Communicating a Shared Understanding of Goals

In their work on teaching for understanding, Howard Gardner and the staff at Project Zero emphasize the importance of defining clear goals (which they call throughlines) and communicating them to students:

Making these throughlines explicit for students helps to ensure that the students stay focused on developing the most essential understandings. By making such goals explicit for students, you give them the opportunity to monitor their own growth and the power to separate the relevant from the irrelevant, the useful work from the interesting-but-distracting work. (Blythe & Associates, 1998, p. 50)

Within a print-based curriculum, where the means to achieving learning goals are essentially the same for everyone (reading and writing), the need to articulate clear goals is less apparent than when multiple pathways are possible. However, in a UDL classroom, which offers diverse media, tools, and content, the need for clearly articulated goals is obvious. When students work with new tools and try new approaches, they need to know what they are trying to accomplish in order for the tools and approaches to have a positive impact on learning. Using a multimedia CD-ROM or the Internet just for the sake of using it won't help students progress. For students starting on the journey of developing skills with new tools and methods, knowing the destination is more important than ever.