Welcome back to Teach English Now. In the last video, we gave a short definition of an objective, and why discussing objectives might be important when you give a lesson. We also introduced the concept of problem solving curriculum design, one in which you are led by a driving question that leads you to a concrete artifact. Such as a portfolio. In today's lesson, we want to discuss objectives in more detail and help you to recognize the difference between poorly written and well written objectives. First of all, when thinking of an objective for a lesson plan, you need to think of something that can be accomplished within a single lesson. A lesson plan may occur over a few days but often is confined to a single time spent within a class. That's when you write an objective. Think in terms of the amount of time you have and what can be legitimately accomplished within that amount of time. Don't confuse this with your overall target goal, which may be greater and which may be reflected in your final product. Or as crachick puts it, your concrete artifact. But do consider how these lesson plan objectives might add to that larger goal and help provide the necessary skills to eventually accomplish it. Now, let's discuss what an objective is not. Many new teachers confuse an objective with an activity. An activity may be a way in which to achieve an objective, but an activity itself cannot, and should not, be considered the same as an objective. This is because an objective represents the ends of instruction, the results. Not the instruction itself. An objective should clearly specify what the results of the activity should be, not simply share what the activities are. Consider the difference between these two attempts at writing objectives. Students will listen to a song about colors of the rainbow. Students, when shown a rainbow, will correctly label all the colors. Notice that the first sentence sounds like a great activity to help students learn about the colors of the rainbow, but it isn't really an objective at all. The second is an objective. Notice that it has something demonstrable, something students can do which leads me to my first tip about objectives. When you write an objective, think about what the students will do after activities to demonstrate that learning has occurred. Now, let's discuss another problem with writing objectives. Even when teachers realize that objectives are different from the activities in the class, some teachers still struggle getting the wording right. In particular, teachers often write vague objectives. This might be because teachers haven't thought through how they want to assess their students. Or perhaps teachers only have a vague idea themselves of what they want students to know. Regardless, teachers often use words like no, believe, feel, and understand, which are states of the mind or heart and impossible to observe. Action words, such as identify, state, demonstrate, and create are preferred when writing objectives. Consider these two examples. Students will know about vocabulary in English related to family (mother, father, etc.). Students will demonstrate their knowledge of family vocabulary (mother, father, etc.) by writing a paragraph that correctly distinguishes relationships in their own families. Notice that the second objective is simply more specific, clearer and is something a teacher could observe and assess. Thus, my second tip for writing objectives is this. Make your objectives observable and measurable. What I mean is that an objective that only describes a process inside a learner's head is impossible to prove. Learning may have occurred. But there's no way you will be able to ascertain as a teacher how well students have achieved that learning. Thus, objectives should have a clear path for teachers to assess what learning has occurred. One more note about objective writing, and perhaps the most important idea of all. Sometimes, as teachers get better at writing objectives that are clear and measurable, and separate from the activities themselves, they lose site of the most important part of an objective. Does it matter? When I say does it matter, I mean, does the objective itself have any connection to the real world? Will it actually help students as they go out into the world and speak English? Is this objective worth spending time on compared to other objectives, or in other words, are you teaching the most important parts of English first? To illustrate, if you are teaching typical students, would it be best to teach vocabulary about families or backpacking? In most cases, you will choose the more commonly used words. The words they will use most. You're going to talk about families. And this goes for grammar, as well. Some grammatical rules require more attention because they are more prevalent, more common, and thus more necessary for the success of your students. The most common words, the most common phrases, and grammatical items in English should be taught ahead of pet topics, pet rules that are rarely needed, and tiny little grammatical items that show how smart you are as a teacher, but simply aren't necessary for actual daily practice of English. So my last tip for today is this, teach objectives that matter. So how do you know if your objectives matter? One way to know if your objectives match up well with worthwhile practice is to introduce yourself to Corpus Linguistics. Corpus Linguistics can help you to determine the frequency of certain phrases or grammatical items. Did you know, for example, that the most common 2,000 words in all of English represent almost 80% of all speech? Hm, sounds like those 2,000 words should be taught more often than others. And did you know that 3 tenses in English account for 98% of all published text? What? But we keep teaching past perfect progressive and giving it the same amount of time as these three, whoops. That is what I would call less worthwhile. I'm not arguing that other tenses should not be learned, but that it is important to weigh which parts of English will yield the most results in the real world. And that our teaching should reflect that reality. Of course, you must consider your purpose when determining your objectives. Or in other words, your content. For example, if you are teaching a group of students who all want to become engineers, well then certainly, words about engineering become more important. And if you are teaching a class on public speaking, then the three tenses found in most written language isn't enough. You probably want to teach the present progressive, because it is so common in speaking. And you may want to teach the uncommon past progressive, for the same reason. All in all, when it comes to writing objectives, you must think in terms of what students really need in order to achieve the primary goal of learning English. Certainly there are many theorists who strongly disagree with each other, just as we saw in our second course. That stated, what we want you to do is to think critically about what to present in your classroom, and to present it well. And it all starts with those tricky, little objectives. It's hard to hit what we don't aim for. In our next video let's watch our three teachers in action as they attempt to give objective discussions. Thanks for watching Teach English Now. See you there. [MUSIC]
