Spring 2026: Improving Learning Objective Alignment in Coreq College Algebra - What to do to make things more transparent for students.

This term I am making two changes to my college algebra course, and the second is to have better alignment of course activities and student-facing directions of the weekly learning objectives. This is informed by my attempts at standards based learning, that I've ultimately backed off of. In short the grading methods got complicated quickly, which left students unsure of their grade and where they were in the course. I am still holding out for another chance at using standards for grades, and am looking for ways to do that this conference season. If you find some interesting ones, let me know. 

Best practices in teaching tell us that learning objectives should be clear to students, and all parts of the learning process should align to that learning objective. 

• There should be some framing of the learning objective, why it is important, how it connects to other areas of the course or course of study. I have this in a Weekly Objective page that introduces the week and the learning objectives for that week.  
• There should be some introductory activity exposing students to the content of the learning objective. I use Note-Taking Assignments to have students take notes on the textbook before class, using it as an opportunity for them to take notes in a few different methods throughout the term to figure out what works for them. 
• There should be some kind of instruction of the learning objective. My in-class active learning activities focus on this. 
• There should be some place students can practice the learning objective in a formative way. Our online homework system Knewton and the exercises in the textbook form this practice for my students. 
• There should be a way to assess if students have learned the associated knowledge, skills, and abilities found in the learning objectives.

These learning objectives really provide clarity to students and educators of what the real goals and stakes are in a course. 

I have all of these course activities aligned to these learning objectives, yet I don't have consistent student-facing messaging around how these activities support their learning. To address this I have started doing the following;

• Including the learning objectives in the daily agenda. This is a sheet with student group and role assignments, a list of what we'll be doing today, student process goals, my faculty goals, feedback from students from last class, and how many students completed the pre-class assignments. 
• Review activities to ensure they match the learning objective, and find places to ask students if the questions in the activity address the learning objectives in the daily agenda.
• Connecting where pre-class assignments support the learning objective in the activity. This requires some level of review of both the pre-class assignment, and the activity, which I have to do anyway. 
• For assessments I allow students to retake two questions from the assessment, if they complete an Assessment Reflection Form. I've adjusted the form to ask students which learning objective the questions they want to retake are from. 

These are just a few ways I am trying to make learning objectives meaningful to students, showing how they touch various parts of the course. 

What do you do to ensure students understand the learning objectives in your course? Is it not that important, or something you repeat regularly? I'd love to learn more about what others do, selfishly sure to learn from their experience, but also how this might change in different disciplines to support my colleagues in other departments. 

Spring 2026: Improving Process Skill Development in Coreq College Algebra - What to do instead of things students hate.

This term I am teaching a corequisite support version of College Algebra at my home institution, and as an educator I am constantly tweaking and changing my courses. There are two changes I'd like to make this term; the first on process skill development which I'll describe here, and the second on better alignment of course activities and student-facing directions of the weekly learning objectives, which I'll talk more about in another post this week.

Process skills, success skills, or foundational skills, are the skills students need to develop and use in order to learn. There are a wide variety of them out there (I also like the CAST UDL Guidelines, and there is overlap with the NACE Career Readiness Competencies) and I use the Process Oriented Guided Inquiry Learning (POGIL) Process Skills; Teamwork, Oral and Written Communication, Management, Information Processing, Critical Thinking, Problem Solving, and Assessment. Here are the three areas Process Skills will come about in my class this term. 

1. Class Session Agenda - Each class session I make a student-facing agenda that includes group assignments, role assignments, process skill for the day, faculty goal for the day, learning outcomes, exit ticket feedback, and how many pre-class assignments were submitted. The inclusion of the process skill is meant to help students identify the specific skills they are developing, and to nudge them towards behaviors that will help them learn in groups. I then also use it when asking students to reflect about their progress as a group in answering questions together. 
   
   
2. Craft Your Learning - Corequisite support courses have three goals; help students develop prerequisite knowledge to support their understanding of course-level material, have more time for course-level content, and to develop the necessary skills to be successful in a college-level math course. I used to have specific assignments about organizing a binder, reflecting on procrastination, and other skills, but students rarely completed them, and when they did complained about them.
   
   To help with this I started having conversations with the class about what they struggled with. Over time these conversations came around to the same skills I was trying to help them develop, but it wasn't until they recognized the need for the skills themselves did they actually start engaging in these assignments. I have now a developed protocol on how to structure these conversations, focused on having students discuss what they are struggling with in small groups referencing the POGIL Process Skills, and collecting this information anonymously to share out with the class. We then talk about what kind of assignment or activity would have students address this struggle, and then talk about what they did the following week. If you are interested in hearing more and seeing examples, I will share out more during the upcoming POGIL Practitioner Collaborative in June. 
   
   
3. Weekly Process Skill - One thing I would like to try is to have a specific process skill for the week, that I integrate into the goals for the week, exit tickets, and course announcements. I thought I might have this list before the start of the term, but I'm realizing it may be better to think through it as I do my weekly preparations.
   

How have you used process skills in your courses? Yours may not be the ones I use, and students seem to benefit from having the 'hidden curriculum' be made visible and direct.