Start up a conversation about learning objectives with fellow teachers and educationalists and you are guaranteed to enter a quagmire of disaccord.
The first thing you will probably realise is that in education we have mimicked the joy of the English language and provided an array of different labels for the same thing.
From “learning goal” to “lesson outcome” or even the “key question”, teachers are all thinking the same: what do we want our students to learn?
On the face of it, it might appear that what you call it and how a teacher writes it down is simply semantics. However, many a lesson will have been lost to the abyss due to one simple fact: an unclear learning objective.
Of course, it is punitive to judge the quality of a lesson solely on the shared learning objective, but it does have the power to work as the mesh to bring all the elements of a quality lesson together.
But with careful thought to their construction and wording, the use of learning objectives can do a lot of the work for us as teachers. To help break down the enigma that is the “LO”, here are three top tips and two things avoid at all costs.
DO: Clarify knowledge or skill
Learning objectives should focus purely on the learning that is about to take place. When planning a lesson think: are your students going to be learning specific knowledge or will they be learning how to apply prior knowledge. Essentially, lessons will be focused on one of two things: knowledge or skills.
Previously I have advocated for the use of Bloom’s Taxonomy when formulating learning objectives, with verbs such as to “understand”, “explore”, “analyse”, or even “evaluate”.
While these can be useful, especially when showing how the development of a scheme of learning becomes more challenging as students learn more and naturally progress, it can detract from the more important aspect of the actual learning.
This leads me nicely to the ability to plan and write learning objectives that complement the sequencing in a scheme of learning. In mid-term planning, being able to know specifically lesson-by-lesson what the learning is going to be enables teaches to plan more effectively when retrieving prior knowledge and building new learning onto this.
In my school, we are moving to a model of using the stem “To know…” when the lesson will be focused on knowledge and “To know how…” when a lesson is applying a particular skill. This provides clarity and consistency for our whole community – students, teachers and school leadership.
DO: Make objectives student-focused
The learning objective needs to be concise and accessible for the students so they can easily understand the aim of the lesson ahead. Always take time at the beginning of a lesson to introduce the learning objective and explain any specific key words or terminology.
I have never been a massive fan of writing the learning objective down, especially with classes of mixed ability. It can be painstaking when you are ready to move on and you still have a couple of students copying it down.
However, I have seen how other teachers have scrapped “lesson titles” in favour of using the learning objective in its place.
While the English teacher inside me slightly shudders at the lack of a title or headline, I do appreciate how easy it makes it for students to refer back to previous learning.
Moreover, having a learning objective which is student-focused, whether that is written in the books or visible on the board, is invaluable when you are checking in with students on their learning.
Popping into a year 8 maths lesson recently I wandered around the room and asked the students what they had been learning in the lesson. Of course, I had been expecting the stock reply: “We are learning maths, Miss!”
However, on this occasion I noted how much more responsive the answers were, with the students commenting that they were learning how to divide fractions and more specifically how they had learnt to flip the second fraction and then multiply.
With further probing, students were able to flick back in their books and show me how they had been looking at fractions for the last few lessons and could explain the learning journey that had been taken up until this point – every paper had the learning objective at the top and students were using this as a prompt. Genius!
DO: Make objectives measurable
Of course, with any objective or target, a learning objective should be measurable. When planning your lesson and thinking about the knowledge or skill you are wishing students to understand there has to be some form of checking that this has happened by the end of the lesson. Formative assessment tasks should measure the progress towards meeting the learning objective.
When writing your learning objective keep this in mind. Ensure the structure and wording of your learning objective is focused and really specific to the one thing you are teaching your students to know. By making learning objectives too broad, you lose the ability to monitor whether the learning has occurred.
For example, I know when teaching English, it is very easy to focus learning objectives on plot retention or character analysis when studying whole texts.
However, in an actual lesson I may be focusing on how a particular character is presented at a chosen moment. My learning objective is not simply to know how this character is presented but, crucially, to know that he is presented in a negative light due to the building tension in chapter 5.
My lesson should then revolve around introducing this learning and then checking to see how well my students have understood this.
DON’T: Make objectives task-driven
The most obvious mistake to make is writing learning objectives simply as a task for students to complete in that lesson. This is not an objective. If anything, it might be the outcome – but it does not explain the learning that is taking place.
Always construct your learning objective first when you are planning what you want the students to learn and then think – how are you going to meet that objective by sequencing activities that work together to achieve it. The lesson tasks are the implementation of the learning. The learning objective is the intention of what you want students to learn (know) by the end of the lesson.
DON’T: Differentiate learning objectives
There is nothing like lowering your expectations of students when they can visibly see on the board that only an elite few, referred to as the “some”, might be able to achieve the full learning objective for the lesson. All students learn and progress at different rates, but what they are learning in the lesson should not differ.
Always plan your differentiation/adaptation by task or outcome and set your learning objective to the learning that you are teaching to all the students. Even if you are scaffolding down information, providing additional resources or probing students to further responses, the learning objective should meet all of this.
Final thought
To sum up the importance of precise learning objectives, I was recently told the following by a school improvement advisor:
“Unless teachers know precisely what they expect students to learn in a lesson, they are relatively unlikely to be able to teach it; students are unlikely to learn it, and anyway no-one will be any the wiser because no-one will be able to assess it as they don’t know what the expected learning was.”
- Jessica Richards is assistant headteacher for teaching and learning at Oak Wood School in Middlesex. Find her on Twitter @JCR91.
Further reading
Also from Jessica Richards: Classroom behaviour barometer: Four keys to managing your classroom, SecEd, December 2022: https://bit.ly/3WlWqkx