I work with teacher candidates, which means it’s that time of the year when they head into classrooms to observe what mentor teachers are doing to support learning. This week, they’ll be looking for how instruction and activities are aligned with objectives. As such, I’m revisiting this fundamental pedagogical practice that I often hear teachers begrudge…

Learning Objectives/Daily Learning Targets
Whatever you call these, an effective teacher has at least one of them in mind and is checking throughout class to see whether students are meeting it. If they’re not, then the teacher adjusts instruction, or provides feedback on how to improve. This process is not complex. It’s certainly not easy, but it’s a straightforward task: the teacher determines what students should be able to do in class, then checks to see if they can do it.

Must Be Measurable
Careful with this one. We’re not talking about counting things and getting too wrapped up with quantitative assessment. By “measurable,” we mean that the teacher can observe students throughout class, look at whether they’re meeting the objective, and be able to answer “yes/no” for each student. Therefore, the first place to get tripped up is if the teacher determines an objective they can’t really observe, like “students will know math,” or “students will learn about democracy.” The first is too broad. It’s also very hard to define the mental process of “knowing.” The second one is also hard to define. At best, the teacher can observe students being active participants throughout class, but can only hope that learning will occur as a result of that participation. There’s nothing to guide what the teacher will check during class.

The “during class” part is extremely important. This allows the teacher to pivot and adjust instruction during the learning experience. There’s no faster way to waste everyone’s time than to plan a class, let students work completely on their own and unmonitored, then collect learning evidence at the end only to find out you’ve gotta reteach everything. Objectives can help improve learning during the formative assessment process.

Aligned Activities
Objectives guide activities. When teachers start with planning the activities, there’s a really good chance that students might be busy, but that “doing something might not be doing anything.” I first wrote about this mantra here on this blog in 2020 and have been using it with teachers ever since who find that it articulates some things they’ve noticed about planning, learning, and how they’re not always aligned. The key with this one is to compare what students do to the verbs in the objective. For example, if the objective is that “students will explain…” and then the activity is creating posters and doing a gallery walk, the teacher hadn’t recognized that most students are just copying information. Would those students really be able to explain something after transferring information from a source to a poster, and/or from another group’s poster to their graphic organizer?! Highly unlikely, but more to the point, the teacher doesn’t really know. They can’t observe whether students can explain if the learning activity was something other than explaining.

Posting Objectives
Requiring teachers to have objectives visible in the room has reduced a fundamental pedagogical practice to a checklist item for teacher evaluation, but we can trace it back to something meaningful. That is, an administrator needs their teachers to articulate what students should be able to do during class. That’s a given, because the teacher who randomly plans activities without knowing what they’re doing, or what to look for is placing a LOT of faith in those activities to cause learning. Activities, however, rarely cause learning on their own, which means the teacher needs to be checking in with students during the process, and they need to know what to be checking. These are objectives.

So, administrators need reassurance that the teacher can articulate what students should be able to do. It just so happens that posting objectives is one very obvious way to do that. In theory, that’s great. In reality, however, posting objectives becomes an additional task for the teacher and these objectives often become a joke, posting something to satisfy something with a checklist. One way to disrupt this would be to treat objectives more seriously, having discussions about the purpose of a topic, how objective(s) can guide instruction and improve learning, and how activities can be chosen that align with that learning.

Myths
1 Class, 1 Objective
I challenge the common practice of thinking that the lesson’s objective should be met “by the end of class,” or even the idea that a lesson will take place over a single class session. That kind of thinking can lead to extremely granular planning without much to show for it. Therefore, start with what students should be able to do (re: backwards design via Understanding By Design). If the objective will take more than one class, that’s fine.
You Need Hundreds of Objectives
Similarly, there’s no inherent reason to establish a completely different objective each class. If you’ve got a single objective that you can observe, that supports learning, and that could apply to an entire month’s worth of classes, use it?! That is, there are probably some really good skills that keep coming up each unit. The only thing that might change is the content dropped into each, but that doesn’t have to be articulated in the objective. For example, something like “students will make a claim, cite evidence, and provide reasoning” could be used in almost every class. That’s a three-parter, sure, but all three are observable. Something like this allows the teacher to assess which students might need more help with any one of the three parts, and it’s super easy to use because it’s content-independent, meaning this can guide most classes regardless of topic.

Not All Objectives Are Effective, Or Needed
I told teacher candidates that I would never recommend using a learning objective with the verb, “list.” My explanation was that something like “listing terms” would be a prerequisite for a greater, more meaningful objective. Observe that because the ability to list would be embedded within the bigger objective. Moreso, teachers could get bogged down by determining objectives based on discreet facts, etc. Teach them, yes, but focus on measuring what students do with them, in larger, more transferable buckets/umbrellas. This is kind of like grading a small set of transfer standards vs. the entire ~40 state standards?! Teach them all as part of the curriculum, yes, but report achievement on just the major ones. I recommend treating objectives like this as well.

I also don’t like the “list three terms…” kind of objective because it limits what kind of learning evidence the teacher will get. As written, students have to enumerate the terms, either in writing or aloud. If the point is really to identify the terms, they could do so in a number of ways with more context than just listing. Therefore, I think this is a case of the verb being too limiting as an action. For example, “Students will write…” really just describes a mode or process. A more transferable objective would be “Students will explain…” Perhaps the way to think of this is that skill-based objectives are probably going to support learning more, like the claim/evidence/reasoning one above.

Second Language Acquisition
This paragraph is a huge asterisk. I don’t work with second language teachers, but every now and then something related comes up. Besides, far too many teachers are giving isolated vocab quizzes, so I do get a chance to talk about language in context and help get them away from that pointless assessment and instead have students do something meaningful with those words (because if they don’t know the word it’ll be obvious within the larger task). Anyway, it’s important to recognize that language operates differently from content, which is why I recommend that second language teachers think of the lesson’s purpose of communicating rather than a learning objective. In a sense there’s really only one objective when it comes to language acquisition: ensure that learners get as much input as possible (without thinking about the language itself) while you make sure that input is as comprehensible as possible. THIS is what should lead the teacher’s activities and is what they observe and measure throughout class: comprehension. Communicative purposes are the framework. In the classroom setting, there are three: entertainment (e.g., students watch a funny video in the target language), learning (e.g., students read the target language and learn about the world), and creating (e.g., students write a text in the target language with the teacher about what’s going on in school that week).