Creating Success Criteria With Your Learners

If learners understand what their work is being judged against, they can target their efforts more effectively.

This is because they know what they are meant to be doing.

What success looks like.

And if learners know this, they can self-assess.

And do so more effectively than if the success criteria are ambiguous, hazy or not shared at all.

When you know what the success criteria are, self-assessment is straightforward.

Even more so when learners develop the success criteria themselves.

Giving them a role in the process binds them to it, while creating certainty in their minds over what success entails.

And it means they actively engage with the success criteria (by constructing them with you) before the activity begins, priming them to target their efforts effectively and to self-assess with confidence.

Here are three ways you can develop success criteria with your learners, and bring all these benefits to bear in your classroom.

Groups Work Out Success in Advance

Before beginning a task, divide the class into the same number of groups as success criteria you want (so, if you want five success criteria then divide the class into five groups).

Explain that each group has to agree on one success criterion they believe will be important for learners to try and meet in their work.

If you are concerned about different groups coming up with the same criteria, give each group a different area about which to develop a success criterion.

This minimises the possibility of repetition.

After sufficient time has passed, ask each group to select a representative who will share their work with the class.

Go round the representatives in turn.

They should state their group’s criterion, explain why they have chosen it and suggest an example of what work that has met it might look like (indicate in advance that this will be expected).

You can record the success criteria on the board so that learners can refer to them when they begin their work.

One variation on this is to aim for three success criteria, with those put forward by your groups then being whittled down either through a class vote, or by you making a decision over what is best.

Diamond Nine Success Criteria

Provide learners with a list of nine success criteria connected to a task you want them to do.

Explain that they will be working in pairs and that their task is to order these criteria into a ‘diamond nine’.

This means organising the items in rows of 1, 2, 3, 2, 1 from top to bottom.

The position of the criteria in the ‘diamond nine’ reflects how important learners think them to be.

The most important success criterion goes at the top, the least important at the bottom.

And the rest are sorted across the middle.

When learners have agreed their diamond nines, ask pairs to move into groups of four.

Groups should compare their work and justify their choices to each other.

You should then announce that each group must agree on two success criteria they are happy to put forward to the whole class. These should be the two that each group feel are most important overall.

Groups take it in turns to share their choices.

You can collate these on the board as you go.

If a total of between two and five different success criteria are put forward, use these for the task and set learners to work.

If more than five are put forward, ask the class to vote for the ones they most want removed.

Repeat this until you pare down the results to four or five criteria.

Any more than this and using them becomes too complex.

Post-It Note Success Criteria

Introduce learners to a task and display a range of success criteria on the board.

Give each learner a couple of post-it notes.

Ask them to choose which two success criteria they think will be most relevant for the activity.

They should write their reasons on their post-it notes and then go and stick these on the board, next to the criteria they have chosen.

The success criteria with the most votes are the winners.

These are what learners should focus on while completing the task.

If too many success criteria gain enough votes to be put through, use the elimination method outlined above.

Either way, you have a quick and easy method for learners selecting the success criteria.

(And this is subtly directed in the first place because you have decided the success criteria learners must choose between.)