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You’ll recognize the preceding quotation from Lewis Carrol’s Alice’s
Adventures in Wonderland. Alice’s exchange with the Cheshire Cat
was preceded by a perilous plunge down a rabbit hole where she was nearly
drowned in a pool of her own tears. Shortly after this conversation, she
joined a raucous tea party filled with rude and unruly guests. Later, she
was ordered beheaded! Though
the context is different, teachers who don’t plan instruction thoroughly,
often endure events that resemble Alice’s painful experiences. The
result of poorly defined instructional goals and objectives is frequently
a chaotic academic program that leaves students frustrated, confused,
and uncooperative.
Rationale
To build a strong, focused academic program that engages your
students and that results in high levels of academic performance, you
must first define the intended outcomes of your curriculum. This includes
documenting your educational goals for the year and for curriculum units.
It includes identifying the academic or intellectual concepts that will
be the focus of your instruction. More recently, it has come to mean coordinating
your program with State Academic Content Standards. Finally, it means
developing clear instructional objectives that guide daily instruction
and serve as the basis for measuring your students’ progress.
Beginning
teachers, and less successful experienced teachers, often overlook these
crucial steps when planning their instruction. Instead, they mistakenly
develop their program and lessons by describing instructional activities,
listing topics to be covered, or by not planning at all. Only afterwards,
do they consider what their students may or may not have learned as a
result of instruction.
Throughout
the CalStateTEACH program you will be asked to consciously consider and
document the purpose and expected outcomes of the lessons and instructional
events that take place in your classroom. This instructional module will
help you accomplish this task.
Program
Goals
The
goals of these instructional materials are to help you:
- Understand
the process and rationale for writing instructional objectives
- Differentiate
between goals, concepts, standards, and objectives
- Understand
how to write instructional objectives using a standard format
- Understand
the implications of Bloom's Taxonomy for writing objectives
Program
Objectives
More specifically, when you complete this instructional program,
you will accomplish the following objective:
- Given
an educational goal, concept, and standard, write instructional objectives
that include a statement of behavior, condition, and criterion(a) for
each of the six levels of Bloom's taxonomy
Advance
Organizer
To help you achieve these goals and objectives this module is divided
into four major components.
- The Range of Educational Outcomes
- Why Write Instructional Objectives
- How to Write Objectives
- Writing Objectives for Bloom’s Taxonomy
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