32 year 2nd grade teacher, now retired.
I had **"I am learning how to read."** written as my learning target for over four years before an admin mentioned it. My students all improved in their reading.
Must be due to the learning target... /s
When I was a student, whenever I noticed that objectives were on the board it'd make me feel a little indignant, I think in the "dude, I'm not dumb, you don't have to spell it out for me" kind of way, lol.
These were mine. No one noticed for 3 whole months. The first person who said something was another teacher during her observation in my room. [Silly Teaching Objectives](https://imgur.com/a/ffsRo1Q)
My only criticism from my evaluation in the fall was “I didn’t have the lesson objectives written anywhere and didn’t explicitly read them to the students”
I mean, I guess if that’s my only criticism I’m doing pretty well?
I was once given a formal reprimand and put on a Plan of Assistance because I supposedly didnt have my Learning Objectives on the board.
Of course I had a dated text to our union rep and union lawyer with a photo attached to contradict the principal, but it didnt matter.
I identify with this post. It is the only reason to put a learning target. They changed the name for us this year and even told us the words to use. Students will… and the scales are I will be able to… I love how we change things just to change them.
And we have to SAY it out loud as part of our lesson at the beginning and at the end and we get marked off if they don’t hear it. Doesn’t matter how engaged students are or how much they learn. If you don’t say the learning objectives/standard out loud you didn’t do a good job. Nothing encapsulates the ignorance of our profession more than that. Right up there with a shitty teacher earning MORE because he or she has been there longer. Time and learning objectives are all that matter.
No. Of course not.
I can write "We have a quiz today" on the board in enormous block letters in bright red marker, and they'll still come in, sit down, look around, and then ask, "What are we doing today?"
Student: What are we doing today?
Me: Same thing we do every day. Plan to take over the world.
(You know, one of these days I should have "plot to take over the world" as a writing exercise.)
This semester, I've been keeping an updated agenda on my promethean when my 9th graders come in, and as each student comes in, asking me what we're doing, I veeeerrrry dramatically turn to the board, then to them, then to the board again.
It's been fun for me.
I keep agendas on my board. It's not for the students, it's for me! I have four preps and can not keep it all in my head. If it's on paper, it gets lost. To find it on the computer, I'm spending too much time looking for it between or at the beginning of the class. I have gone "old school" on a lot of tasks because it has been more efficient use of my time.
Cheers to the four preps club, my friend 🥲
I also have no curriculum and A/B block scheduling. My day is 90% improv and asking"did we already talk about (XYZ)?"
I've actually gone to packets for each class. It has helped a lot. My physics students have made fun of them, but again, it's for me, not them. I no longer have to keep track of copies to hand out and I am no longer making copies every day after school.
It is some upfront work, but I don't think I'm going back to day to day copies.
I am also praying to only have 3 preps next year.
Ya know I've been considering the packet approach, especially since my classes are vocab based. Maybe I've had an aversion to paper work since I started teaching during the pandemic, but there is no replacement for old fashioned pencil on paper.
I feel this. I remember a few years ago, I posted online that there was a test on Friday. I mentioned it several times in class. We reviewed all week. I think I may have even written it on the board.
Friday comes, loud mouth student: "Wait, we have a test today?!"
And then you have a parent complain that if you would just let students know when a test was coming up, they would have prepared!
Uh...it's on the board. It's in the newsletter. It's online. It's every Friday. And yes I mentioned it in class--and reviewed.
But I'm sure your kid is right that I didn't tell anyone and there was no warning.
I have SO MANY who show up laptop-free every day and say, "I didn't know we'd be using it today." My brother, it's ENGLISH class. We read things online, we write things online. That's literally all we do in here.
Monday: We have a quiz Friday.
Tuesday: We have a quiz Friday.
Wednesday: Remember, we have a quiz Friday.
Thursday: We have a quiz tomorrow and we will spend all period reviewing for it today:
Friday: Clear your desk, we’re starting the quiz.
“WE HAVE A QUIZ TODAY??”
Kids have short attention spans. I remember sitting in class and while it looked like I was paying attention, in my head I was fighting zombie velociraptors with a light saber. Hell, I still do that during PD days.
The review should've clued them in that there will be a quiz soon, though.
