Creating Goals for Learning

What are Goals?

It seems as though my undergrad students are having trouble deriving learning goals for their lesson plan assignment that was due Friday night.  They are giving me objectives but not goals; I saw very few of 35 lesson plans that had anything similar to goals.

I remember the first time I had to derive instructional goals versus instructional objectives.  I had a difficult time distinguishing between the two.  It took awhile throughout my master’s degree program, but I finally figured it out:

• Goals are the dreams.  What do you want for your students?  What do you want your students to become?  What type of knowledge do you want your students to encode?  What skills do you want your students to develop?
• Objectives are the actions.  What do you want your students to do to achieve the course goals?

According to Fink (2003), you should ask yourself the following questions BEFORE planning methods.

1. What do you want and hope your students to be, to have, or to have learned?
2. What would distinguish students who have taken this lesson from students from students who have not?

How do you begin lesson planning?

Many, many of us start lesson planning with a great idea for teaching our students.  In other words, we start by planning our teaching methods while we have little clue about the real goals of our teaching.  We then wander through our lesson while teaching it, and our students mysteriously don’t learn what we ultimately want them to learn.  Go figure.

The secret is to derive your true goals for your students.  These need to be broad, overarching statements that will benefit your students over the long haul.  Following goal creation, you then create your objectives.  I will talk about this later on…

Let me give you an example:  If you are teaching a Photoshop class, do you want your students to know how to use discrete tools like the clone stamp tool and the red eye tool, or would you prefer your students know how to repair a photo using the tools, adjustments, and filters.  You need to teach the whole rather than just the parts, and your goals need to reflect this need.

Now begin proper planning…

The following steps are derived from Fink’s Steps to Prepare for learning.

Step 1

The first step is to look at your situation carefully.  Look at what you already know about the teaching and learning situation and gather any addition information.  You should consider:

1. Specific Context of the Teaching/Learning Situation
2. General Context of the Learning Situation
3. Nature of the Subject
4. Characteristics of the Learners
5. Characteristics of the Teacher

You can use a worksheet of the Fink Situational Factors to help you through step 1.

Step 2

You should then work through the question of, “A year (or more) after this course is over, I want and hope that students will _____________.”  This involves using Fink’s significant learning areas including foundational knowledge, application goals, integration goals, human dimensions goals, caring goals, and “learning-how-to-learn” goals.  Use as many of these goals types as you can to create a significant learning experience.

Fink’s Taxonomy of Significant Learning

Please use a worksheet to formulate Significant Learning Goals.

Step 3

Next, write down your goals with associated assessment tools.  Write the assessments BEFORE deciding on methods.  Use a grid like this:

Just do it

I know this seems like a lot of work, but it is worth it. I cannot imagine wasting your time and your students’ time if you don’t teach with a purpose that continues to benefit your learners beyond the classroom!

References

Fink, L. D. (2003). Creating significant learning experiences: An integrated approach to designing college courses. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass