3 Ways to Use Learning Target Overview Pages

You may have noticed on the first day of every Math Medic unit, there is a link to a Unit Overview and Learning Targets page. We have been using these for years to help keep our students (and ourselves) organized! Each Unit Overview includes a list of all of the lessons in the unit and the learning targets covered in each lesson. These pages can be downloaded as a Word document so you can edit them to best fit your classroom needs. Here are three of our favorite uses for these docs:

Use 1: As a schedule and cover page

We like to create activity packets for our students for each unit that contain each activity that we will be doing in class. We use the unit overview as the cover page for the packet. We add columns to the table in order to add dates and homework assignments. We also add in additional rows for quiz and test days. You can see an example of this use below.

Bonus: If you’re using the Math Medic Assessment Platform, you can add links for the homework and post it to your Google Classroom! We like to assign homework digitally, but we still print the in-class quizzes and tests.

Use 2: For students to self-assess

This one actually began because we saw our students doing this on their own. Before tests, students were using the list of learning targets from the cover page as a checklist to help them study. They checked off the learning targets they felt they understood and spent their study time going back over the ones they didn’t. What a great idea!

Try adding this reflection tool to the list of learning targets for students to score their understanding:

1. I don’t know how to do this

2. I can do this with some support

3. I can do this independently

4. I can teach this to someone else

In order for this to be most effective, give students a chance to score themselves during class. We like doing it before assessments to help guide their studying. An example is shown below.

Use 3: As a digital launchpad to share with students and parents

Try turning the unit overview into a digital launchpad that you add to throughout the unit. Add links to videos, answer keys of the notes for absent students, and additional resources that students may find helpful. This is a great way to re-use all of those videos you created during the remote teaching days!

As we transitioned away from traditional textbooks, we found these overviews were a simple and effective way to communicate with parents (and our admin) what we were working on in class and to provide additional resources.

We hope you find these unit overviews helpful. Let us know how you use them in your classroom!

Looking for more? On the home page for each course, you can find a single pdf compiling all the Unit Overview pages of that course. Additionally, we have new alignment documents showing the Common Core State Standards for each lesson!