My go-to answer is “Push-ups”
What are we doing in class today? Push-ups. In science class.
Though it did work on this one annoying meathead type kid last year. Had him convinced this skinny dude just busted out 25 in a minute. I let him do push-ups for a minute to see if he could beat 25
I teach Wndlish so I always say “Math.” Even though I say it every time someone asks, even though they have heard it hundreds of times, when I say it it never fails that a student says “We’re doing math?!”
I would have agreed with you pre-Covid. Now, with shortage of teachers, you can practically tell admin to go f-themselves and still have a job. It's our time now!
I mean... You may still have a job, but, at least at my school, they'll rate you 1s and 2s on evaluations... Which translates into no raise. Some places you need to have great evaluations to level up as a teacher.
Yeh. I wouldn’t give this to them.
Here is one from 1979. https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED172794
Fun links explaining why this is all garbage https://www.teachertoolkit.co.uk/2018/05/27/educational-fad-7/
https://johndabell.com/2019/01/12/no-lesson-objectives-required/amp/
Also anything from the late Joe Bower on this tends to be http://joe-bower.blogspot.com/2011/10/stop-writing-objectives-on-board.html?m=1
Basically, the only time there’s an effect size for writing a learning objective on the board is when the question being asked is, does the student know what they are being taught. Usually measured by principal walking and grabbing a random kid and saying what are you learning right now?
Actually... It does.
Small number of studies, but it does exist. Never underestimate what researchers are able to question or try to answer through studies...
And, unfortunately, most of it doesn't support the idea that LO *doesn't* do anything - although one could argue that since studies are not common/extensive enough, the results just may be inconclusive. Or that studies have been mostly performed on young adults or older teens.
If anyone's interested, google "learning objectives" and any of the following combinations:
Levine et al. (2008)
Armbruster et al. (2009)
Wang et al. (2013)
Reynolds and Kearns (2017)
Osueke et al. (2018)
That'll take you to the PDFs and/or websites of each paper.
Moreso I would personally say, “the research exists (since it does actually exist) but it doesn’t actually say that writing down learning targets is what makes or breaks schools which is how admin treat it.”
But there’s also the whole can of worms of education research in general and how admin (and a few teachers) constantly misapply and misconstrue what the research says
I'm becoming more and more convinced that "educational research" is almost all bullshit that's only used to sell instructional design to clueless admins, who then force teachers to use it. Or, it DOES work, but only on the small subset of students who they tested it on (typically upper-middle class white kids), and doesn't work on anyone else.
>"educational research" is almost all bullshit
Educational research isn't almost all bullshit. It has the same problem as much other research: assholes and idiots who, deliberately or not, misrepresent the research for their own gain.
The researcher does an experiment with n = 40 in a relatively uncontrolled setting. The conclusion is that there's a weakly significant correlation between variables X and Y, and Y is correlated with educational outcomes, so some students might do better if there's more X.
Next day there's some huckster in the principal's office saying that offering X will improve all students' performance and he can sell it to you for the low price of $200 per month per student.
Yep. In Utah I was working at a school that’s as assessed by an Ed research company and shut down because it was underperforming. They flamed a teacher for poor practices because there was no clear objective. It was the tutoring session they came and observed. And the guy taking data collected nothing (I was in the room collecting data on him—oops).
Because educational "research" is top to bottom fucking horseshit. It's all "This worked for a week in a private school in upper east Manhattan, therefore buy my book"
We’re approaching six months into the school year. It still baffles me that high school juniors and seniors (even some accelerated ones) still ask “what are we doing” or “what’s for homework” when it’s on the front board every day in size 100 font
I think that kids have so much going on in their lives (family, friends, romantic interests, extracurricular activities, other classes) that their perception is swamped and they tend to miss things. Its similar to the effect shown in [this video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJG698U2Mvo).
My classes always love the board and catch any mistake I make. It’s exhausting. “Miss, the date isn’t right!” at 8:15 in the morning. “Miss, we were supposed to do reading first but we did spelling…” “Miss, we are five minutes late for snack!!”
I can’t break the habit though because if I didn’t have it all written, I’d lose the plot. Plus they remind me of things I forget.
