Many years ago I got Foreign Language Teacher education. We were how to state objectives, how to structure the lesson, how to use appropriate methods, etc. After graduating from the university I have been teaching for 15 years already and rather often attend courses practical teachers. But only this week I found out an interesting thing - while defining the objectives of the lesson, while teaching I don't think about to what extent students are supposed to assimilate new knowledge or skill. Because there is always the idea of 100% accuracy although the real results show up not so brilliant.
I think next week I'll try to state more precise objectives which won't be "global" but step-by-step. May be we won't achieve impressing results but they will be more real, more practical.
The second thing I've learned this week - variety of search engines each of which has its rubrics and it gives more possibilities to find what we are interesed in. Sure there are some of them which can be found useless for us or not interesting and it should be so. In any case we should know what we need and where and how we can find it or try to find it.
Hi Olga
ReplyDeleteI think we are in the same boat. I did not know how to write objectives until I have practiced myself. As for me, our instructors are used to present their lecture with no practice in our real life, “Practice makes the master.” ― Patrick Rothfuss.
I promise I will not do the same mistake. I will convey this information I got to my colleagues at school.
I am sorry if I made a mistake in naming you, but this is the name I found on Blog Roll.
Abdullah
http://aaldosar.blogspot.com/
Hi Abdullah,
Deleteyou are absolutely right - I'm Olga, Helga is a Nordic variant of my name.
We got useful knowledge, skills and experience during this course and after it while our ordinary classes we should forget about it as it may happen because of a plenty of reasons but we should go further and develop\master what we've already got and will get here.
And I like the manner in which Assignments Week 3 are written: all of them have (Audience), (Condition), (Behavior) and (Degree).
Hello Helga.
ReplyDeleteI have also taught English for many years like you. So far, I was writing lesson objectives without insisting on the levell of achievement the students should perform for fulfilling the objective. When I write my next lesson plans I will set realistic levels of achievements for assessing my learners comprehension of the lesson because no one is perfect for achieving 100% success. I have read on www.unm.edu that "Objectives are directly tied to assessment in that the Behavior expressed as an action verb suggests what form appropriate assessment might take". So the question I would like to put to you since you are more experienced than I am is to know if there is a criteria for setting a level of achievement. Does the percentage success depend on the action verb used in the behaviour?
Hello Niangoran,
Deletefrankly speaking I can't answer your question. Let's see an example. It's from Assignments Week 3: "discuss that project (Behavior)" and can be interpreted differently - we don't know the "amount" of this discussion (how many words or phrases or speeches should be presented by a participant) and we don't know the "quality" of this discussion (what kind of vocabulary, grammar structures, register. etc should be used). If we consider other examples the situation might be the same.
And what do you think about it?