Phew! After two days of ‘curriculum enrichment’ followed by an evening compering awards evening I’m knackered. Friday’s lessons seem a long time ago now but I’m committed to reviewing the learning objective techniques used. Sadly though, I’ve reached my limit and this will be the final installment of the Objective Quest for a while at least.
So, without further self-justifying twaddle, here are Friday’s lessons:
Lesson 1 – Yr 9 – 3-2-1
This is the first of two lessons with Year 9 today and they are spending both lessons reflecting on the term’s learning and preparing a presentation for Thursday afternoon. Because normal lessons are collapsed on Monday and Tuesday for enrichment, this is the last time I se the class before they have to present so the lesson needs to be tight, focussed and purposeful. The objective is ‘to be able to share ideas and solve problems’. According to @badgerove’s suggestions, students need to work through three steps and write the following:
Lesson 2 – Yr 10 – Learning Continuum
No review of techniques used to introduce learning objectives would be complete without at least one less using the learning continuum. I’m a big fan of this idea and have been since basically nicking the idea from Jackie Beere’s How to Teach the Perfect Ofsted Lesson. If you’re interested in reading about the principles behind this technique, I’ve written about it here.
The objective for this lesson was as follows:
What I do is to get the students to view the objective as something which they can meet a different (or differentiated) levels and ask them to decide how much progress they want or are able to make by the end of the lesson. The key words in this example are ‘explore’, ‘analyse’ and ‘evaluate’ which are linked to the skills described in the grade criteria for B, A and A*. This is something which I make explicit to students when introducing the objective. Now, compared to some of the marvellous techniques I’ve trialled over the past 5 days, this certainly isn’t the best at engaging students’ interest. But it is a fantastic tool for getting students to think about their progress and the direction of their learning. It’s easy to stop the lesson at any point and ask students to mark an x to show how far they’ve travelled, or even to get them to get up and physically position themselves against an arrow on the classroom wall. The kids don’t enjoy this so much as find it very useful and perhaps I need to think about combining it with other techniques like expanding sentences and hierarchies. The main drawback is that it takes time to work out this kind of objective: definitely not one to try on the fly.
Ease: 8 Impact: 9
Lesson 3 – Yr 10 – Code Learning Objective
This is my parallel Year 10 class and what I did was to use a very simple cypher on puzzlepixies.com to transform the objective:
The class were completely nonplussed to be confronted with this as their objective and needed to quite a bit of coaching to work out how to crack the code. It took them ages! My plan was to them use the learning continuum from the previous lesson but we didn’t really have time so I used it as a plenary instead. Was this time well spent? Probably not. But on the plus side I can tick the numeracy across the curriculum box and despite some getting very frustrated, others really enjoyed the challenge.
Ease: 8 Impact: 4
Lesson 4 – Yr 11 – Meta Menus
Meta menus are another old favourite of mine (borrowed from their creator Paul Bytheway) and are ridiculously easy to use. Basically, you introduce the lesson topic and then display the meta starters slide from the PPT below:
Students have to select a question and you can either get them to discuss it with a partner or to write an answer in their books. Sometimes just the simple act of asking them to choose is enough to get them thinking in interesting ways. The most popular starter question always seems to be ‘what will hinder your thinking?’ and this is a handy way to discuss possible distractions.
The objective for this lesson was ‘to be able to explain how to achieve a Band 5 in the Extended Reading controlled assessment’ and some of the debate generated by the starter menu proved invaluable in dealing with concerns and misconceptions. This is a very flexible tool which can be easily inserted into any lesson and is a fantastic way of providing students with a choice as to how they will find their way through the lesson.
Ease: 2 Impact: 8
Lesson 5 – Yr 9 – Not the First Time?
This one was a complete cheat as I just used the same objective from lesson 1. Obviously they were all able to say that they’d seem the objective earlier in the day, but they were also able to tell me about other lessons across the school where they had done similar things. So, not such a waste of time as I might have feared.
Ease: 10 Impact: 4
It’s been hard work thinking this way about teaching and forcing myself to constantly change my lessons’ structures. But, I’ve learned loads and tried out lots of techniques I wouldn’t normally have bothered with. Also, several lovely people have been in touch to say that they’ve found some of the techniques I’ve written about useful and if nothing else then I’m delighted that these blog posts have helped to promote Kristian Still’s brainchild: to crowd source 50 different techniques for introducing learning objectives. And here they are (currently up to 51!)
Related posts
Objective Quest Day 2, Day 3 and Day 4
David, there is more reassuring than taking ‘that’ car out a test drive before your make that final purchase. For me, everyone of your mini experiments has added a little more assurance that we can experiment with LOs and so we should. The very fact that ‘not the first time’ reveal so much warns us not to overlook those sitting in front of us as a key learning resource? Loved all 5 posts.
Thanks Kristian – I enjoyed experimenting (mostly) and writing up my reflections is crucial for my own professional development as much as anything else. In the past I’ve often taken an action research approach to teaching and then forgotten everything after a few weeks. Now I have a permanent record!
[…] Objective Quest – Day 5 […]
One of the most useful experiments written up as a blog post that I’ve seen. Thank you very much for all your hard work!
Thanks Adam. I learnt a lot from doing it too. Please let me know how you get on if you try any of the techniques. Cheers, David
David
Thanks for this very engaging quest! Am trying learning continuum tomorrow with my year nine groups. Maybe Meta Menu tomorrow!
Also, colleague of mine has chosen ‘learning outcomes’ as the area for her CPD. I feel this blog is basically her CPD sorted!
Thanks again, Dave
I’m almost embarrassed about my overuse of exclamation marks in previous post. Especially to fellow English Teacher. It’s late… Ahem…
No need to apologise Dave. I’ll take it as flattering!!!
Glad you found the objective stuff so useful – I haven’t had as much feedback as I hoped from these posts so it’s nice to know folks have been reading.
Cheers, David
[…] It is my contention that learning objectives are important for two reasons. Firstly, they ensure that teachers are clear about the purpose of the lesson before they begin thinking about all the fun they want to pack into them. Secondly, they provide a very useful signpost against which progress can be checked. Now, I know progress has become a bit of a dirty word and I’m not suggesting that Ofsted’s insistence on students visibly making progress every 20 minutes is necessarily a good thing. But no one can seriously want to make the counter argument that students shouldn’t make progress, can they? Make no mistake though; simply writing your objective on the board is not good practice. There are many more creative ways of introducing objectives and if you’re short on ideas have a look at the ideas discussed here, here, here, here and here. […]
David,
Could I please have permission to use the 5 answers to the Shakespeare question in an upcoming book I am writing called 450 ideas to improve studwnt learning. I want to include practical examples of SOLO in different disciplines. Thanks
Don Woods,
Professor emeritus, Chemical Engineering
Yep
Hi, I found this really interesting and thought I would comment in light of your mention of low response levels. I am going to use the because……. For my formal observation in a fortnight, so I will let you know how things go. This is a second chance, as I got a ‘need to improve’ before half term, but was told that I was clearly a good- outstanding teacher, but was not demonstrating this when measured by the latest OFSTED criteria.
I am struggling to remain positive, up-beat and not allow cynicism to creep up on me, so I have enjoyed reading your work tonight. It has left me feeling that I can, perhaps, do this!
Thank you, Lily