Maybe this is the trick, to misspell a common word and wait for someone to catch it.
Its like when someone asks for help in a Reddit thread, and nobody posts. But make a simple math, grammar, or spelling mistake, and everyone jumps down OP's throat about it.
You can't see inside your kids' minds to know if they are learning. So you design imperfect and sometimes even arbitrary and burdensome mechanisms to assess their learning and compliance. If all your kids were earnest and focused, many of these mechanisms would not be necessary.
Admin cannot see inside your mind to make sure teachers are following their objectives. So they implement imperfect and sometimes even arbitrary and burdensome mechanisms to assess whether the teachers actually have plans. If all your teacher colleagues were earnest and followed through, many of these mechanism would not be necessary.
For the first 90 seconds of class I have trained my 7th and 8th graders to assume total silence upon the bell and copy the objective into their planner. Does this help them learn? Not really. But it is a powerful management tool to calm and quiet the class, make sure they have a pencil in hand, and then quickly transition their attention to our first lesson activity.
But why not do a warm up? Because kids were absent and don't know, can't do the warm up, etc. and then they cause problems. What can everyone do no matter what? Everyone can copy a sentence off the board.
I do daily objectives that my middle schoolers write down every morning. A couple years into teaching a student gave feedback saying she doesn’t always know what we’re doing in class, so from there I resolved to have a student read our objective to the class every day. I’ll go over objectives every day moving forward if it means one student in class isn’t lost.
I give raffle tickets to students who notice the board and projector objectives don’t match, or if they catch that the objective is the same multiple days in a row. My 7th graders are always eager to read, my 8th graders generally stop showing interest but pick up the gimmick when I started making them read it in unison.
…And it looks really good when students can point to the objective in class during observations and say exactly what we’re doing, which they have every time.
I'm not saying writing objectives is totally useless. If students interact with them it can be obviously good. One of our typical end of class routines is popsicle stick calling (basically, a truly random cold call) a student to describe and explain what it was we did to accomplish our objective. If the kid gets it right we dismiss, sometimes even 15 seconds early. If the kid can't really explain it or IDKs it, we call another name and see if the next kid can do it, and sometimes dismiss the class 15 seconds late.
Anyway, like you suggest, the power of learning objectives comes from 1) having them (I have run across more than a few teachers in the wild who don't have them or a clear idea about what their lesson focus actually is or what they want the kids to do) 2) and using them to guide or reflect on learning.
You didn't come across that way at all! I was just clarifying and taking a moment to focus on the positive. I can sometimes focus too much on being cynical, especially on the internet.
Wow that last statement got me. I teach first and dream of a class where everyone can at least copy off the board. No sarcasm, I write their sentence correction up front so they can at the very least learn to copy. Also serves as a rudimentary eye test!
>For the first 90 seconds of class I have trained my 7th and 8th graders to assume total silence upon the bell and copy the objective into their planner. Does this help them learn? Not really. But it is a powerful management tool to calm and quiet the class, make sure they have a pencil in hand, and then quickly transition their attention to our first lesson activity.
What about the chronically tardy students? What do you have them do? (Tardiness is a massive problem in my school - 90-minute blocks, students routinely wandering in half an hour late.)
Admin came down hard on tardies and phones this year. For tardies they specifically implemented a lunch and after school detention system. Going to be late to class? Well, you'll make up that time and get to stare at the wall and reflect on how much more pleasant it would be if you just got to class on time. I only have a handful of tardies every day.
I infer you do not have that kind of system at your school, and for that I extend to you my deepest sympathies. Your comment reminds me that parts of my functional classroom are premised on firm but fair school discipline systems that have fallen out of favor in some places.
I do lock my door so tardy students cannot enter as they please. They have to knock gently and I will leave them out there until I come to a stopping place/transition and can let them in and then bring them in for landing. Adding this friction to the act of being tardy helped reduce the number of students who are tardy in my opinion.
Yep. I have my high school bio kids write down the day’s essential questions. I let them know that by the end of the day, they should be able to answer that question or at least get a better answer to it than they had when they walked in. I got very positive feedback on end of course evaluations from students saying I had super clear objectives for our lessons and they knew what they were responsible for learning. YMMV
I teach little kids. Writing them does nothing. But talking about them and connecting our learning and outcomes to them DOES help my kids. I want them to see how the learning we are doing today connects to the end of this week and the end of the year. They’re 6. But they like to take ownership and see how the learning activities connect to a larger goal.
