Pedagogy
The importance of Learning Intentions for improving student engagement
Often as teachers, we hear from our students “Why are we learning this?” or “I don’t get the point of this lesson Miss/Sir”. As teachers who are often very passionate about our subject areas and determined to pass this on to our students, unfortunately, such questions can be very troubling and difficult to hear.
However, on reflection, many of the outcomes provided in our respective syllabi are confusing and unrelatable unless we unpack them with and explain their importance to our students. For example, why do we need to learn about Pythagoras’ theorem in Maths or about conduction, convection and radiation in Science? Unless we give them the context for these concepts based in the real world, there is a good chance the students will continue to ask those questions that we don’t want to hear. This is where good learning intentions come into play. Providing our students with clear learning intentions assists them to know what they are learning about and to understand why we are teaching them about certain concepts.
At St Paul’s, our aim is to have clear and relevant learning intentions written into our programs and articulated in our classrooms to increase the relevance of the learning for our students. Ensuring that the learning intentions are written to inform the students about what they are learning and why they are learning it will improve student engagement with the concepts taught. For example;
- "We are learning to apply Pythagoras’ theorem so that we can find the distance between two points in real-life situations, such as determining the shortest path in a park or measuring the height of a ladder needed to reach a certain height."
- "We are learning to describe the transfer of heat energy by conduction, convection, and radiation so that we can understand how heat moves in everyday situations, such as cooking food, heating a room, and feeling the warmth of the sun."
Perhaps when your child comes home from school, you could have a conversation with them about what they are learning in class and determine if they can tell you why they are learning about those particular concepts.
Ms Maria Littlejohn - Leader of Pedagogy
maria.littlejohn@lism.catholic.edu.au