How to Make Your Classroom as Addictive as a Video Game with Learning Intentions & Success Criteria: Level 1

By Kate Wolfe Maxlow

Video games—love them or loathe them, we can all agree that they’re great at their ultimate purpose: getting you to play them. But...how do they do it? Why, as a sleep-deprived mother of young children who needs all the sleep I can get, do I occasionally willingly sacrifice sleep to reach the next level on the video game dujour? I’m an adult! I should be immune!

Nope--because video games use some pretty potent psychological principles to capture and keep your attention. The good news? You can use the same principles in your classroom.

Why We Love Video Games

It turns out that one of the major strategies used by video games is that they communicate very clear learning intentions and success criteria, which are two fancy words from John Hattie’s book Visible Learning: A Synthesis of Over 800 Meta-Analyses Relating to Achievement. The words can trip up teachers trying to differentiate the two, but the definitions boil down to this:

• Learning Intention: What you’re trying to do (or in the classroom: What students are learning)
• Success Criteria: How you’ll know you’ve been successful (or in the classroom: What task students are completing the degree of proficiency required to consider learning a “success”)

It turns out that our brains loooooove learning intentions and success criteria. Human brains are set-up like little “to-do” lists. When given a task that we find interesting (the learning intention), we actually get a little dopamine hit when we complete it (check off the success criteria). Dopamine, of course, is that amazing neurotransmitter that plays a major role in motivation and rewards.

How to Write Learning Intentions & Success Criteria

So, let’s say that you’re playing a game where you need to is to Stop the Dragon from Terrorizing the Town. That’s your overall goal—your learning intention.

Sometimes, there’s only one way to achieve that goal—or one success criteria (i.e., kill the Dragon). But sometimes, maybe there are multiple ways to achieve the goal, such as:

• Kill the dragon
• Talk to the dragon, find out he's just lonely, and set up a weekly Dragon Cribbage party
• Sell the dragon on the virtues of a condo in a nearby beach city and wave goodbye as he hits the skies in retirement

Similarly, in our classrooms, often we have a basic learning intention, such as: “Understand the importance of the Bill of Rights.” But, depending on your students’ ages and readiness levels, your success criteria might look different. For instance, here are some possible success criteria at different levels:

• Elementary: Fill in the graphic organizer by providing three basic rights guaranteed by the Bill of Rights and one way that each right impacts your everyday life
• Middle: Write a five paragraph essay that introduces what you feel are the three most important rights outlined in the Bill of Rights and include at least three details supporting why you think each right is important.
• High School: Create a documentary on the Bill of Rights in which you choose three of what you feel are the most important rights, interview at least two people about each right and how it impacts them on a daily basis, and provide at least three historically significant facts about each right.

Tips to Making Your Learning Intentions and Success Criteria More Addictive (as learned from video games)

• Learning Intentions and Success Criteria can’t be so broad that the tasks seem never-ending or else your students WILL lose interest. That’s why video games break things up into levels or quests. A good rule of thumb is that a Learning Intention/Success Criteria should usually last 1-5 days.
• With success criteria, there’s a sweet spot between allowing for productive struggle and giving students enough specificity that the task is clear, and the amount of specificity that you give might depend on how independent your students are with the content. In video game speak, it’s like the difference between the tutorial and the actual gameplay. “I can count to 20” might be too vague; “I can count to 20 by saying 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, etc..” is probably too specific. “I can out loud to 20 by myself with no help from my teacher and no more than one mistake” might be just right, depending on your students.
• In order to work, learning intentions and success criteria MUST be shared with students and easily accessible at ALL TIMES! Imagine a video game in which you wander around without any idea of what you’re trying to accomplish or how you’ll know when you’ve done it. Would you even bother to play? (Okay, okay, I know that there are some video games built entirely on this premise, but it’s not a common format because many people find it frustrating.)
• The way that you word your learning intentions and success criteria is less important than whether or not they contain enough information to empower students to want to “play” the task, and whether they are communicated to students.

Example Learning Intentions and Success Criteria

Most of the following come from our talented curriculum writers in Hampton City Schools, Virginia, and are featured in our online curriculum.

English/Language Arts

• Learning Intention: I can summarize a story.
• Success Criteria: I can choose a fairy tale and write a story in the Flow Map that includes a picture and sentence for each of the following: the beginning, the middle, and the end.

CTE/Family and Consumer Sciences:

• Learning Intention: I will observe safe ways to use the internet.
• Success Criteria: I will list five ways to be in danger on the internet and five solutions to avoid those dangers.

Health

• Learning Intention: I can explain how violence, bullying, and harassment affect health and safety.
• Success Criteria: I will create a campaign to prevent bullying in school and online according to the rubric (note: rubric shared with students as part of the success criteria)

Library

• Learning Intention: I will check out an appropriate book.
• Success Criteria: I will choose a book that interests me and is at a comfortable reading level by using the “just right” book strategy

Mathematics

• Learning Intention: I will know and be able to apply the rules for adding, subtracting, multiplying & dividing using numbers with decimals.
• Success Criteria: I will be able to successfully set up and solve four single-step and multistep practical problems involving operations with decimals by using the problem-solving process.

Music

• Learning Intention: I will understand how to care for an instrument.
• Success Criteria: I will be able to explain all of the parts of my instrument and demonstrate the proper posture and procedures for playing and caring for my instrument.

Science

• Learning Intention: I will be able to distinguish between a hypothesis, a theory and a law
• Success Criteria: I will be able to define and give one example of a biological hypothesis, theory and a law

Social Studies

• Learning Intention: I will know the locations and names of Virginia’s important water features.
• Success Criteria: I will be able to successfully locate and name the bodies of water important in Virginia’s early history on a blank map.

Spanish

• Learning Intention: I can describe and identify daily routines.
• Success Criteria: I will be successful when I can orally describe a typical day at school or home with at least 5 details.

Visual Arts

• Learning Intention: I will be able to identify basic shapes that make up complex objects
• Success Criteria:I will be able to draw the basic shapes (circles, triangles, squares, etc) that make up a complex object when given four printouts of complex objects.
  

Next Time

Check back next Tuesday for Part 2, in which we’ll discuss how to choose what type of learning intention and success criteria to write in order to best empower your students to take ownership of their own learning.

(By the way, if you want to “gamify” your classroom with even more ideas, I highly suggest that you check out the You Are Not So Smart Podcast on The Psychology of Video Games.)

Kate Wolfe Maxlow is the Professional Learning Coordinator for Hampton City Schools, Virginia. You can contact her at kmaxlow@hampton.k12.va.us.