The Wallpaper Problem

Here's an uncomfortable truth that Professor Dylan Wiliam has observed in classrooms around the world.

Many schools have a policy that every lesson must begin with a learning intention — written on the board, copied into notebooks, and then ignored for the rest of the lesson. As long as a member of leadership can walk past and see it on the wall, the box is ticked.

Students have noticed. When Dylan Wiliam once asked a group of Year 8 students what a learning intention was, one replied:

"It's what we copy into our books at the beginning of the lesson while we're chatting to our friends."

These are what researchers call "wallpaper intentions" — they're present in the room, but they're just background. No one is really reading them.

So Why Doesn't It Work?

The deeper problem with the wallpaper intention isn't just that students ignore it — it's that even when they engage with it, completing the objective and actually learning are not the same thing.

Dylan Wiliam's research makes this uncomfortable but clear: performance and learning are different. A student can copy the learning intention, engage with every task, score well on the end-of-unit test — and still not have learned in any durable, transferable sense. The objective was achieved. The learning may not have happened. And crucially, neither the teacher nor the student can always tell the difference in the moment.

Success criteria carry the same complexity. They are not a simple checklist to hand out at the start of a lesson. Done well, they require careful thought — about what quality actually looks like, about what different students need, and about how to move learners forward rather than simply toward a grade.

This is why learning intentions and success criteria deserve to be rethought — not abandoned, but approached with far greater intention and nuance than a policy of writing them on the board every lesson allows for.

That is exactly what this course will help you do.

The Real Purpose of This Course

This course, grounded in Dylan Wiliam's research, will help you move past the compliance version of learning intentions and into something far more powerful — across three areas:

• Focus on long-term capability — shifting from what students do today to what they can do independently over time
• Communicate quality effectively — moving beyond rubrics to help students truly understand what success looks like
• Build student independence — using success criteria to develop self-monitoring skills that transfer beyond any single task

Because when learning intentions and success criteria are done well, they don't just tell students where they're going. They hand students the map — and the confidence to navigate for themselves.