Meet WALT, WILF, WALA & TIB

A teacher’s take on the jargon of explicit teaching…

I know that parents have to decode a lot of jargon whilst their kids are at school. I’m often asked about some of the acronyms commonly seen and heard in my classroom. Perhaps they sound more like a quartet of elderly folks in a retirement home, however WALT, WILF, WALA and TIB are some the latest educational buzz words.

Explicit teaching focusses students toward the learning/understanding/skill, rather than the doing/task/activity. Below are some useful acronyms that are becoming more and more common in schools, for making learning explicit for children.

WALT = We Are Learning To…
Sometimes called a Learning Intention, a WALT  makes the learning, concept, understanding or skill clear to students. For example, “We are learning to use talking marks in our writing”. I find WALTs extremely useful in differentiating between the task or activity and the actual learning. Without some element of explicit teaching, students prove very competent in articulating what they are ‘doing’ rather than what they are ‘learning’ by doing it. I learned this in my very first week of teaching when I was attempting to teach children the ‘count on’ strategy for totalling two numbers by getting them to play a simple die-rolling game called Cover Up. When I asked them to explain their learning, most answered with some form of “I learned to play Cover Up” rather than what I’d hoped for – “I learned to add the numbers by counting on from the bigger number”.

WILF = What I’m Looking For…
Sometimes called Success Criteria, a WILF makes clear to students, what they are expected to demonstrate or produce. For example, the teacher might make explicit that he’s looking for the correct use of punctuation, such as talking marks to indicate characters speaking.

WALA = We Are Learning About…
A WALA statement is often useful for covering a broader topic or concept, without getting in to the nitty gritty of specific skills. For example, a WALA might be “We are learning about writing fiction stories” whereas a WALT would be more specific such as “We are learning to write a fiction story with an orientation that describes the main character and setting”.

TIB = This Is Because…
TIB explicitly describes the purpose of the learning and might clearly make connections to other skills or understandings or articulate the application of the concept. Basically, why are we learning this?

Education is one particular profession where new initiatives, approaches, buzz words, etc, come and go, and sometimes even pop up again years down the track. Kath Murdoch’s post “The question of learning intentions” (http://justwonderingblog.com/2013/08/04/the-question-of-learning-intentions/) makes some interesting points regarding explicit teaching, which I am inclined to agree with! I especially like her examples for re-framing WALTs as questions. “For example, I might once have said to students that, as self managers, they would be “learning to devise an effective action plan to meet a goal”.  Now, I pose a question: “How can we devise effective action plans to help us meet our goals?””  (Murdoch, August 4, 2013) 

Any teachers out there, what do you think? Any parents out there, what do you think? Should we be telling kids exactly what we expect them to be learning at a given time, or could we be, as Kath says in her post, “reigning in the potential for discovery”?

-Teachling