What do WALT and WILF stand for?

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I keep seeing walt and WILF all over things at school but nobody has ever bothered to mention them or explain what they mean --and I keep forgetting to ask or there's more important things to ask in the limited time for parents evening.

So please can someone tell me what they are abbreviations for please? neither ds1 (8) or 2 (5) are able to although ds1 says walt is the same as learning objective in his school (he's now moved up to junior school).

I hate all this new fangled educational jargon - I'm of an age old gimmer where the teachers would say 'right open your textbook at page 43, we're doing more on triangles/osmosis/the ancient Greeks/ book reviews or whatevr and that was it. And if there were classroom displays they just had a basic title (living in ancient Greece, inside a cell etc).

They've actually used them on ds2's homework sheet today and I was very tempted to just ring them and annotate WTF? but then thought that a y1 teacher might not appreciate that so I've come to find out on the fount of wisdom mumsnet instead.

Any enlightenment would be much appreciated

WALT - We are learning to... so is pretty much the learning objective.

WILF - What I'm looking for... so essentially how children are going to show that they've met the learning objective

Goog;e says they stand for 'We Are Learning To' and 'What I'm Looking For' - does that makes sense in the context they're used on the homework etc?

It isn't new fangled jargon in fact it is very dated. I remember an advisor suggesting we adopt it about 10 years ago...we didn't!

We Are Learning To
What I'm Looking For
This Is Because

It was definitely around when I was doing my TT in 2000ish. Not sure I've ever used it though.

TT should be ITT or initial teacher training.

And in addition to those, there is EBI ("even better if...") which some teachers have to put at the end of each piece of work - no matter if the work actually fits all the objectives perfectly (which would have irritated me no end as a child, as I'd have been thinking 'well if you'd wanted extension into such-and-such an area, why didn't you say so, instead of asking that specific question which I answered perfectly well!). Sometimes even in maths the teachers are required to comment on what the student should be doing to improve, despite, for example, having all the question correct. I know the theory behind it all and for many children it's a good thing, but at times it must get a little demoralising, never quite being good enough.

I find the writing of all the WALT and WILF stuff takes forever for children who are struggling with the writing, and none of them ever pay any attention to it.

Oh, and in schools RTFQ means Read The Full Question

(and I'm sure teachers pick that acronym on purpose).

WALA We Are Learning About
RUCSAC Read, Understand/underline, Choose calculation, Solve, Answer, Check

they are never ending!

Thanks everyone - much appreciated!

I'd guessed that walt was along the lines of 'we all learned to' (I usually see it on displays rather than current work hence different tense) but wanted to get the 'official' version! I'd given uP on WILF.

Interesting to hear they are outdated quite old now - the HT changed about 10 years ago and changed loads, pulled the school up lots but I think it has been coasting along doing the same old stuff since then. iPhone turns WILF into capitals so obviously it Knossos it's an abbreviation of some sort!

scav - . I'm now trying to thing how I can turn WTF into that is innocent - and whether I dare use it!

They've been around for years - not new dangled at all!

Or even fangled!

Can't agree more RunAway. One of my placement schools had a policy that every piece of marked work had to have two stars and a wish. That included all maths work. Almost workable for a very open ended task or investigation. Complete waste of time for number bond/timestables tests anything involving consolidating methods. Even if you provide extension questions children can only answer what is there.

Would have taken much less time and been more useful to annotate on my planning/assessment those children that managed the task very easily, those that are OK but could do with a bit more practice to secure their knowledge and those that will need a lot more work with a topic.

Oh and they've started to use ridiculous marking schemes to where you have no clue about how you have done in your homework without referring to a long key for letters and colour meanings.

The also don't actually use a cross to show something is wrong - just leave it blank. I had to ask ds1's teacher about why she hadn't marked half of ds's homework recently - happened to have come back the day before parents day, just because I knew the answers happened to be right. She responded that they weren't not marked, the just didn't get ticked as they were wrong. Which then led to the discussion about what was and wasn't an adverb. Seems that she had only taught them the -ly ones so wanted those as examples but hadn't explicitly said so on the homework sheet. Ds needed help remembering what adverbs were so I'd explained in more general terms and he had found examples that didn't end in ly as well as those that did. Argh. Separate rant vent, sorry.

But thanks again for all the acronym explanations, I'll be looking out to see how many more I can spot!

Ds school just have a learning objective and a traffic light system. Much simpler!