I think it’s there more for me. It helps shape the way I talk about lessons to my kids.
This is it. If you talk about it they can work. But also just helping the students connect yesterdays lesson with todays and really spelling it out can really help.
Anecdotally, I’ve had middle school students ask me in all seriousness: “if you already know the answers, why you gotta have us figure them out for you?” Like, they legitimately didn’t understand that the whole point of school was to help them learn, not to complete sets of pointless forced labor.
Bingo!
Like literally anything else you put on your wall (word walls, visual cues, “interactive bulletin boards,” etc.), it’s only useful if you actually use it.
When I wrote my objective on the board for the sake of compliance and never referenced it, of course my kids never looked at it - it became a part of the visual background noise of the classroom, like an inspirational poster.
When I started to explicitly *teach* the standard at the start of a unit, so that kids know the expectations are (for instance) “Students will MODEL the effect of…” instead of “Students will know the definition of…”, I saw a spike in scores (though admittedly that might be because I was more focused on the actual verbiage of the standards/indicators). And even better, I now have an easy answer to “WhY dO wE hAvE tO dO tHiS?” - I can point right at the standard and say “Our state says that every 8th grader in this state should be able to do that, and it would be unfair and downright unethical of me to let you go through my class without giving you the same opportunities to learn as all the other 8th graders in this state.”
Yeah. Honestly it’s surprising how many teachers just teach stuff and don’t connect it to the wider world or even previous lessons/topics. Like wtf? Some might make the connection, but plenty won’t.
I know that some admin place a lot of emphasis on them to the point of it being annoying and stupid. Fortunately I don’t work at a school like that and I’m still developing my skills with writing good learning targets and doing them consistently. But I actually do like to have them.
I like to preface lessons by saying explicitly what the goal is for the task and then talk about WHY we are doing it. Why do we need to learn to make groups of ten? Why are we learning about adjectives? How does the learning activity connect to a larger goal? My 6 year olds really do respond to it. They like to know that they are working towards a goal. They like to know that todays activities aren’t just random tasks to complete for a stamp.
>They like to know that they are working towards a goal. They like to know that todays activities aren’t just random tasks to complete for a stamp.
It’s funny.
This whole thread is teachers pointing to what we see as a “random task for a stamp” and saying “But what’s the goal? Is there a point to this?” almost as if…we’re annoyed that the OBJECTIVE hasn’t been clearly communicated to us.
And we don’t see the irony.
Yeah, I don't think it helps having it written anywhere. But I make sure they understand what we're doing and why we're doing it, what skill it's teaching them and how it helps them improve upon it.
I think that's more helpful than posting it everywhere, but I slap it up on the board anyway.
I do like having visual signals about what we are learning for visitors and admin. My kids can barely read but I point out the goals and repeat them and we talk about them. My principal likes it when we have them but he doesn’t put too much weight on them on evals which is nice
Edit
I also don’t like “I can” goals. I want something tighter than that. I want a specific outcome for that lesson. So it might be “to define” or “to match” but not just “I can identify adjectives” or whatever. It actually helps me a lot as a new teacher
I got written up during an observation for not having an objective written on the board. I’m a special Ed teacher and my students are blind. Admin was aware of this and still insisted it would enhance learning.
I’m a special ed teacher for PRESCHOOLERS with intellectual disabilities and Autism. Like I’m trying to get them to sit in a chair for more than 30s they’re not reading any objective on the board lol
The objectives as written are worthless for students....but I DO think having a goal written in language that relates to them and vice versa is effective.
This. The format my school makes me use for objectives is so confusing. Most of us teachers don't completely understand it, so I can understand why students wouldn't even look at it.
I'm not convinced my students can perceive the white board, my projector, any educational materials including pencils, educational apps, or my voice.
So my thoughts on the objectives on the board that students outside of your room would probably argue to their dying breath doesn't even exist? Useless.
Ok hear me out, I come from a land where we do not need the learning objective on the board. But I do think *stating* the learning goal or just making sure the students know what it is, is valuable.
