Clarity for Learning: What’s Next in What Works Best

In today’s complex educational landscape, one element consistently emerges as essential for accelerating student learning: clarity. When our learners, whether in music or mathematics, kindergarten or Calculus, Language Arts or World Language, understand what they’re learning, why they are learning it, and how they’ll will know when they have learned it, they can direct their energy toward meeting rather than decoding expectations.

While clarity is not a new idea, there has been a renewed interest in how to leverage clarity in our classrooms.  We have spent a lot of time learning alongside each of you to better understand how to implement the latest research into schools and classrooms. This post revisits what clarity for learning really means, why it’s critical now more than ever, and new practical strategies teachers can implement to create clearer learning experiences.

What is clarity for learning?

Clarity for learning refers to the quality of being comprehensible, transparent, and navigable in educational contexts.

It encompasses several interconnected dimensions:

Instructional clarity involves presenting content in a structured, accessible way that students can readily understand. This includes clear explanations, logical sequencing, and appropriate pacing of material.

Expectational clarity ensures students understand what success looks like and what evidence will show that learning has happened during the learning experience. This involves learning intentions, success criteria, examples, and evidence-generating strategies that make learning visible.

Directional clarity provides students with a clear understanding of learning goals, their progression through content, and the purpose behind what they’re learning.  Examples can guide this direction by highlighting the essential aspects or attributes of the learning.

Procedural clarity helps students understand the processes and routines that structure their learning environment, from classroom procedures to assignment workflows. Learners are clear about when and how to practice.

Notice the clarity is much, much more than learning intentions and success criteria. That is simply the starting point for the decisions we make in our teaching and our students’ progression through the learning experience. When these elements align with each other, our learners experience an environment that has the greatest potential to move learning forward.

Why is clarity so powerful?

Look, we are quite busy in our schools and classrooms.  With little room for anything else on our proverbial plates, why should we devote so much time and attention to clarity. There is new research on the benefits of clarity. Research consistently demonstrates that clarity significantly impacts student achievement and engagement. Not to mention, clarity supports mental resource allocation, ensures equity of access and opportunity to the highest level of learning possible, helps learners drive their own learning, makes learning visible, and enhances metacognition.

Clarity supports mental resource allocation. Our working memory has limited capacity. When students must discern relevant from irrelevant information during a learning experience, our cognitive architecture can become overburdened. When our learners know what, why, and how, they can better allocate their attention and mental resources to the essential knowledge, skills, and understandings. In addition, clear instruction, expectations, direction, and procedures free mental resources for actual learning rather than processing extraneous information.

Clarity ensures equity of access and opportunity to the highest level of learning possible. When expectations remain implicit, students with greater background knowledge or cultural capital have an advantage. They’re better equipped to navigate unspoken rules and expectations. Clarity democratizes the classroom by making success paths explicit for all learners. To scaffold learning, we must first have a clear picture of the learning – a blueprint. Then, we can add scaffolds to ensure all learns can access the content, engage in the experience, and make their thinking visible.

Clarity helps learners drive their own learning. When students understand expectations, they experience greater self-efficacy and agency in their learning. This confidence translates to increased willingness to take intellectual risks and persist through challenges. Having clarity about the learning, learners can better determine their current level of understanding, make informed decisions about where they are going next in that learning, and monitor their learning journey. Learners that drive their own learning have a toolkit of learning strategies and know when to deploy those strategies – the right time for the right place in the learning progression.

Clarity makes learning visible. The only way to have a clear picture about learning is if that learning is visible to both us and our learners. When we have clarity in our classrooms, we know exactly what learners must show us as evidence of their learning. Likewise, when learners have clarity in their classrooms, they know exactly what they must do to convince themselves that they have made progress towards the day’s outcomes. Clarity ensures that learners are actively processing at the level of complexity.

