Going Behind the Scenes of Teaching

This weeks classes focused on review in planning curriculum. We started with the basics by defining aims, goals, and objectives. The most important thing I took from this was that as you go through each of these terms, they become more specific. My most specific and detail-oriented planning will be when I formulate my objectives for my lessons. They need to be very specific so that if a substitute teacher is there, even he or she knows exactly what the students are expected to do with exactly what materials. He or she will even no how to evaluate them based on the objectives. This made me really understand why you need to be so particular in writing objectives. It helps to do this so that anyone could follow what you are trying to say and they could make a lesson around the objective.

To better understand the formulation of objectives, we read and talked about Bloom's taxonomy.

This chart is especially helpful to me, and I refer to it constantly when writing objectives. When we use the CBC format (Condition, Behavior, Criteria), this is very helpful. The verbs in the picture are verbs you can use to when explaining what the student will be doing. For example. If I take the verb "locating," I could make an objective. The objective could say: Given a map of the thirteen colonies of America, the student will locate 11 of the 13 colonies correctly. This shows you that the students will be on the "knowledge" level. This is the broadest and most basic understanding when it comes to knowledge. As we go up the pyramid, it becomes more specific. This is helpful to me because I can always refer to Bloom's taxonomy and make sure I am using a proper verb to formulate my objectives. This shows me that I am making an objective that is observable and I can measure and evaluate what the student has learned, while following national and state standards for each subject.


For homework, we were able to formulate our own objectives based on science and mathematics. We then critiqued our partners objectives. This helped me to realize the mistakes I made in my objective. Every objective must be about a single student. This makes sense because the objective may need to change for each different student. No two students are alike so the objectives need to be written out according to each persons needs. I also learned that using the verb "identify" is not correct because you cannot measure if the student identified something. If you cannot measure the progress than the objective is completely pointless because then there is no way to evaluate the student. We were able to go through our own objectives to make the changes also. This helped me a lot because I was able to pinpoint exactly where I was making mistakes. That is helpful to me because when I make a mistake I usually am more aware of if and think twice before making it again. Hopefully that means I will be able to write great objectives to base my lesson plans on.

I enjoy learning the behind the scenes of planning for teachers. It all just sort of clicks and makes so much sense when you see the methods used to plan out a lesson. It all revolves around the objectives you are going to use. The objectives talk about the activity and how you will assess what the student has learned. It is good to know that there is a formative way to go about planning a lesson, that way I can always refer back to it at any point.


Self-tutorial