Making Lesson Objectives Meaningful To Your Learners

Activity 1

As we explored, students need to understand a learning objective. As teachers, we need to introduce lesson objectives to our learners. We also need to understand how to establish if our lesson objectives have been successful.

Activity 2

Below is a quick classroom scenario that outlines why it is important to make lesson objectives meaningful to our learners.

Consider carefully Ms Zulu’s use of questioning:

• How does she use questioning to introduce the lesson objective? 
• How does she use questioning to clarify learning? 
• What do you think of Ms Zulu’s approach to introducing lesson objectives? 
• What do you think of Ms Zulu’s approach to making lesson objectives meaningful to her learners?

Scenario

Ms Zulu is teaching her Year 2 class about when to use a capital letter. Her objective is ‘to apply capital letters to the start of sentences correctly.’

At the start of the lesson, she asks the class, “what do you think we will be doing today? Why or why not?”

Cara replies, “studying capital letters. I know that capital letters are put on people’s names, like me. I am Cara, with a capital ‘C.’”

“You are correct, Cara. Do you think we will be studying this today though?” replied Ms Zulu.

Cara took her time to reply, before saying, “probably not, Ms Zulu, because the objective is about the ‘start of sentences.’ There is obviously another time when capital letters are used that I don’t know about!”.

Ms Zulu then proceeds to complete activities that teach the students about how to apply capital letters to the start of sentences.

Towards the end of the lesson, she asks Cara, “so, what have you learnt about capital letters at the start of sentences?”

“Capital letters do not just start people’s names. They also need to be at the beginning of every sentence. I know it is a new sentence when there is a full stop before.”