A learning objective is a short statement of the goals and objectives that students should know or be able to put into practice after a lesson. Focusing on what students should know is frequently called the “cognitive” approach; focusing on what students should be able to do is known as the “behavioral” approach. While most teachers are, by temperament, drawn to one of the two approaches, in practice, most teachers often combine the two, perhaps without knowing it.

Large-scale learning objectives will be articulated in a teacher’s curriculum guide, but it is up to each individual teacher to formulate learning objectives for individual lesson plans. Teachers must create lesson plans that include objectives that are:

1. Measurable
2. Observable
3. Content-based
4. Student-centered
5. Aligned to the state standards

New York State provides teachers with a curriculum that needs to be covered in a specific course. The teacher must create objectives that align with the curriculum. Teachers need to make sure that they can measure if the students have met the objectives of the lesson. This can be achieved by giving formative and summative assessments (Types of assessments will be discussed in Chapter 6). If students do not meet the objective of the lesson, a teacher needs to be aware and try to remediate to ensure that students can meet the objectives with support from the teacher or a fellow student. In order to be able to measure objectives teachers have to be able to observe the student meeting the objective. For example, I caution pre-service teachers to not use “know” or “understand” in their objectives. These verbs are not concrete and they hard to measure.

It is important to have 2-3 objectives in a lesson plan. This allows the teacher to scaffold instruction (Wood, Bruner, and Ross, 1976). Teachers have to consider that students have varying levels of readiness to complete a certain task. If teachers offer support to students during the learning process, they may be able to complete complex tasks. Teachers can use multiple levels of Bloom’s Taxonomy to create objectives that start with tasks that require lower order thinking skills, and moving to more complex tasks that require higher order thinking instruction. If there are multiple objectives, a teacher can measure what objective the students did not meet, and just address that part of the lesson.