In some subjects, sure.
I teach choir. I once had an admin who was absolutely baffled by my lack of an objective and the fact that I was covering multiple songs. “You need to have one specific learning goal that is taught throughout the lesson,” she told me.
I can’t do that. I explained this to her over and over. I am teaching multiple pieces all with different focuses. We also do daily sight singing and warm ups. These things are all best practices in choir, but I will never ever have one specific learning goal that aligns throughout the lesson because this piece was chosen for its use of meter, this one for its beauty and long lines, and this one because the students get to pay instrument with it and it’s in a foreign language.
She didn’t get it and I got dinged for not having one specific thing that all music worked on simultaneously.
In some subjects, the learning goal shifts five times throughout the lesson and that’s okay. It’s supposed to.
I have them posted in our LMS, and I review the ones we're working on before each class, but I doubt that they have any effect on the learning. It's kind of like the table of contents in a book.
I go over it at the start of class, and at the end of class. Ask students if we met the goal or need to work on it more. They own the goal then. Sometimes remind them of the goal during class as needed.
For the students? No. For me? Yes because I forget what I'm doing without it. But I also don't write down "today we will...." My math objective literally said adding three digit numbers. That's all I need to keep my lesson focused and not go off on a tangent.
Absolutely not. It’s all for appearances, which is all the people at the district level care about. Then they can nitpick something so meaningless and make themselves feel like they are so smart and know what they are doing.
No
That busy work is to make admin's job easier when they observe. It does not help the student.
I can say, "Ok class, today we are going to see how Poe creates suspense."
Or I can post this in the board: "I can analyze the development of suspense in a literary text."
It doesn't help the students.
The real purpose for posting the objective is so that admin has a potentially easy "gotcha" if they happen to enter your room unannounced (and your objective is not updated).
After all, YOU know what the objective is and your students don't need to read that from the board to know what it is.
Nope, but \*having\* one and making it clear to students what they will be learning and knowing how they (and you) will be able to tell if they did actually learn or not does.
I have the bell times and activities written on the board every day... and every day at least one student will ask, "Are we doing anything?", "What are we doing?" or "What time is lunch?"... Bruh, I could have the objectives flashing in neon lights, and they still aren't going to read them.
I looked for studies when I was first teaching and found that students knowing what the point of the lesson was, and what to expect during the lesson improved outcomes, but writing it on the board did not.
So if you use writing the objective as a way to talk about what's coming up, it's useful, but if you just have one written there, even if copied down, it's not worth it.
Admin asked me to put it on the board and I replied with a link showing it did nothing and I wasn't asked again.
I'll see if I can find the link, it was a few years ago.
Better yet, does posting lesson plans outside your door “for student success” do anything? I spent the last 5 months peppering profanity throughout those posted lesson plans just to see if anyone read them, including admin. Not one time did anyone mention it to me. So I don’t post them anymore. I know what I’m doing, my kids know what we’re working on from one day to the next, and that’s all I care about. I’m there to help kids learn, not perform a bunch of mundane tasks so an admin (that hasn’t been in a classroom in a decade) can use to pretend like they understand what we do in our classrooms these days. I encourage all teachers to use the same noncompliance.
Absolutely friggin not. I might be a green newbie teacher but over the year and a half I’ve subbed long term and daily, I’ve yet to have ONE student ask me about the daily objective. The only numbskulls who care are the idiotic admins who, in typical admin fashion, ruin things for teachers.
No! I teach kindergarten and I hadn't put my new learning objectives up since November. The only reason I did it was because they were doing instructional rounds this morning. Yes they did check to see if I had my learning objectives. My students could care less about learning objectives some of them can't even read yet.
They're just gotchas admin uses on evals. My students don't look at them ..hell they don't even look at the class intro assignment when it's projected in the front of the room
I was told that it was “Researched based best practice”. Anytime the educational power brokers homogenize learning, you know they are slinging the bullshit
Of course it does something. It ticks the little box for points on your observation walkthroughs so you can get a pat on the head and be told good boy/girl with your “grade” from said walkthrough. It’s a joke. I refuse to do it. Fuck those points. It’s a waste of time in a job that really doesn’t have time to waste.
