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What do we mean by Objective Driven Teaching?

When planning lessons it is easy to think "What activity shall I get the students to do?" or even "I have this wonderful activity, let's do that tomorrow." However, lessons are far more successful when you start to think the other way round.

Objective driven teaching starts by considering "What do I want my students to learn?". By first thinking about this we can focus our attention on choosing the appropriate resource or activity that will enable us to help the students reach that point.

But objectives, like anything else, can be both great and mediocre. How can we write ourselves a great set of objectives?

The first thing to do is to think bigger than the lesson. Learning is a journey that takes time, and we need to think about the bigger picture. This is what Doug Lemov describes as "Begin with the End". Start your process by thinking about what you want students to learn by the end of a unit (or even a year). Then break this up into all the small steps that students will have to take to get to that point. These steps should rely on each other, and build up over time to lead to the final objective.

These mini-objectives are going to form the basis of your lesson planning. Once the big objective has been broken down, you have a series of smaller objectives that will be your lesson objectives. Choosing the order that these are taught in should be largely dictated by the breaking down process, though there may be some that are interchangeable. With you lesson objective chosen, the next step is to decide how you are going to measure if your students have reached the objective.

This gives us some accountability for our teaching, allowing us to ask the question "Did the students learn what I wanted them to learn in this lesson?" and actually have an answer. Not just a vague notion, but a concrete way to assess if they have mastered the material from that lesson.

Once you have decided how you will measure if the students have reached the objective, now is the time to start choosing and designing the main teaching activities that students will be involved in to get them to that point. By working backwards we ensure we are always focused on the most important thing (what will students learn) rather than the easier option (what will students do).

It is handy to clarify this order of planning based on objectives, based on ideas from Lemov:

  1. Plan the unit objectives

  2. Break these up into smaller objectives (see below for details on making these effective)

  3. Choose a focused objective for a lesson

  4. Decide how you will measure if the students have achieved the objective

  5. Decide on an activity to get students there.

Along a similar line of thought, Zoe Enser (https://teachreal.wordpress.com/2019/03/10/on-the-right-track/) describes her new process for planning with these four points

  1. What do I want students to know by the end of this lesson/ topic?

  2. How will I get them to know it?

  3. How will I check they know it?

  4. What do I want them to do with it?

Although different, these two lists make the most important thing the first step: choosing the objective for the lesson, which is what we want students to learn by the end of it.

One danger of splitting the big ideas down into smaller objectives is that students can lose the big picture. Obviously, through this process you are working down, but it is important that when actually teaching the students, you also provide opportunities to link the current lesson objective to the big picture, what has been taught previously and what is to come. Otherwise students can end up with a huge set of disconnected ideas

But what makes a good objective? Again, Lemov has a great technique on writing effective objectives, which he calls "4 M's".

An objective must be manageable in the time available in the lesson. This means breaking it down more than you might first think appropriate. As an example from Maths, consider the difference between these two objectives:

  • Adding and subtracting fractions

  • Adding and subtracting fractions with like denominators

The latter gives us more detail, and is more likely to be achievable in a single lesson. As a teacher it focuses our attention on a particular aspect of the broader first objective. Of course, we may actually teach more than one of these smaller objectives in a lesson, but the process of breaking it down makes us think about the constituent details, makes it easier to build up knowledge slowly and incrementally, and makes the next step easier to achieve as well.

The second aspect of an effective objective is that it is measurable. This means that we can assess whether students have achieved the objective. This is easier to do if we have a manageable objective, as there is less haze around problems that might arise. This also forces us to think carefully about what we want the objective to be, as there are some things we cannot measure. For example, setting an objective such as "Students will enjoy reading short stories" is not really measurable, as we cannot effectively ascertain if they do or not. It is also not manageable, as this is not something that can be achieved in a single lesson (in fact, there is an argument to say it is not possible to guarantee you will achieve it at all).

The third, made first, and fourth, most important, link back to the earlier discussion. Deciding on the objective before choosing the activity and then keeping focused on that objective are clearly important.

Formal lesson objectives will usually start with a stem, such as: "By the end of this lesson students will be able to:". This would be followed by the content of the objective, giving a finished product along the lines of:

"By the end of this lesson students will be able to add and subtract fractions with like denominators."

I will measure if students can do this using several Diagnostic Questions to identify any lingering misconceptions. I will teach students how to do this using two examples, one of adding and one of subtracting, and then they will complete the 20 question worksheet followed by a rich problem.

One common way to structure an objective is around the ideas of Bloom's Taxonomy. This is excellently described in this video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4DgkLV9h69Q). However, be wary of misinterpretations of Bloom's Taxonomy (https://www.interactive-maths.com/blog/blooms-taxonomy-how-the-pyramid-has-been-misinterpreted).

In certain areas of the world it has been made mandatory for teachers to write the lesson objective on the board for students to copy into their books. Although there is a benefit to students knowing roughly where the lesson/unit will take them (it primes their mind and might spark off any relevant prior knowledge), it is not our policy to require teachers to do this. For one thing, sometimes we want to keep the objective hidden from students to create a sense of curiosity and tension in the classroom.

However, what we mean by saying that Great Teaching is driven by an objective is that the teacher has thought through the objectives in detail, and planned the lesson based on the objective, rather than choosing an activity and fitting an objective to that. By the teacher having a clear picture of what they want to achieve, both in the long term and in the individual lessons, we are much more likely to be successful in getting the students to that point.

Further Information

Teach Like a Champion 2.0 Technique 16: Begin with the End

Teach Like a Champion 2.0 Technique 17: 4 M's

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