Have you ever felt like a bus driver who has just got to the end of his route - when he stops and changes his destination sign? This is what many teachers do with their objectives; when one class leaves they rub the old ones off the board and write up the new ones for the next class. They know fine well that they would be marked down in an observation if they do not 'communicate their objectives' - but why?
There are times when communicating the objective can kill a lesson stone dead. I have teach a lesson about trusting information found on the internet. I dress it up as though it is a straight lesson about research into endangered species. I start off by telling the students that they are going to research a particular species, giving them specific questions to answer and some websites to use. Then they repeat the process for a couple of other species, but one of them is the North West Pacific Tree Octopus. Most students do the research without questioning the task and it is only when I go through the answers with the class that they realise that something is not quite right. They fall right into the pit and then they start to put the clues together and it dawns on them that this species does not really exist. It is important that they go through the process in order to come to a fresh understanding. Putting the objective on the board and communicating it to the learners up front would lead to more superficial learning, which would be counter productive to say the least.
Most Sunday mornings during the colder months of the year, you will find me on a muddy windswept field coaching rugby. As you can easily guess, the objective of a rugby match is straight forward; it is to win. To some coaches and some teams winning is everything. They concentrate on the objective too much. When these teams fall behind in a match they try too hard and make mistake after mistake and usually end up losing by a bigger margin than they should. They are fixated on the outcome. In the team talk before a match I never mention the objective; I concentrate on the process. The players must concentrate from the first whistle until the last, execute the skills that they have learnt and work for each other. If they carry out these processes correctly then they have the best chance of achieving their objective - but they have to focus on the process. Sometimes they come across better teams than they are, and they lose. I don't have a problem with this providing that their processes are right. As a coach, the performance is everything, the result - the objective - is a poor second.
Carol Dweck's work on mindset has found that praising the outcome will lead to a closed mindset which will ultimately limit achievement. This closed mindset will mean that someone when faced with real difficulty will not be able to work through it. She shows that it is the characteristics that lead to achievement that need to be brought to the fore if a learner is to develop a growth mindset. This growth mindset will allow learners to grapple with difficult problems and it will give them a better chance to overcome them. Again, it is the process that is important. Indeed, focussing on strategies that learners use is confirmed as a a sensible way forward in this post, which includes a thorough research based analysis.
There are times when communicating the objective can kill a lesson stone dead. I have teach a lesson about trusting information found on the internet. I dress it up as though it is a straight lesson about research into endangered species. I start off by telling the students that they are going to research a particular species, giving them specific questions to answer and some websites to use. Then they repeat the process for a couple of other species, but one of them is the North West Pacific Tree Octopus. Most students do the research without questioning the task and it is only when I go through the answers with the class that they realise that something is not quite right. They fall right into the pit and then they start to put the clues together and it dawns on them that this species does not really exist. It is important that they go through the process in order to come to a fresh understanding. Putting the objective on the board and communicating it to the learners up front would lead to more superficial learning, which would be counter productive to say the least.
Most Sunday mornings during the colder months of the year, you will find me on a muddy windswept field coaching rugby. As you can easily guess, the objective of a rugby match is straight forward; it is to win. To some coaches and some teams winning is everything. They concentrate on the objective too much. When these teams fall behind in a match they try too hard and make mistake after mistake and usually end up losing by a bigger margin than they should. They are fixated on the outcome. In the team talk before a match I never mention the objective; I concentrate on the process. The players must concentrate from the first whistle until the last, execute the skills that they have learnt and work for each other. If they carry out these processes correctly then they have the best chance of achieving their objective - but they have to focus on the process. Sometimes they come across better teams than they are, and they lose. I don't have a problem with this providing that their processes are right. As a coach, the performance is everything, the result - the objective - is a poor second.
Carol Dweck's work on mindset has found that praising the outcome will lead to a closed mindset which will ultimately limit achievement. This closed mindset will mean that someone when faced with real difficulty will not be able to work through it. She shows that it is the characteristics that lead to achievement that need to be brought to the fore if a learner is to develop a growth mindset. This growth mindset will allow learners to grapple with difficult problems and it will give them a better chance to overcome them. Again, it is the process that is important. Indeed, focussing on strategies that learners use is confirmed as a a sensible way forward in this post, which includes a thorough research based analysis.
By now you might be getting the impression that I think that objectives are, at best, a waist of time. In fact, nothing could be further from the truth. The teacher must be very clear about the objectives for an activity, a lesson and a series of lessons. The teacher must plan with the final outcome - the objective - clearly in mind. What I am questioning is asking the learners to concentrate on the objective. I am certain that if they concentrate on getting the process right then they are far more likely to achieve the objective. To be fair, higher ability learners often do get the process right, but even they are prone to taking inappropriate short cuts. It is lower ability learners that more often than not, do not get the process right.
In the classroom there are definite characteristics that successful learners share: resilience, adaptability and determination are a few of them. Too often teachers emphasise the outcome - the objective - with too little emphasis on the process. There should be far more emphasis in classrooms on making the process of learning explicit and making learners far more aware of the characteristics that successful learners share. I am certain that many of the students who do not succeed in education fail because they have not developed the characteristics necessary to be successful learners, and they don't engage with the process of learning fully. In fact, sometimes these learners do not realise that there is a process for learning, and if they don't know that there is a process then they have little chance of getting it right. You could construct a powerful argument that lower ability learners are only low ability because they have not grasped the process of learning and have not developed the necessary characteristics sufficiently. If there was more emphasis on process rather than outcome then lower ability learners are the ones who will benefit the most. If we spent more time in school developing the characteristics of successful learners, and making the process of learning visible, especially with the less able, then they would be far more likely to achieve the objectives that we set for them - even if we don't always make those objectives explicit.
In the classroom there are definite characteristics that successful learners share: resilience, adaptability and determination are a few of them. Too often teachers emphasise the outcome - the objective - with too little emphasis on the process. There should be far more emphasis in classrooms on making the process of learning explicit and making learners far more aware of the characteristics that successful learners share. I am certain that many of the students who do not succeed in education fail because they have not developed the characteristics necessary to be successful learners, and they don't engage with the process of learning fully. In fact, sometimes these learners do not realise that there is a process for learning, and if they don't know that there is a process then they have little chance of getting it right. You could construct a powerful argument that lower ability learners are only low ability because they have not grasped the process of learning and have not developed the necessary characteristics sufficiently. If there was more emphasis on process rather than outcome then lower ability learners are the ones who will benefit the most. If we spent more time in school developing the characteristics of successful learners, and making the process of learning visible, especially with the less able, then they would be far more likely to achieve the objectives that we set for them - even if we don't always make those objectives explicit.
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