There are two interactives on this website focused on using the purpose of a lesson to guide your development of learning intentions and success criteria. This interactive is intended for you to practice writing learning intentions and success criteria using the purpose of your lesson, while the other interactive ("Lesson Purposes, Planning Interactive") is specifically designed as a planning tool you can use when you are planning lessons. (For more on learning intentions and success criteria, and on overarching instructional purposes, see Chapter 2, "Using Mathematics Learning Intentions and Success Criteria," of Bringing Math Students into the Formative Assessment Equation: Tools and Strategies for the Middle Grades.)
This interactive supports practice in writing learning intentions and success criteria by providing guidelines for learning intentions, with corresponding success criteria. These guidelines are intended as a starting point, and we encourage you to edit these guidelines to match the particulars of the lesson.
The interactive also supports you by providing our reasoning about which overarching instructional purpose is warranted for a particular lesson description. A different choice from yours doesn't mean you are wrong; you may simply be thinking about the content differently than we do. The feedback will help you see how we were thinking about the lesson, and you can decide whether you want to change your mind—or not.
©Education Development Center, Inc.
Four sample units are provided in the tabs below. For each unit, a list of lessons a teacher might include in the unit are provided.
For each row:
You can change your mind about the purpose in any row at any time by selecting a new purpose in the second column for the row. (This will erase your LI & SC, though.) If you wish to save a completed table for future reference, you can select the table and copy it, then paste it into a word processing document.
| Typical Lesson Activities | Purpose | LI & SC | |
| Lesson 1 | Review what a fraction is; understand different uses of fractions | ||
| Lesson 2 | Use the area model (that you'd already learned for whole numbers) to think about what it means to multiply fractions | ||
| Lesson 3 | Move from the area model to an algorithm for multiplying fractions | ||
| Lesson 4 | Make meaning of multiplying fractions by developing some "stories" or contexts that would result in multiplying fractions | ||
| Lesson 5 | Explain why multiplying fractions sometimes results in an answer that's smaller than either of the fractions you're multiplying (multiplying doesn't always result in "bigger") | ||
| Typical Lesson Activities | Purpose | LI & SC | |
| Lesson 1 | Review what area means (tiling shapes with small squares, etc.) and formulas you already know | ||
| Lesson 2 | Use the area of a rectangle to find (informally) the area of a triangle | ||
| Lesson 3 | Understand why the area formula for a triangle is ½bh | ||
| Lesson 4 | Practice using the area formula for a triangle to find areas of other complex shapes that can be subdivided into triangles, rectangles, other familiar shapes | ||
| Typical Lesson Activities | Purpose | LI & SC | |
| Lesson 1 | Introduce idea of independent and dependent variables | ||
| Lesson 2 | Identify the independent and dependent variables in story problems | ||
| Lesson 3 | Build tables of values from a story problem (i.e. Cheryl and Eric decide to go canoeing; they pay $10 plus $2.50 per hr, etc.) | ||
| Lesson 4 | Review plotting points on a graph | ||
| Lesson 5 | Learn where independent and dependent variables show up on the graph | ||
| Lesson 6 | Plot points from tables onto a graph | ||
| Lesson 7 | Look at patterns in the increase in the y column (and in the x column) in a table – look for constant rate of change patterns | ||
| Lesson 8 | Discuss how constant rate of change appears in graphs of straight lines | ||
| Typical Lesson Activities | Purpose | LI & SC | |
| Lesson 1 | Review graphing lines from tables | ||
| Lesson 2 | Graph the line from a linear equation in the form y = mx + b using a table | ||
| Lesson 3 | Generate values for the table from looking at the graph | ||
| Lesson 4 | Explain the relationship between a point on the graph and the corresponding equation | ||
| Lesson 5 | Review finding constant rate in a table | ||
| Lesson 6 | Introduce slope | ||
| Lesson 7 | Find the slope of a line from the table, or graph, or equation | ||
| Lesson 8 | Write the equation from values in the table or from looking at the graph | ||
| Lesson 9 | Use any one of the representations (table, graph, or equation) to generate the other two. | ||
Your reasoning may be just as valid—sometimes other choices work just as well. You can keep the purpose you chose, or switch to ours.
Choose the LI guideline you prefer to start with. You'll be able to edit it.