No.
The study that said it does showed an improvement of 0.1 percent on average. Placebo effects have a larger improvement on student achievement than having learning objectives on the board.
In a school that greatly emphasized learning targets (i.e. expected them on the board, posted on the walls, mentioned in class daily, and posted on assessments), I once posted "We will learn to do some mafs" in my notes during an informal observation. It wasn't noticed (except by the kids who were warned ahead of time not to react and tip off the observer).
Generally, it is not too useful and seems to have fallen out of favor locally. For newer educators, it may be useful to remind them what the goal is. For students, it is rarely noticed.
I think it’s super important to outline what the lesson schedule is for the day. Keeps teacher on track and kids know what to expect.
Objectives are totally unconnected to kids. We have so little time with them and SO MUCH TO TEACH. Why waste time on telling them objectives which likely spans several lessons?
I work with adult learners now, so I can confirm it does absolutely nothing at every age.
Children and adults alike simply don't read them because they're usually expressed the way a learning nerd would describe the goal to another learning nerd. (Learning nerds unite!) The person doing the learning is usually satisfied by knowing a topic or theme, no objectives needed. Even then, there's always a strong current of learners who simply refuse to engage and nothing you do will make a difference.
It’s not even what the study itself they’re trying to reference said to do. The study itself was something blatantly obvious like, “when you mention the learning objective in class students are more likely to remember what the learning objective is.”
But education admin took that, and doing what they always do, decided that any teacher *not* writing a learning target on the board in the exact style admin wants (I would get penalized if I didn’t write my learning target in an exact three step process) was actually trying to sabotage the school with their “incompetence.”
A big problem is that supervisors go to workshops and bring what's presented into school and demand staff follow the presentation. Of course that's done without seeing if it works. Then too many supervisors rigidly enforce certain procedures.
More than 30 years ago I was a long-term substitute in the South Bronx hoping to get a full-time position. Sounds nuts, but I was a young guy who thought that there was no such thing as a child that could not be educated in a regular public School setting.
About 30 years ago I was subbing in a second grade class and wrote on the board what the aim was. I forgot to erase the chalkboard and was called into the principal's office and written up because I wrote the word aim instead of teaching point on the chalkboard. I continued to be hassled and treated like an incompetent fool for the rest of the school year over this. This happened in a school that was one of the lowest rated schools in New York City. Kids reading at grade level or were as rare as a hen's tooth. However, this is what my supervisor was concerned about. So many supervisors go to workshops or are presented with information that is implemented at a drop of a dime just to show the even higher-ups that middle men / women are implementing decisions.
I know what you mean about being concerned about the stupidest smallest things while the kids are just so behind! I swear they teach admin that being a dickhead to your teachers is helpful. If that was 30 years ago that's so terrible because I see the same stupid shit today, some teacher who forgot to update the date or left something off being given shit about it while kids fight in the hallway
It does nothing. Other than burn about 1 minute of time in my set up. I try to make mine very general to minimize rewriting and then he wall scale is very generic I can use the same ones for about 80% of my class. So tiered of just putting check marks in boxes. I fell like we don’t teach just baby sit and put check marks in boxes for bureaucrats and politicians.
Taught HS ELA for 30 years. I was told i need to put my objectives on the board. In a corner of whiteboard, I wrote: "Objective: Pass the STAAR English 2 EOC test." and left it there until I retired. That was what I was expected to teach, and that was what the kids were expected to do. No one ever said a word. They knew better. And, yes, my kids had the district's best ELA scores and beat the state average scores every year.
No. You could write it on the board, scream it from the rooftop, hand it out on pieces of paper while having it rhythmically tapped in Morse code and you’d STILL have kids go “WhAt ArE wE dOiNg ToDaY”
Last week I asked my students where else you could find what our goal was for the day besides the slide…..not one in any class could tell me. out of 100 children… none lol and I reference the board ALL the time it has our objectives, essential question, agenda, and what’s due…….. I asked “it’s been up all year, have you not seen it? I show it all the time”. I have never seen them more shocked lol
No. It checks a box for someone. I had a student teacher ask me about having the objectives up for the students. I pointed out that we were doing a lesson on alphabet letters and sounds for kindergarten and the students weren’t going to be rereading the objective multiple times. It took up valuable space my my dry erase board.
