Learning Intentions - it's all in the words you use.

We had a great discussion on Learning Intentions (or Learning Objectives) - a discussion which distracted us from the main point of the meeting but which turned out to be really productive.
It started when we looked at Doug Belshaw's post on Learning Objectives. His point was that writing LOs is vital to both knowing what you are going to teach and for the student to know what s/he is going to learn.
His initial LO example was "To know who the Romans were".
His improved one was "To list 3 ways the Romans have influenced life in the 21st century". Okay, better in some ways, we thought round the table, but how dull. As a student it might tell me what is required but it would not motivate me. I almost felt that the original would motivate me more.
Doug gave developed it further by showing how the LO could be made "SMART". 
We discussed this and posted a comment - Doug promised a follow-up post on trigger-verbs.
Subsequently he has published a list of action verbs which are linked to Bloom's Taxonomy - and which should make for better, more productive and informative Learning Intentions, useful to both student and teacher. 
A question I had related to the link between the level in Bloom's Taxonomy and the grade given for KS3 and GCSE - surely not as simple as that?
Part 2:
Thinking about grading (reporting, evaluating - could the term that you use determine what your perspective on this is?) and levels in the National Curriculum. Each do different things. The grade for a reporting period is a summary of both expected content coverage and how it was learned or at least what the result of assessment on various pieces of work has been - some rubric based, other not. The NC level says what you can do, taken from a big list of things. Not how well, or under what circumstances. 
So they do different things. This sometimes leads to two very different approaches to reporting a grade or level.
One view would have you start a two year course, say an IGCSE course, at the lowest grade. As you build up your knowledge and skills, so the grade improves. Then at the end of the course, it is possible to get the highest grades. This is definitely the NC levels approach but I have seen some promoting this as the way to work with A to G type grading too.
And the other view is that you grade to show how a student is doing, in terms of expected content coverage as well application, etc.
In the end it depends upon the cultural context and the expectation that stakeholders have.