Targets And Dreams

23/05/2018

I was talking recently with some colleagues about writing school reports. At one point it was suggested that if there were, for a particular student, a significant discrepancy between her target grade and her working grade, it would be important to include a written comment to parents to explain this. It was then that I may have committed heresy.

For those of you who are not initiated into the arcane mysteries of teaching or, perhaps more accurately, educational record-keeping, I may need to explain what “target grades” and “working grades” are. Brace yourself. At the beginning of a school session in August I am supposed to talk to all my students and set with them an ‘aspirational target grade’ and a ‘current target grade’. These are, roughly speaking, what grade they want to get at the end of the course and what grade they should realistically expect of themselves in, say, three months time. A working grade is, as you might expect, the grade they are actually achieving. It’s a little time-consuming, but it beats the hell out of explaining stuff to them or answering their questions about Chemistry, right?

Anyway. Back to the heresy. One of the advantages of my grey hair and advancing age is that I can afford to be heretical. I can say the things that don’t agree with the policies of the Powers That Be because I have no dreams of promotion . Retirement on the other hand… So I said that, in my opinion and experience, all this target-setting wasn’t making the blindest bit of difference in terms of student attainment. Well, I don’t see that being seriously discussed any time soon. Received wisdom is that setting and monitoring targets is the golden road to the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow that is improved exam results. The fact that, year after year, we keep bemoaning the fact that exam results are not improving despite the hours we spend logging target grades into spreadsheets and databases is an irrelevance in the face of the power we imagine we have to motivate students to learn through targets.

I am pretty sure I’m right on this. I’m also pretty sure I understand the psychology here. I’m not averse to targets. I want my students to want the best for themselves. I want them to aim for the best they can achieve. I want them to keep pushing themselves and find, through pushing themselves, that they can do things they never thought they could. I want them to come out of a year in my class believing that they can achieve what they want to achieve. I want them to be eager to take the next step in Chemistry. If that’s a target then count me in. Trouble is, it’s not quite the same thing as a target grade, is it? It’s not something easily described on an A-E scale.

So, maybe we can agree that an aspirational target grade is a good thing. It’s a good thing that, given we have an exam-based system of qualifications, that kids have something to aim for. Sure. I’m happy to encourage the folk I teach to have a goal that they’re working for. The thing is that it needs to be their goal; not mine. They need to own that goal, not me. If I record that goal then I take ownership of it. If I attempt to moderate it by assimilating it to a “realistic target” then I take control of it. If I keep matching it up to their “working grade”, then I make it a stick to beat them with.

The target-setting and monitoring procedure that exists in many schools, in my opinion, does nothing to improve the attainment of our students and may be detrimental to their education because, perhaps, ironically, it disempowers them. A target is, ultimately, a dream: a dream that can, for sure, become a reality, but something which, when we speak it out loud, becomes susceptible to analysis. Is it realistic? Is it likely? I think that the dreams that really inspire us - the ones that keep pushing us to achieve more - are ones kids don’t easily share. Especially not with the teacher who is going to be marking their tests and are going to be required to comment on how far short they are falling of realising those dreams.

When we record, monitor and report on our students’ targets and the extent to which they are likely to achieve them then we march onto their territory. We take ownership of their targets and their dreams. We make their education something that is done for them or to them, not by them. If we genuinely want to improve the attainment of our students we need to hand them back their dreams. We need to encourage them to demand the best they can do from themselves and to keep their targets in mind. Their targets. Not mine.