what do we do with learning objectives?
I have been marking assignments this week, becoming immersed in trainee teacher thoughts on learning objectives, adaptive teaching, assessment, progress, attainment and feedback. It is an assignment that asks them to consider and explore pupil progress in relation to wider literature and an analysis of their own enabling of progress within a lesson they have taught on placement. It is not an easy topic, but it is an essential component of their understanding of the role of the teacher.
One of the significant and recurring arguments that I have read within these assignments is the notion that progress can be enabled by sharing learning objectives at the beginning of each lesson. I have to admit that I find this troublesome (always have, and none of the assignments so far have managed to swerve my thinking on this).
I am not concerned about the requirement for LO in themselves - they are an essential part of a teacher’s planning, preparation and awareness of what they want the learning to look like - but I do query the need to share them with the students in what has become a bizarre pedagogical habit, with students up and down the country writing the LO at the top of their page at the start of each lesson.
Where, I ask, is the surprise? The wonder? The creative hook that draws the students in? The spirit of exploration and enquiry? The creative provocation for learning?
The premature oversharing of the LO in a lesson is a spoiler about the destination of the lesson, and, often perhaps, a narrowing of the complexity and potential of what is to come.
I suggest we can continue to be crystal clear in our LO in our heads, in our planning, in our understanding of them, but instead of being formulaic about when and how we share them, we use our professional judgement and discretion in when and how.
Making art-research-teacher connections
My research into how student teachers develop teacherly thinking approaches has begun to explore the notion that ways of thinking can be shaped without the owner of them being aware, and that this subtle, secret, happening is a powerful pedagogical approach in itself.
Does this argument relate to wider learning too? I wonder if we are so bound to habitual, industrialised, compliant schooling that values conformity and control over curiosity and creativity. I wonder what would happen if teachers were more autonomous in this? I wonder how learning and thinking happens together between teacher and student, how LOs and SC can be co-created and organic as opposed to being set in stone and formulaic.
There should be room for a multitude of approaches. Perhaps it doesn’t have to be the same for all lessons. Surely it shouldn’t be the same for all lessons?
Pre-school children are learning all of the time, without being made explicitly aware of it by their caregivers. This is powerful. This is wonderful. Let’s keep that wonder going.