SMART objectives

When thinking about planning a lesson (which I don’t do yet here) I always wondered, how do you set the topics and objectives. National Curriculum for History is quite broad in that so deciding for a topic is not easy (sometimes having a wide choice is not the easiest way) and so is the objective setting. When planning, I need to know what I want the students to learn and how I will know that they learned

I was thinking about objectives in very similar way as about the Goals… When setting them trying to be SMART.

The Word stands for

1. Specific – Objectives should specify what they want to achieve.
2. Measurable – You should be able to measure whether you are meeting the objectives or not.
3. Achievable - Are the objectives you set, achievable and attainable?
4. Realistic – Can you realistically achieve the objectives with the resources you have?
5. Time – When do you want to achieve the set objectives?

This method is being used when setting any goals, targets and objectives in business or personal life. I have seen our SMT members referring to it, when talking to students about targets setting and the ways, how to reach them, and in the relation with plans for revision. At this point I thought ‘yes, you can make a teenager to plan his life the way like that…’ But I can use this knowledge for myself. When talking about objectives of the lesson, those are little targets, we need to hit before we move on. And we actually have to assess out students against those targets.

How to make the Objectives SMART?

To make them Specific I can use the behavioural verb taken from Bloom’s Taxonomy. (I still can find objective set like ‘To understand…’) Those are best use for Cognitive objectives. I don’t think I could use affective or psychomotor objectives in history. Maybe in team or group work oriented tasks. I find verbs in bloom taxonomy quite useful and I plan to have look in the NC Programme of Study and relate them to attainment targets. I will see what I will make of it. (Is on my @todo list:-) I found Behavioural Verbs Appropriate for Each Level of Blooms’ Taxonomy here. It is a good guide to create learning objectives.

Using Blooms taxonomy (I know there are other theories as well) I actually make the objectives Measurable as well. I can ask a student to perform a behaviour described in my objective. And if this behaviour is related to the Attainment Targets I actually can give a level. I find it strange, that teachers here use only (as far as I am concerned) formal assessment via assignments or tests and not on the results of the lesson plenary or similar feature.)

Achievable – This is a difficult one. It requires a good knowledge of limits and abilities of students as well as mine. If I lack a competence to teach how to discuss, I cannot achieve such objective. The same if students are not able to learn this particular skill (as a group or individual due age or ability limitation). What do you do, if realistically you lack a skill or competence to achieve objective you should achieve next lesson? I think teacher can be in such situation. Am I wrong?

If my objective cannot be achieved during a time set, with the particular group or because I lack competence, skill, whiteboard necessary for planned method or another resource, than it is unrealistic. Unrealistic expectation can cause big behaviour problems as I could experience here. My expectation based on different school culture (where 95% of students have resources and don’t expect teacher to provide them and where transition from task to task takes minimum of time…) triggered some really ‘interesting’ reactions.

Relation to the time is one of very important features when setting objective. In Business goal or task setting the question is ‘when do I want to reach the goal, finish the task?’ I lesson planning I ask how much time I need to get my students ‘behave’ according my objective? Do I need extra time to check I after the learning activity, when will I see the result? Etc. And probably before hand plan the assessment process (this is different from my experience as well)

I don’t know whether these ideas make any sense at all. There are many theories about planning the lesson and setting the objectives. But I believe that everyone will personalize this process to make it work. I try to find the best way to make it work for me. I still may have problem with differentiation, something rarely used or mentioned during my teacher training overseas. I am quite glad to experience this system and learn from it…