Moore Chapter 3

Moore’s Chapter 3, “Setting Goals, and Objectives,” from Effective Instructional strategies examines how teachers should decide exactly what they should teach, how the students will learn it, and how the students will prove that they know it. In order to know exactly what goals and objectives teachers should set for their students, they need to know the level at which their students are starting. From this point, the teacher can plan appropriate goals of learning growth. Several factors determine the starting level of students. Some students can have special education needs, while others could be extremely limited in English proficiency. However, students may also come to the teacher as extremely gifted and thereby require their own differentiation.

The objective should be a statement of what the students are expected to be able to do after instruction. Since the students will require attention, the objectives must be able to include students from multiple levels. They must also set exactly what skills and knowledge students must show as result of instruction. They must be measurable. When they are measurable they build student and teacher accountability. This way objectives make sure learning is actually occurring.

Instruction must contain three elements, expected behavior and/or product, specific conditions, and a rubric. Communication and execution of these objectives are all required for successful learning. Furthermore, good objectives follow a taxonomy of objectives that moves up the difficulty scale. This is helpful for differentiation. These taxonomies exist for cognitive development, meaning blooms scale, and affective domains meaning the students attitude and emotions. This affective domain includes personal skills like making value judgments and organization. The third domain is psychomotor domain which relates to the development of muscular abilities including sports, music, art and vocational skills. Thus, standards keep teachers and students accountable and objectives are how teacher seek to actually meet these standards.

This chapters focus supports and aligns to everything we have learned as a teacher. Accountability is the watchword these days. It’s a vital concept for both education and the marketplace today. Assuming teachers care about standards or have some incentive to care about standards, standards provide the goal that students should strive for. As long as the student can internalize the rationale for why they must know this, and assuming it is in fact geared to their level, standards provide the goal and organization for students. It makes the whole process transparent to both the teacher and the student. I have learned that in the class the most important thing is to be transparent with your instructions and goals. Students who end up guessing get sick of being wrong and will either give up or act out. However, the problem with this comes down to practically. Sure all teachers would love to be able to incorporate this ideas and make sure their objectives are working up the scales. But finding the time to do that is a taller order. It just like most things gets better with practice, I assume.