Setting Instructional Outcomes: Danielson Component 1c Explained

By Jon Konen, Last Updated: August 31, 2026

Students gathering around a laptop and teacher working on a lesson

Setting Instructional Outcomes is Domain 1, Component 1c of Charlotte Danielson's Framework for Teaching, and it asks whether your learning goals are rigorous, sequenced, and matched to the students in front of you. Evaluators look for outcomes that build on prior learning, cross subject areas, and stay flexible enough to reach every student.

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What Danielson's Framework Actually Asks You to Show

The current Danielson Framework organizes Component 1c into four elements. Knowing them by name before an observation helps more than any generic prep advice:

Value and Relevance: outcomes represent ambitious, important learning, not filler content standing in for a real lesson.
Alignment to Grade-Level Standards: outcomes match the standards for that grade and set high expectations for every student.
Clarity of Purpose: outcomes spell out exactly what students will learn, why it matters, and how they'll show mastery.
Integration of Multiple Aspects of Student Development: outcomes connect academic growth to social-emotional development rather than treating the two separately.

The eight questions below walk through what that looks like in practice.

1 - How Are Goals for Students Selected?

We should not simply open our textbook to page one and begin. Many curriculum programs provide a research-informed sequence aligned to applicable state standards, including Common Core in states that use it. What they cannot do is decipher what type of learner is sitting in the room. That's the teacher's job. We need someone who can light a fire of engagement in the content while differentiating it to connect with every student.

We must select goals that are rigorous for the learners in our classroom. Effective teachers set high expectations for all students and use data from academic, demographic, and social-emotional areas to set goals that are appropriate. They use the standards set by their state or district to guide their implementation.

Knowing that students land at different readiness levels, the teacher groups them as best they can to create goals that are both effective and efficient for the timeline they're working with. The best teachers include students in devising the goals and the learning process that follows.

Common Core State Standards logo graphic

2 - How Are Goals Connected to Other Subject Areas?

The ability to be so engaged in a lesson that you can't tell whether you're learning science, math, or English language arts is a true art form. That kind of cross-curricular learning doesn't happen inside 45 minutes of strictly science or 45 minutes of fiction reading.

Most textbook companies plan for some cross-curricular experiences, but not many, and that's the teacher's opening. In fact, EdReports' first round of reviews in 2015 found that most of the K-8 math instructional materials it evaluated did not meet its criteria for Common Core alignment. Strong teachers plan learning goals that span subject areas and build multi-layered experiences wherever possible. They use multiple resources to meet the standards and reach different learning styles, and they sequence units so each one builds on the last. Done well, students stay highly engaged while meeting several standards at once.

3 - How Does Prior Learning and Skill Development Play a Role in Selecting Goals?

What students already know matters before you start teaching. You have to select goals at their actual readiness level, which might feel insurmountable, but spending time up front assessing what students know makes you more effective and efficient.

Prior knowledge, often discussed in terms of schemas or schemata in cognitive development and learning theory, is the ability to build new content or skills from what students already know. Schemata can be assessed in several ways, and the teacher has to decide what that data means for the next instructional goal.

For example, a 3rd grade class has an instructional goal of mastering single-digit multiplication, and the district recommends 14 weeks of instruction to reach mastery. When you pre-assess, you find five of your 25 students are still working on double-digit addition with regrouping, a prerequisite skill. Do you forge ahead with the required curriculum, or pull that small group aside? A strong teacher designs the lesson around what the pre-assessment actually showed.

4 - How Are Goals, Rationale, and Outcomes Communicated?

Communicating goals to parents, community members, and students is vital to getting everyone working toward the same outcome. Effective teachers use several strategies to share what students are learning, why they're learning it, and what the outcome should look like, and they keep the administration in the loop through weekly and unit plans.

Strong teachers tell parents what content is coming for the year, then follow up monthly or weekly with progress toward the goals. Parent newsletters, emails, Facebook updates, and app updates via tools like Remind or ClassDojo are among the most common channels. Using more than one is the point: figure out what actually reaches the parents of your specific students.

Communicating with community members can feel like a stretch, but building a community of learners starts with teachers creating chances to showcase student work. A school builds a reputation for strong learning culture when parents and neighbors can point to something specific: a cultural heritage night, a wax museum project, Chromebook presentations, a music performance. Inviting community members alongside parents helps build that bond.

Most important is how teachers translate learning goals into student language. Strong teachers post the goals, explain the reasoning, and check that students can repeat the goal back in their own words. The best teachers involve students in devising the goals in the first place, which builds real ownership over the learning.

5 - How Are Learning Goals Sequenced and Adapted to Student Learning?

Selecting instructional goals without district or state requirements would be daunting, and without regulations and expectations, learning would happen at random. Goals should be sequenced to meet two requirements: they build on prior learning, and they account for the learners actually in the room.

Look at the Common Core standards, and you'll see they build on each other. What's expected at each grade level gets more complex as the grades progress. Take number sense in math. At kindergarten, students are expected to know:

CCSS.MATH.CONTENT.K.CC.A.3: Write numbers from 0 to 20. Represent a number of objects with a written numeral 0-20 (with 0 representing a count of no objects).

First grade builds directly on that:

CCSS.MATH.CONTENT.1.NBT.A.1: Count to 120, starting at any number less than 120. In this range, read and write numerals and represent a number of objects with a written numeral.