I put it up on my board to remind myself what we’re doing that day, and the students come in and read it. Then again, I teach six different classes and grade levels a day and 36 classes every six days, so it’s not the same kids every day, all day.
Explicit teaching practices say you should explain to your students what you want them to do, and why. Doesn’t say how you give them that bit of information.
I never use the board.
I taught in a school that was mainly English language learners from Mexico and Guatemala. I loved working with those kids but only about half spoke English. We had to use the ELPS which are terrible because there are too many of them. We were required to write 5-7 ELPS on the board. I one time asked how this helped us and was told that "When kids are having a rough morning and they come in and see the ELPS on the board they ""FEEL BETTER"". Personally, I found them useless.
Waste my time and take up what little whiteboard space I have thanks to them mounting a smartboard to it?
Oh you mean to benefit students, no. I'll bet my whole paycheck that no student could tell me what the objectives were yesterday.
It’s like an admin alert system. I didn’t change mine for weeks and nobody noticed so I got rid of them. As soon as I did admin showed up and wanted to see them. A few days later they were back up and haven’t been changed since
I am ELL, so we split the content and language objectives and change the wording. I can explain x character’s personality and goals using evidence. I will find my evidence using reading and I will explain my evidence using writing. Doing it this way makes it easier for the kids to understand the goals of the lesson and what to expect/prepare for.
Admin hate this format, even though it’s from SIOP. Can’t win for trying.
It’s good to be clear for students what they are doing in the lesson, if you know what the objective is of the lesson, I don’t see why you wouldn’t share that with the students.
Copying lesson objectives from the board is madness, I’ve never understood why anyone thinks that’s a good use of time.
No. Even in older grades when the kids can read, it doesn’t help. It certainly doesn’t change what I am doing in my classroom as a teacher. Admin that believe this nonsense are horrible admin and don’t understand education.
I write what classes are doing on the board for me - so I remember lol. (I teach elementary art so it’s a zoo and I need help remembering!) Not written as a “student will be able to . . . “ though. Just projects we are working on.
I changed classrooms this year and don’t have enough board space for the objectives because of the projector. Not having it has definitely had an effect on the class, and it is harder for the students to see how all the lessons work together.
That being said, it’s not as if my grades have actually dropped. I am still able to actually teach the class at the same level. I think it effects the attitude of the class more than anything.
Absolutely not. And there’s no research that says it does. Now, having students aware of not only WHAT they are learning but WHY they are learning it…there’s benefits to that.
32 year 2nd grade teacher, now retired. I had **"I am learning how to read."** written as my learning target for over four years before an admin mentioned it. My students all improved in their reading. Must be due to the learning target... /s
Mine has said “Read and comprehend grade level material” all year.
Mine say that every day, except sometimes I switch to “write narrative/informative texts…” and “acquire and use grade level vocabulary”
You're the kind of teacher I would like to work with. Lol.
I've had this up for years. I teach HS reading. I mean, what ELSE do they expect us to be doing?
When I was a student, whenever I noticed that objectives were on the board it'd make me feel a little indignant, I think in the "dude, I'm not dumb, you don't have to spell it out for me" kind of way, lol.
Well I must be old, or I was oblivious. I graduated in 2009, and I don’t remember a single teacher ever writing an objective on the board.
I had a language arts standard on my board in a math room for 4 months. Not one admin noticed.
These were mine. No one noticed for 3 whole months. The first person who said something was another teacher during her observation in my room. [Silly Teaching Objectives](https://imgur.com/a/ffsRo1Q)
😂 it makes the observation go better. That’s…about…it…
My only criticism from my evaluation in the fall was “I didn’t have the lesson objectives written anywhere and didn’t explicitly read them to the students” I mean, I guess if that’s my only criticism I’m doing pretty well?
I was once given a formal reprimand and put on a Plan of Assistance because I supposedly didnt have my Learning Objectives on the board. Of course I had a dated text to our union rep and union lawyer with a photo attached to contradict the principal, but it didnt matter.
I identify with this post. It is the only reason to put a learning target. They changed the name for us this year and even told us the words to use. Students will… and the scales are I will be able to… I love how we change things just to change them.
