Enhancing lesson clarity with learning intentions and success criteria

Experienced teachers know that effective planning and sequencing are essential, especially in subjects like maths and science, where each concept builds on prior knowledge. Setting clear learning intentions and success criteria can be one of your most useful tools in making the learning pathway through the lessons to success more visible and meaningful.  

Evidence from the Australian Education Research Organisation (AERO) supports the use of clear learning goals as one of the most impactful ways to enhance student engagement and achievement. Here’s a closer look at how you can take your lesson clarity to the next level, ensuring every student is set up to achieve their best. 

What do we mean by learning intentions and success criteria?  

It is no accident that learning intentions and success criteria feature in current frameworks such as Explicit Teaching in NSW’s public schools and the Victoria Teaching and Learning Model 2.0. Well-structured learning intentions and success criteria are a powerful way to help students understand not just what they’re learning, but why and how they’ll know when they have succeeded. 

What is a learning intention? 

A learning intention is a short statement that clearly establishes the objective of the lesson. Making these intentions visible makes learning more focused and meaningful.

What are success criteria? 

Success criteria are a set of specific, measurable indicators that help students understand what they need to do to meet the learning intention. They describe in more detail what success looks like to help students know when they’ve mastered a concept or skill. 

Making learning intentions relevant and engaging 

Using well-constructed learning objectives is widely regarded as one of the most effective tools for increasing engagement, attention, and motivation (the golden trio). Classrooms are busy places full of stimuli. Learning intentions prime student attention to focus on what is most important; a key element in building effective schema that make it easier to remember, organise and retrieve essential information (Geake).  

Pro Tip: We know that the teenage years are a developmental stage where students are going to be more engaged when they see the relevance to themselves and to real life. When you communicate the learning intention with your class, explaining how the lesson links to the ‘big ideas’ of the topic invites students to visualise how the immediate lesson is part of a larger, more meaningful learning journey.  

Bump it up: Invite students to rephrase the learning intention in their own words. With increasing rates of disengagement in Australian classrooms, strategies to increase intrinsic motivation become key (Grattan Institute).  

Using success criteria as reflection tools 

In strategically using success criteria, you’re not only guiding students through content but helping them to become independent thinkers. Well-constructed success criteria make an excellent platform launching into other high impact strategies including questioning, feedback, and metacognitive strategies like reflection.  

Try this:   

• Keep success criteria visible throughout the lesson via questioning.  

• Refer to success criteria as the basis for feedback.  

• Make time to reflect on the success criteria at the end of the lesson.  

Pro tip: For success criteria to be truly effective, they need to be actionable. When creating success criteria for lesson objectives, consider how to communicate what the observable evidence of learning looks (or sounds) like. The ‘do, say, make, write’ mantra can be helpful; that is, articulating what students need to do, say, make or write to be successful in the lesson.  

Bump it up: Co-constructing success criteria with your class is a way to foster student agency. Co-constructing criteria is not about students choosing their own criteria, rather about supporting students to become more fluent at articulating what success looks and sounds like.  

Putting it all together 

We all know the feeling of getting to the end of a unit and finding yourself perplexed when a student acts like the assessment and reporting criteria are completely new and overwhelming. 

Try this:  

Unpack assessment, reporting and curriculum outcomes with students at the beginning of a unit. To reinforce learning sequences, visually map the lesson’s steps with students on the board or in handouts. This technique provides students with a clear, continuous roadmap to follow, aligning with AERO’s evidence-based teaching practices. Show students how the learning sequence in the classroom is purposefully building them towards their final grades. When students can then begin to identify these reflected in the success criteria, students are less likely to be overwhelmed by assessment criteria and it reduces the ultimate marking burden.  

Integrating these strategies into your classroom isn’t just about effective teaching—it’s about empowering students to take charge of their learning, building skills they’ll carry forward. 

  References for further reading 

1. Australian Education Research Organisation (AERO) - AERO Practice guide – Explain learning objectives (2024). AERO emphasizes the importance of clarity and relevance when communicating learning objectives. 
2. NSW Department of Education - Explicit Teaching (2024). Explicit teaching sets out the importance of structured teaching approaches including explaining, demonstrating and modelling learning goals. 
3. Victorian Department of Education and Training - High Impact Teaching Strategies (HITS) (2019). The HITS explore how to embed effective, evidence-based instructional practices in schools and classrooms.  
4. Grattan Institute – Engaging students: Creating classrooms that improve learning (2017). The Grattan Institute crunch educational research data to identify priority areas that will have the most impact to engagement and outcomes.  
5. Geake, J. The Brain at School: Educational neuroscience in the classroom (2009). John Geake’s book explores how neuroscience research can inform educational practices that benefit learning, memory and motivation. 

About the author: Kai Nunn 

Kai’s adventurous spirit, inquisitive nature, and unabated curiosity in the world around us defined a career as a passionate teacher of Humanities for over twelve years. As a learning area leader, Kai’s interests expanded through further study and research into student agency, neuroscience of human learning, as well as digging into educational psychology regarding the needs of middle years learners. Kai is a trained International Baccalaureate educator. Kai’s latest challenge is how to channel all of this learning into the development of educational resources as Content Learning Specialist with Pearson, developing our Science teaching and learning resources.