That strand keeps getting more complex at each grade level. These standards serve as ready-made goals that a teacher can adapt for the students in front of them, and the best teachers still bring students into the process of shaping their individual goals.

6 - How Is the Effectiveness of the Instruction Assessed?

Assessment gets a bad reputation: "test" is a four-letter word for many students, parents, and even educators. It's no secret that we overassess. We must remember why we assess, and assess only when we plan to do something with the data.

Strong teachers build formative assessment into the lesson itself: check where students are at the start, check mid-lesson again to see who's on track, then check at the end to see what actually landed. They use that data to make real-time instructional decisions, for instance, spending more time with manipulatives to build 1:1 correspondence at the kindergarten level. Making decisions on the fly, outside the written lesson plan, comes from experience and from knowing the students in your room. Teachers have to be willing to scrap a lesson and admit the plan wasn't working.

The best teachers track classroom-wide effectiveness data for every lesson, not just individual student scores. They set a target for how many students should master the content, and they understand that their effectiveness is directly tied to the instructional decisions they make before, during, and after each lesson.

7 - How Can Students Show What They Know?

Planning instructional goals should start with the end in mind: how do you want students to show what they know? Strong teachers understand their goals well enough to know how best to assess them, using both formative and summative approaches.

Formative assessments show how students are progressing toward a goal. They can be quick to gather and vital for in-the-moment instructional decisions: if a five-question pre-assessment shows that 80% of students miss the same question, that's your cue to reteach before moving on. They're primarily meant to guide learning and instruction, not to grade it. Whether or how they factor into final grades depends on local grading policy.

Summative assessments show what students have already practiced and can do, given at the end of a learning progression. Avoid running them mid-lesson while students are still building understanding.

When strong teachers write lesson plans, they label the type of assessment they'll use and tie it to tracking student growth against the standards. The phrase TSWBAT (The Student Will Be Able To) or LO (Learner Outcome) in a lesson plan spells out the expected outcome, and the assessment should mirror it directly. One online tool that ties all of this together is www.planbook.com.

chart comparing formative and summative assessment types

8 - How Do You Determine Next Steps After the Lesson?

After any lesson, a teacher has three options: reteach the same content a different way, reteach a prerequisite, or move on to the next piece of the learning progression. Formative and summative data should tell you which one.

Strong teachers track exactly where every student stands on proficiency. Use formative and summative evidence, along with the school or district's own mastery criteria, to decide whether to reteach, provide targeted support, or move forward. That decision often comes down to whether a small group needs pull-out support, whether the whole class needs a re-teach, or whether the gap traces back to a concept that was never mastered in a prior grade.

Making a lesson more accessible usually works one of two ways. In mathematics, one useful instructional approach moves from concrete representations to pictorial or representational models to abstract notation, and making a concept more concrete is one lever. The other is working backward through the original 1956 version of Bloom's Taxonomy, from lowest to highest: knowledge, comprehension, application, analysis, synthesis, evaluation. If a teacher asks students to apply an algorithm and they're not making the leap, the fix is to go back to the knowledge or comprehension level and rebuild from there, the same way a math teacher would remediate a stuck concept.

(Charlotte Danielson Model: Domain 1 Component c)

Frequently Asked Questions

What is Component 1c in the Danielson Framework?

Component 1c, Setting Instructional Outcomes, is part of Domain 1: Planning and Preparation in Charlotte Danielson's Framework for Teaching. It evaluates whether a teacher's learning goals are valuable, clearly stated, appropriately balanced across types of learning, and suitable for the range of students in the class.

What does a well-written instructional outcome look like?

A strong outcome states what students will learn, not what activity they'll do, and it's specific enough to assess directly. "Students will explain how regrouping works in two-digit addition" is an outcome. "Students will complete a worksheet on addition" is an activity. It doesn't say what they're supposed to walk away knowing.

How do you set outcomes for a class with mixed readiness levels?

Start with a pre-assessment to see where students actually are, then group students so the goal is reachable but still rigorous for each group. Some teachers set a shared outcome with different pathways or supports built in, rather than lowering the bar for part of the class.

What's the difference between a learning goal and a learning activity?

A learning goal names the knowledge or skill a student should walk away with. An activity is the task used to get there. Confusing the two is one of the more common mistakes evaluators flag under Component 1c, since an activity-only outcome gives no way to measure whether learning actually happened.

Outcomes come from data, not the textbook - strong teachers set goals from academic, demographic, and social-emotional data, not just the next page in the curriculum guide.
The four elements have names - Value and Relevance, Alignment to Grade-Level Standards, Clarity of Purpose, and Integration of Multiple Aspects of Student Development are what the current Danielson Framework scores under Component 1c.
Cross-curricular goals fall to the teacher - EdReports' first 2015 reviews found most K-8 math materials it evaluated fell short of full Common Core alignment, so connecting subject areas is rarely built into the materials.
Assessment closes the loop - formative checks adjust the lesson in progress, summative checks confirm what was learned, and both should trace back to the stated outcome.
Reteach, regroup, or move on - use formative and summative evidence and your school or district's own mastery criteria to decide, not a one-size-fits-all number.

Working through your own instructional outcomes gets easier once you have formal coursework behind you. The graduate and endorsement programs listed on this page cover instructional design and assessment, and several are built to run alongside a full teaching schedule.

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