A combination of my ongoing mentoring of an M.Ed. student, a request by a commenter (Ian Guest) and some broken links on the newly-restored teaching.mrbelshaw.co.uk has spurred me to write this post.
As a teacher, I’ve never really known a world before learning objectives. It was certainly something that was expected of me during my PGCE at Durham University and from then on in my teaching career. And, to be fair, it’s fairly obvious why. If a learner knows what’s expected of them, and then can ascertain whether they’ve achieved a learning goal, then they’ve been successful.
However, I’ve seen learning objectives used really badly. I’ve seen a ‘learning objective’ that ran something like:
To know who the Romans were.
How would a learner or teacher know whether any type of meaningful learning has taken place with this as a learning objective?! A far better one would be:
To list 3 ways the Romans have influenced life in the 21st century.
This is SMART – i.e.
Specific – ‘list 3 ways’ tells students exactly what to expect.
Measurable – both students and the teacher can tell whether the learning objective has been attained.
Achievable – the learning objective is open-ended enough to allow for effective differentiation.
Realistic – this particular learning objective doesn’t really require any prior learning.
Time-related – students need to have achieved this learning objective by the end of the lesson.
Even better practice would be to use ALL, MOST and SOME with learning objectives. This allows for even more differentiation and sets and explicit baseline for all learners.
To use the above example again:
ALL students should: list 3 ways the Romans have influenced life in the 21st century.
MOST students should: decide which Roman innovation has been most profound.
SOME students should: explain how Roman innovations have changed/evolved over the last 2,000 years.
It’s only after the learning objectives have been formulated that lesson activities and resources should be prepared. After all, if the activities and resources aren’t focused on learning, what are they focused upon?
Do you have a view or some advice on learning objectives? Share it in the comments below! 🙂
I was delighted to welcome my mother home from her three-and-a-half week visit to the UAE at the weekend. We got talking about what she’d been up to and she mentioned that she’d spent a lot of time reading books. In fact, she said, it was refreshing not to be constantly bombarded with information from the UK media. What followed was an interesting conversation between us in which I advocated carefully selecting a range of (conflicting) media perspectives from which to draw information and form opinions. The answer is not necessarily to cull the number of news sources but to make sure they’re not all telling you the same thing… 😉
To that end I was looking for more places from which to get my information instead of the same-old, same-old, when I came across The Twitter Times. This takes not only stories linked to by those you follow on Twitter, but those of ‘friends of friends’. You may argue that everyone in my Twitter network is likely to be related to education in some way. That’s correct, but some are tangentially connected to that topic and have networks that span many other disciplines and interests. You can see my Twitter Times and judge for yourself here.
The Google Wave post is a reasonable one but I found another post by the author (Daniel Tenner) more interesting. Entitled Counting hours doesn’t make sense it included this gem:
When we measure results instead of hours, something interesting happens: the distinction between work and not-work blurs away and vanishes, for two reasons. First, clever ideas can make a huge difference to results, and ideas occur anywhere, at any time. In fact, they’re least likely to occur while sitting at a desk working. Secondly, it soon becomes obvious that our actual output of things done is correlated far more to how we feel on the day than to how many hours we spend “working”. The real measure of work is not hours – it’s energy.
We all have a certain amount of energy each day, that can fluctuate depending the day, on our general level of fitness, nutrition, health, state of mind, etc. Some activities (such as going to the gym) increase our daily pool of energy. Others (such as staying up all night or getting drunk every evening) decrease our daily pool of energy.
‘Productivity’ by the hours one works is implicit in our culture. It’s the reason that, despite increased efficiencies and an ever-increasing population, we work longer hours now than ever before.
My wife thinks that I work all of the time. And she’s right, I do. But then it depends what you mean by ‘work’. I’m just as I’m likely to think of something related to elearning in the shower at home as I am about football when I’m in the office. It would make as much sense to say that there’s a synergy between my work and my leisure interests. Consequently, it makes no sense to demarcate and delineate ideas and energy to physical spaces, especially when we live in such a connected world.
It’s always struck me as strange that despite what we know about physiological and psychological ebbs and flows in human beings we remain tied to straightjacketed corporate routines. And none more so than in education. Take, for example, the (current) Autumn term. Each half-term is usually around 7 weeks long – just at the time when the nights are closing in and energy is likely to be lowest. Which is the shortest term? Spring! We start off the year at an naturally energy-sapping time. It would be funny if it wasn’t so tragic.
What’s important in any organization is that the core purpose of that organization is delivered upon. In education that’s the education of young people so they can operate effectively in the adult world. Their minds should have been opened in the process, their horizons raised, and their imaginations fired. That’s unlikely to occur when the adults who surround them are tired and clock-watching.
So when you’re feeling ‘unproductive’ just remember that you’re being human. It’s not about the hours you put in but about the energy you devote and the results you achieve.
Get the energy right and the results – whatever you or your organization decide they should be – will follow. 🙂
During the couple of days I’ve been off work ill this week I’ve transferred teaching.mrbelshaw.co.uk from a UK-based webhost to Bluehost (which hosts this, among other sites). It was about time my former blog (active 2005-2007) had some TLC as it was becoming progressively broken.
I had a 42MB MySQL database backup – the file that contains all of the blog’s important information (post and comment text, etc.) – but every time I tried to import this into a new database at Bluehost I kept getting timeout errors. It was then that I remembered I’d had this problem before and I’d managed to solve it with some sort of script that breaks the file up into smaller chunks to feed to the database incrementally.
After a while searching, I came across it again. It’s called BigDump and the process, if you’re familiar with installing WordPress manually, is fairly straightforward:
Go into phpMyAdmin and execute DROP_TABLES on your target database.
Open bigdump.php using Notepad, TextEdit, or similar. Edit the relevant lines to point towards your database, username and password.
Create a folder called dump on your web server and upload both bigdump.php and your MySQL database into that folder.
CHMOD the folder recursively to 777 (i.e. give read/write permissions when accessed via the web)
Access the script via (e.g.) http://yourdomain.com/dump/bigdump.php
Follow the instructions!
This should lead to your database backup being successfully inserted into your new database. You can then use the data in whatever web app (i.e. WordPress) that you want! 🙂
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=d23e1268-3922-44a3-a3ea-9c34f4070e11)
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=6ddcd762-88c3-44c2-9aba-8aeabdbec6f2)
