Weekly Vitamins: Objectives and Interest Approaches.. No Longer the Gummy Bear Vitamins

Anyone ever have to take the gummy bear vitamins? Maybe they take Flintstones vitamins? I've never taken them because I never really needed to and always thought they were a silly promotional movement to get kids (and I'm sure some adults) to take their vitamins. OF COURSE vitamins are important, but I guess I always felt that you should only take it if you needed to take them. And as I now know from my food science course, Americans eating a typical diet get plenty of vitamins in the foods that they already eat. So unless you have a specific deficiency, you don't need to take extra vitamins. Even before this tidbit of knowledge, I thought they were unnecessary; pointless. 

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Full disclosure time... that was how I felt about objectives and interest approaches a while ago (gasp!). I assumed that they were part of standards and procedures that teachers had to do, but didn't actually want to do. For some reason, it seemed like something that was dreaded. But before you become outraged, know that there is a happy ending to this story. 

The main objective of using objectives

In our book, Methods of Teaching Agriculture, I love how they define the purpose of objectives: "what the teacher wants to achieve from the unit". Overall, it's about what the students should be learning at the end of the day, unit, and semester. They are the underlying goals of the fun labs, interesting videos, and informative articles. Everything, then, must be purposeful. 

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As I push myself to think like a teacher, I realize that this is important. Especially when I think about how I'll be teaching 42 minute classes. I'm used to my high school block scheduling with about double this time, so I need to make sure each aspect of my lesson and unit is purposeful. 

Some highlights for the importance of objectives from the book are as follows:

• relevance of the assignments
• structuring the sequence and order of the course
• growth toward the knowledge/skill to be learned
• provide a basis for evaluation

Students and teachers alike can look to objectives to know what it is they are going to be tested on, what they are doing that day, and what the whole point of the lesson is. 

I remember in my educational psychology class, we used the acronym "TSWBAT" which stood for "the students will be able to" and then inserted our action verb, and finished with the evaluation portion of objectives. I think this is such a useful equation that they also mentioned in the book. Another source I found ties in several of the key concepts we've been learning about including Bloom's taxonomy and domains to make objectives. Check out this article on using Bloom's to figure out your objective. It is the older taxonomy version, but I think the same principles apply. 

The three domains

Just like vitamins serve a specific purpose, some domains focus more on specific areas of learning than others. By being sure to include the cognitive, affective, and psychomotor domains, teachers can better differentiate their instruction to include all types of learners. Students should be challenged in many ways; pulling them from their comfort zones and getting them accessing their brain from all means. 

One thing that objectives can encompass this is by using action verbs to describe the action that needs to be performed by the students. They used the example of saying "explain" instead of "list". It requires the student to not just say, but cognitively express their understanding of the information they learned. 

Keeping these things in mind will keep my lessons purposeful and make sure that students are engaged in learning in more than just one way. I think this is so essential as I learn about student strengths and ways to be adaptive. I also think that even the most skilled students require differentiation. I recall from my summer reading book, Teaching Outside the Box: How to Grab Your Students by their Brains by Louanne Johnson, that people learn better when their brains are surprised. If I keep my students on their toes, I can keep their interest, no matter what level they're on.

Speaking of interest...

Speaking of that, I should mention those interest approaches. I hadn't even heard of interest approaches until my junior year of school and even then it sounded funny to me. Do you always need one? What is its purpose? Did my teachers in the past use one?

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I honestly can't remember any of my teachers in high school using an interest approach. Not to say that they didn't use one... just that I don't remember it. But I don't think that's a bad thing. If they did in fact use one, they were able to successfully link it to the lesson that day, so it didn't seem like it was a random activity or random start to the class. 

When I first really learned about interest approaches, I thought they were just fun little packages of information that piqued the interest of students. It would have had something to do with the content, but wouldn't directly roll over into the main lesson. For example, if I were teaching a lesson about the water cycle, I might have thought a good interest approach would be "discuss all of the uses of water". While the students might touch on the parts of the water cycle, they probably would have talked about food, cleaning, the beach, etc. While it relates to the subject at hand, it's not what I want to teach about. 

Now I understand that interest approaches directly and (again) purposefully pertain to the lesson. Some interest approaches are actually a part of the lesson. I thought that was really interesting too. In the book, it shares some examples of types of approaches. Some are just meant to be discussed at the beginning of class, and then there is a transition into the lesson. However, some are questions that the students discover they can't answer until they learn more. The teacher will teach new content, but carry that initial approach until the end of the lesson so that students can see if, with their new information, if they can figure out the solution. 

Clarity and reflection

As I've stated many times throughout this blog post, I'm discovering that everything teachers do is purposeful. Sitting through 12+ years of school, and I never realized the real reasons for why teachers did what they did or said what they said. Now it's becoming clear why my teachers would write out the objectives on the board, or why they used the transitions that they did. I'm excited to begin implementing these ideas in my lessons. Perhaps those silly gummy bear vitamins truly served a purpose.

Leaving Thought:

"It's very difficult to plan a journey if you don't know where you are headed and have no mileposts to guide you; and so it is with planning instruction"-(Newcomb, et al., 2004)