Posted on May 9th, 2026

 

In my last post, I wrote about what makes a learning objective actually work for students.

A learning objective describes what students will know or be able to do as a result of the lesson. Communicating it to students gives them a context for their learning. This is one of the key ways that we beef up teacher clarity for students.

This matters because John Hattie's Visible Learning research found that teacher clarity — when students know what they're learning — has an effect size of 0.75. That's significant because a strategy with an effect size of 0.40 represents typical growth in a school year.

But today I want to take the next step and explore success criteria. When we add explicit success criteria into the mix, the effect size jumps to 0.88 — two years of growth. So clarity isn't just about the objective. It includes success criteria.

If learning objectives are the learning destination, then success criteria are the landmarks that indicate arrival at that destination. Like how the Eiffel Tower signals that we're in Paris. Success criteria describe the product that students will create or the performance they will deliver to demonstrate their learning.

But in order to be helpful to students, success criteria need a few things in place — and as Jon Saphier describes in The Skillful Teacher, these qualities are what separate criteria that guide students from ones that don't.

First, criteria are performance- and product-based. A learning objective states what a student will know or be able to do as a result of their learning. However, success criteria focus on the product or the performance itself. This is what makes criteria so useful for feedback. When we can point to the work and say "this is here" or "this isn't," feedback becomes precise rather than general.

Second, effective criteria describe how good the product or performance needs to be, or how much — or how many — of something needs to be included. How many examples are good enough? Three? Five? Clear success criteria provide this.

Third, effective criteria are written in language students can actually use. If students can't read them to track their own progress, they aren't useful.

What Makes Criteria Work for Students

Let's look at a science example. Consider a science lesson where students are learning about the transfer of energy in a food chain. The learning objective could be: Students will be able to describe how energy is transferred within a food chain.

Students demonstrate their learning by creating a food chain and explaining the transfer of energy. To help students gauge their progress, we could give them clear success criteria.

The food chain:

• Includes an energy source, a producer, at least two consumers, and a decomposer
• Is accurately labeled
• Indicates the transfer of energy

Each item describes how good the food chain needs to be or how much needs to be included. Students can look at their work and ask: is each of these present? And when each criterion is clear, feedback has something real to anchor to.

So, here's a question: How many paragraphs does the student need to have to successfully complete this?

We might be tempted to jump back into our criteria list to add the required number of paragraphs for an essay. But then this locks us into a specific format: a multi-paragraph essay.

That might be a good match for some of our students to demonstrate their learning. But for multilingual learners who are at an earlier level of English proficiency, what started as a measurement of science learning has become an English proficiency assessment instead. It's possible to know the content and not meet the criteria of an essay.

Same Destination, Different Routes

This is where format flexibility comes in. When we require a single format, we risk measuring English proficiency more than content knowledge. A student who can't yet produce a fluent written response in English may have genuine, grade-level understanding of how energy moves through a food chain. Requiring an essay doesn't reveal that understanding. It obscures it.

Let's change up the question:

What are the different ways that a student can demonstrate their learning, even as they are developing their proficiency in English?

Format flexibility means offering multiple routes to the same destination — all meeting the same criteria, all demonstrating the same learning, but with a natural progression of language demand. The cognitive demand stays constant. The linguistic demand adjusts based on the student's English proficiency.

Yes, students could write a classic multi-paragraph essay that meets the criteria.

But students could also create an annotated diagram with the same information and then explain it orally.

Or deliver it as a pre-recorded PowerPoint presentation.

For students who need a language boost, sentence stems or frames can reduce the linguistic demand without reducing the thinking required.

And for students at even earlier proficiency levels, sentence strips and concept cards can be used to construct the explanation.

What makes this work is that the success criteria remain the same across every format. The food chain still needs to include an energy source, a producer, consumers, and a decomposer. It still needs to be accurately labeled and indicate the transfer of energy. The criteria don't change — the route to meeting them does. We haven't watered down the learning. We've amplified it for students.

When success criteria are written to be CLEAR, we communicate to students exactly what good looks like. And when they're written to be FLEXIBLE, they can apply to a range of formats that all demonstrate mastery.

Every student deserves to know what success looks like before they start working toward it. And every student deserves a fair shot at showing they've arrived.

What do your success criteria look like right now — and what would you change? We'd love to hear what you're thinking.

 

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