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Jabberwocky
Your lesson plan's objectivesdescribes what the students will be able to do upon completion of the
instructional experience.
Fire Alarm
For purposes of clarity, I am not describing the traditional behavioral objective used by many schools. A
behavioral objective has four elements:
The audience
Here's an example of a behavioral objective: All students will write an essay summarizing three major factors
that lead to the start of World War II.
The crux of a good lesson plan is its objectives. Using a roadmap analogy, getting to your final
destination (Carbondale, Colorado, for example) is your objective. In a lesson plan, the final
destination (identifying iambic pentameter or listing important events in the life of Benjamin Franklin,
for example) for your students is the objective(s) of the lesson.
To take the analogy one step further, objectives are what drive a lesson. They power it forward. Most
important, everything you do in a lesson must be tied to one or more objectives. Every activity, every
instructional devise, every teaching resource, and every means of evaluation and assessmentmust
be linked to the lesson's objective(s).
Writing good objectives will be challenging at first. However, everything in the lesson must revolve
around the objectives; thus, you must construct them with care and attention to detail. A well-crafted
objective has two components:
Here's an example of an objective for a third-grade sciencelesson: students will list the nine planets
of our known solar system.
Objectives are built around good verbs. I like to think of verbs as the gasoline that keeps a lesson
moving forward. Thus, the verbs you use in your lesson objectives should be action verbs or verbs
you can use to measure performance. Passive verbs are often immeasurable and make an objective
weak.
As you'll note in these examples, it would be relatively easy to assess students' ability to add (e.g.,
Students will be able to add a column of two-digit numbers), but quite difficult to assess a students'
ability to realize (e.g., Students will be able to realize Lee's defeat at Gettysburg). Action verbs in
your objectives help you assess students and be sure they know or can do what you taught them.
These are just a few sample verbs (among hundreds possible).
Passive Verbs to Avoid
appreciate
enjoy
learn
realize
believe
know
like
understand
add
compute
inspect
rate
alphabetize
construct
list
review
assemble
debate
locate
say
assess
define
match
select
build
design
measure
show
calculate
discuss
operate
solve
collect
draw
place
speak
color
explain
plan
write
compare
grow
point
OBJECTIVE:
In this lesson the students will learn to pronounce /s/ and /z/ correctly.
What do you think? Isn't this version much better?
Here is another objective written by an ESL teacher. Decide if it is well written or
poorly written.
OBJECTIVE:
Through this lesson, the students will improve their understanding of American
culture.
This objective also has at least one serious problem. The major problem with this
objective is that it is too general. (American culture is a BIG topic.) Objectives are
more effective when they specify what the students will do. How would you rewrite
this objective so that it was more effective?
There are many possibilities, but here's how we rewrote it:
OBJECTIVE:
"Students will learn the culturally acceptable way to greet a new acquaintance in a
formal situation in the United States, and they will demonstrate what they have
learned in a role play during the second part of class."