Teaching Experience

It’s a simple premise:  our students should know what they are learning and why.  The best way to accomplish this is through having learning objectives for every lesson.  Yet, teachers tend to make some common mistake around learning objectives.  Knowing these common mistakes will help you maximize your practice of using learning objectives:

1) CLEARLY POST LEARNING OBJECTIVES.

Don’t make the students continually guess what they will be learning.  It’s not fun for the students, and they will eventually give up trying.  Your learning objective should never be a secret.  Your learning objective should be written or placed in a prominent place in your classroom.  Some teachers write it in PowerPoint, some use document cameras, and others have their learning objectives written in a dedicated space on their white board.  Do what works best for you and your students, but the key is to consistently post it.

Reference your learning objectives in the beginning of each lesson.  If you continually talk about (give attention to) the learning objective students will come to understand that this is important and something they should pay attention to.  Another way is to have the students do some activity around the learning objective.  For instance, you may ask students to reflect on their progress in achieving the learning objective and what they need to meet it.

Avoid going crazy with a paragraph-long learning objective.  Keep it simple, allowing the student to understand it.  To ensure students understand the learning objective you can have students rewrite the learning objective in their own words.

Examples of activities masked as learning objectives:
“Read Chapter 2 in the your textbook.”
“Summarize Chapter 2.”
Examples of a learning objectives:
Students will be able to
“Describe the author’s perspective in Chapter 2″
“Compare and contrast between current author and a past author’s perspective”

Every activity and assessment must be connected to your learning objectives.  Often teachers have great activities, but they have nothing to do with the learning objective.

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Posted by mohama1h, 11-13-2009 Very good. I believe a teacher who has no objectives for a lesson is like a traveller who doesn't know where he is going! Sure he will get lost. I'd like to add two things; first, when writing objectives, they (the objectives) should be varied (cognitive, behavioral, and emotional) and pertinent to different activities in the lesson. Second, objectives MUST be considered in evaluation, both at the end of the lesson and at the end of the course (final test). Finally, I'd like to add the following criteria for making sure your objectives are written well; it is a famous acronym we, educators, usually use, i.e. SMART objective: Specific Measurable Attainable Realistic Timed Thank you for any new ideas you may add.

Posted by drellie, 11-10-2009 Good article! What I believe the posting missed, however, is the importance of clear grading/scoring/behavioral rubrics to go along the objectives. The trick to rubrics: if you can't be specific, use real-world examples for each scoring category. For people who believe this cannot be done for art, music, or literature classes, I led a group that included college instructors with MFAs who felt the same way until they wrote rubrics with non-arts instructors. Talk about "Aha!" moments--it was great to see their faces light up when they realized that it was OK to declare an "outstanding" level rubric as containing all the elements needed for a task as well as "strong emotional/affective value."

Posted by Norcross Schools, 11-09-2009 Eric, At what ages will students begin to be helped by spelling out learning objectives? Also, thanks for a few aha! moments, while reading your article.

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