Objective for me...

During my reading about education and browsing through different blogs (so far just randomly) I came across so many topics and ideas which seem quite important to understand for me as someone, who wants to reach expertise in education. I just keep adding new and new learning objective to my personal and professional development… One of them (and completely wrong formulated) is to understand at least 30 of terms for L&D professionals… I know, that some of them are not really related to the secondary school setting, however another will become very important with use of ICT in schools. I definitely will have closer look at Learning Technologies Conference webpage regularly.

Another note to my @to do list is about new category of learning objectives which concentrate on memorable experience:

‘Let's start with asking ourselves what kind of memorable experiences this course will create. Let's put in another category: experiences. Make it part of your learning objectives. In every course or other learning experience.’

But this makes me think that I cannot make all lessons just fun and design them to please my students. Sometimes content does not allow to create such memorable experience and hard work needs to take place. And In real world outside the classroom employers don’t make that much effort to please employees… Well everything in moderation. Even my @to do listJ

I promised (it is on my every day longer @to do) to have a look at NC programme of study of History and compare it with Bloom’s taxonomy and behavioural verbs.

Attainment Target for History - Level 4

Pupils show factual knowledge and understanding of aspects of the history of Britain and the wider world. They use this to describe characteristic features of past societies and periods, and to identify changes within and across different periods. They describe some of the main events, people and changes. They give some reasons for, and results of, the main events and changes. They show some understanding that aspects of the past have been represented and interpreted in different ways. They are beginning to select and combine information from different sources. They are beginning to produce structured work, making appropriate use of dates and terms.

Show factual knowledge - Key Words (Knowledge is Bloom’s lowest category within cognitive domain) When creating objective related to knowledge of facts is better to use instead very vague ‘to know’ these Key words:

Define
Identify
List
Name
Recall
Recognize
Record
Relate
Repeat
Underline/Circle

Key verbs describe, identify, select are related to 2^nd category – Comprehension and are good to use in actual objective. Verb combine is not mentioned in this list, but I would relate it to 3^rd category – Use, apply, generalise… The target is to use, apply more than one historical source and generalise. Verb produce is mentioned in far higher category (5^th) – Synthesis.

So student in Level 4 should be able to work within first 3 categories and reaching higher. (Now I have another task in @to do – have a look in psychology to see relation between cognitive learning and age)

I hope next time I will write about more than one level. And add some examples related to Schemes of Work from my school.