Creating Objectives

Our readings for this week included a great article on creating objectives and using cooperative learning. Of course, there are many teacher out there who struggle with either (or even both) of these topics. Just take a look at my previous blog where I completely forgot to even mention my objectives during this week's lab.

I have spent a majority of my time figuring out how one forms a lesson plan and the components within them. Now that I have read Dr. Whittington's article, I have a much better understanding as to what I need to do to prepare myself when working on my objectives. 

Dr. Whittington has a great analogy of the class as a road trip. In order for the students to reach their "final destination", whether it be for the lesson that day or for the whole unit, they need a good map of the roads that will be taken from the very beginning. Just earlier today, I took a trip across three different counties in Pennsylvania, and I was very grateful to have my map (although it was a GPS) to guide me along the way. I relied on it heavily, and I could only imagine how lost I would be without it. This can only be compared to providing students with quality objectives from the start of their 'engines'. Without objectives, how can they reach their final destination?

This would have been very beneficial knowledge to have of creating lesson plans throughout my junior year as an undergraduate as I feel that my lesson plans I am creating today would be so much stronger in the objectives portion specifically. And hey, practice makes [near] perfect, right? 

The article has a great section on the usage of verbs, and that will stick with me from her on out. Using verbs such as "Students will be able to describe..." is so powerful compared to sticking with "Students will be able to understand..." The verbs are even divided up into the cognitive levels of Remembering, Processing, Creating, and Evaluating which were basically simplified from the Cognitive Domain of Bloom's Taxonomy.

Overall, writing objectives is just a new skill for myself and for many others in my cohort. Being able to create them in order to challenge students to think is the ultimate goal and my current task at hand.

(Student + Teacher)^Classroom Engagement x Multiple Intelligences = Student Learning