Clarity enhances metacognition. Thinking about their thinking is our goal for our learners. To be lifelong learners, students must develop the capacity to critically evaluate their own thinking. This begins with knowing the learning goals and success criteria. Then, when we leverage those goals and criteria by asking learners to self-monitor, self-reflect, and self-evaluate, we lay the groundwork for meta-cognition. Learners can better monitor their progress, identify gaps in understanding, and adjust their learning strategies outside of the walls of our classroom. In other words, students know what to do, when they don’t know what to do, and we are no longer their teachers.

Where to begin with clarity?

You may feel a bit overwhelmed by this post.  While we may agree with the ideas presented thus far, knowing how to move from ideas to implementation is easier said than done.  To help with the journey from research to reality, we have started a list of strategies to get us started.

1. Communicate Clear Learning Intentions

• Frame the learning intention as an essential question or a statement that answers what and why
• Post learning intentions in student-friendly language
• Revisit learning intention throughout the lesson and during closure
• Connect new content to previous learning and future applications
• Begin lessons by explicitly stating what students will learn and why it matters

2. Establish Explicit Success Criteria

• Frame the success criteria as “I can” statements to promote student agency
• Provide rubrics that clearly define quality at different performance levels
• Share exemplars of work at various quality levels with annotations explaining strengths
• Co-create success criteria with students when appropriate
• Use worked examples to demonstrate processes and quality
• Offer checklists for complex assignments that break tasks into manageable steps

3. Design Coherent Learning Experiences

• Organize content in logical sequences that build progressively
• Use graphic organizers to make conceptual relationships visible
• Chunk information into manageable segments with appropriate transitions
• Eliminate or scaffold extraneous information that might distract from core concepts
• Ensure alignment between learning intentions, success criteria, learning tasks, and assessments

4. Model “Expert” Thinking

• Use think-alouds to demonstrate cognitive processes
• Make your disciplinary thinking visible through guided examples
• Show common errors and how to correct them
• Demonstrate how “experts” approach problems in your field
• Intentionally release responsibility as students develop proficiency

5. Implement Effective Communication Practices

• Use precise, consistent terminology and define key vocabulary
• Provide both verbal and written directions (in multiple languages) for important tasks
• Check for understanding by having students paraphrase instructions
• Consider diverse learning needs in how information is presented
• Avoid unnecessary jargon that might obscure meaning

6. Create Navigable Learning Environments

• Establish predictable routines and procedures
• Use visual cues and organizational structures consistently
• Provide roadmaps for units that show learning progression
• Create accessible reference materials for recurring processes
• Design user-friendly digital learning spaces if using technology

7. Deliver Meaningful Feedback

• Align feedback directly to success criteria
• Be specific about where they are going, how they are going, and where to next
• Focus feedback on the most important aspects of the work
• Provide timely feedback when it can impact future performance
• Teach students to use feedback effectively to improve

8. Develop Student Self-Assessment Capabilities

• Train students to evaluate their own work against criteria
• Provide opportunities for structured peer assessment
• Encourage reflection on learning progress and processes
• Teach students to recognize quality in their own work
• Build capacity for students to seek clarification when needed

Conclusion

While clarity is essential, it shouldn’t be confused with oversimplification or excessive scaffolding. The goal isn’t to remove all challenge or struggle, but rather to ensure that our learners’ cognitive resources are devoted to appropriate challenges rather than deciphering unclear instruction, expectations, directions, and/or processes.

As students develop expertise, the nature of clarity may evolve. Novice learners typically need more explicit guidance, while more experienced learners can navigate greater complexity. Highly effective teachers calibrate clarity based on student needs and gradually release responsibility.

Clarity for learning isn’t simply a nice-to-have feature of good teaching—it’s foundational to what works best in teaching and learning. When we make learning goals, processes, and expectations transparent, we create environments where all students can thrive. By implementing practical clarity-enhancing strategies, teachers not only accelerate student learning, but also foster greater equity, confidence, and metacognition.

Our next blog post will focus on a specific aspect of clarity: clarity about practice.  This blog post is just to get us started.