Walk into most WA primary classrooms and you’ll find three acronyms on the board: WALT, WILF, and — in the classrooms that have thought hardest about it — TIB. They’re so common they’ve become furniture, and that’s the problem. A WALT that’s copied up out of habit (“WALT: write a recount”) does nothing. A sharp one changes what students do mid-task.
Here’s how to write ones that earn their whiteboard space.
What the acronyms actually mean
- WALT — We Are Learning To. The learning intention. What new skill, concept or understanding is today’s lesson building?
- WILF — What I’m Looking For. The success criteria. What will be true of the work (or the thinking) if the learning happened?
- TIB — This Is Because. The purpose. Why is this worth learning — where does it show up beyond this lesson?
The trio is WA and UK classroom shorthand for a much bigger research base: the formative assessment work (Black and Wiliam’s Inside the Black Box, Hattie’s visible learning syntheses, Clarke’s work on success criteria) that consistently finds students learn more when they know what they’re learning and how to judge their own progress. The acronyms are just the friendly packaging.
Writing a WALT that names the learning
The single most common failure: the WALT describes the activity instead of the learning.
| Activity-WALT (weak) | Learning-WALT (strong) |
|---|---|
| We are learning to write a letter to the principal | We are learning to use persuasive devices to convince a reader |
| We are learning to do the fractions worksheet | We are learning to compare fractions with the same denominator |
| We are learning about the First Fleet | We are learning to explain why people came to Australia in 1788, from more than one point of view |
The test: could a student meet this WALT in a completely different activity? If yes, you’ve named transferable learning. If the WALT can only be met by finishing today’s worksheet, it’s a task description wearing a WALT costume.
Practical notes:
- Start with the curriculum, translate for kids. Your program says
AC9M3N02or the WA equivalent; the board says “We are learning to compare fractions to decide which is bigger.” Same content, different audience. (If decoding those codes is the sticking point, our complete guide to the WA Curriculum breaks down exactly how they work.) - One WALT per lesson. Two intentions means neither gets assessed properly. If you genuinely have two, you have two lessons.
- Verbs matter. Explain, compare, justify, identify, describe point at observable thinking. Know, understand, appreciate are real goals but unobservable on their own — pair them with the verb that would show them.
Writing WILFs students can actually use
Success criteria are for students, mid-task. That sets the quality bar: each WILF must be something a child can check their own work against without asking you.
Strong WILFs for a Year 4 persuasive writing lesson:
- I can state my opinion clearly in my first sentence
- I can give a reason for each opinion and back it with an example
- I can use at least two persuasive devices (rhetorical question, emotive language, rule of three)
Weak WILFs for the same lesson:
- I can do my best work (unfalsifiable)
- I can write neatly and finish on time (compliance, not learning)
- I can be persuasive (restates the WALT — gives no foothold)
Two refinements that lift WILFs from decoration to tool:
- Co-construct them when you can. Show a strong example (a WAGOLL — “What A Good One Looks Like”) and ask the class: what makes this good? Criteria students helped write are criteria they actually consult.
- Use them in the lesson, not just at the start. Pause mid-task: “Check your work against WILF 2 — thumbs up if you’ve got it, keep writing if not.” At the end, the exit ticket can simply be a self-assessment against the WILFs. If your criteria can’t survive being used this way, rewrite them.
TIB: the one-sentence why
TIB is the most skipped of the three and the cheapest to fix. One honest sentence connecting the learning to the world:
- This is because real authors choose their words to change how readers feel — and so can you.
- This is because comparing fractions is how you work out who got the bigger half — of anything.
- This is because knowing whose Country we live on is part of knowing our own community’s story. (That one belongs to Year 3 HASS — there’s a full term of community-history lesson ideas if you’re teaching it.)
The trap is the fake TIB — “this is because it’s in the test” or “because it’s important”. If you can’t write an honest TIB, that’s diagnostic: either you’ve picked an activity whose purpose you can’t articulate, or the purpose is several lessons away and worth naming as such (“this is the first step toward writing our own persuasive speeches in week 5”).
Making it routine without making it wallpaper
- Say it, don’t just display it. Read the WALT aloud, have students rephrase it to a partner. Thirty seconds.
- Return to it at closure. “Did we learn what we set out to learn? How do you know?” is the most underrated plenary in primary teaching.
- Keep the language stable across the school. When every classroom from PP to Year 6 uses the same three terms, students stop decoding the format and start using the content.
- Don’t laminate the lesson away. The point is the thinking, not the display. A scrawled WALT that gets used beats a beautiful one that doesn’t.
If writing a crisp WALT, three checkable WILFs and an honest TIB for every lesson sounds like one more job on the pile — it’s one of the things Bindi drafts automatically for every WA Curriculum lesson it generates, in exactly this structure. Generated or handwritten, though, the standard is the same: name the learning, define success in student language, and tell them why it’s worth their next forty minutes.