be passed on only by example from master to apprentice (Polanyi, 1962, p.53.).” Examples “set the standards for what I and my students aspire to achieve (2003, p.29-30).” He offers students “a taste of excellence (p.31)”:

An ‘arsenal of exemplars’ lets us to show what success looks like, rather than tell. Cognitive science suggests that providing worked examples – models broken into steps – can help students learn better and more efficiently (Zhu and Simon, 1987).