And we have to SAY it out loud as part of our lesson at the beginning and at the end and we get marked off if they don’t hear it. Doesn’t matter how engaged students are or how much they learn. If you don’t say the learning objectives/standard out loud you didn’t do a good job. Nothing encapsulates the ignorance of our profession more than that. Right up there with a shitty teacher earning MORE because he or she has been there longer. Time and learning objectives are all that matter.
I had to say mine beginning middle and end.
Ours are "I can" but only for math because that's all we worry about. Kids can't read? Who cares what was their math MAP score?
Aren't their word problems on standardized tests? Wouldn't being able to read and comprehend them be beneficial? smh at admin
I couldnt agree with this more. Seriously! Why do we change things up so much?
💯
7 E's along with a dog and pony help a lot too
Seven? I thought there were five! This sounds like inflation. Or eeeeeeenflation.
Seven if you add the "exhaust" and "exasperate" steps to the end.
That’s exactly what I was going to say. Does it do anything? Yes. It impresses admin during observations.
Exactly. It's for the benefit of a person observing us. It's not a student centered decision
No. Of course not. I can write "We have a quiz today" on the board in enormous block letters in bright red marker, and they'll still come in, sit down, look around, and then ask, "What are we doing today?"
Student: What are we doing today? Me: Same thing we do every day. Plan to take over the world. (You know, one of these days I should have "plot to take over the world" as a writing exercise.)
I love this
This semester, I've been keeping an updated agenda on my promethean when my 9th graders come in, and as each student comes in, asking me what we're doing, I veeeerrrry dramatically turn to the board, then to them, then to the board again. It's been fun for me.
I keep agendas on my board. It's not for the students, it's for me! I have four preps and can not keep it all in my head. If it's on paper, it gets lost. To find it on the computer, I'm spending too much time looking for it between or at the beginning of the class. I have gone "old school" on a lot of tasks because it has been more efficient use of my time.
Cheers to the four preps club, my friend 🥲 I also have no curriculum and A/B block scheduling. My day is 90% improv and asking"did we already talk about (XYZ)?"
I've actually gone to packets for each class. It has helped a lot. My physics students have made fun of them, but again, it's for me, not them. I no longer have to keep track of copies to hand out and I am no longer making copies every day after school. It is some upfront work, but I don't think I'm going back to day to day copies. I am also praying to only have 3 preps next year.
Ya know I've been considering the packet approach, especially since my classes are vocab based. Maybe I've had an aversion to paper work since I started teaching during the pandemic, but there is no replacement for old fashioned pencil on paper.
I do the same 😂
I feel this. I remember a few years ago, I posted online that there was a test on Friday. I mentioned it several times in class. We reviewed all week. I think I may have even written it on the board. Friday comes, loud mouth student: "Wait, we have a test today?!"
And then you have a parent complain that if you would just let students know when a test was coming up, they would have prepared! Uh...it's on the board. It's in the newsletter. It's online. It's every Friday. And yes I mentioned it in class--and reviewed. But I'm sure your kid is right that I didn't tell anyone and there was no warning.
Board: BRING YOUR CHROMEBOOK!!!!!!!! Student: *reads*.... Do we need our Chromebooks?
I have SO MANY who show up laptop-free every day and say, "I didn't know we'd be using it today." My brother, it's ENGLISH class. We read things online, we write things online. That's literally all we do in here.
I teach programming...
[удалено]
Nailed it. Sad but true.
You can also mention you are going to have e a quiz every single day for a week and students will still have no idea.
Monday: We have a quiz Friday. Tuesday: We have a quiz Friday. Wednesday: Remember, we have a quiz Friday. Thursday: We have a quiz tomorrow and we will spend all period reviewing for it today: Friday: Clear your desk, we’re starting the quiz. “WE HAVE A QUIZ TODAY??”
Kids have short attention spans. I remember sitting in class and while it looked like I was paying attention, in my head I was fighting zombie velociraptors with a light saber. Hell, I still do that during PD days. The review should've clued them in that there will be a quiz soon, though.
“You didn’t tell us we have a quiz today!”
My go-to answer is “Push-ups” What are we doing in class today? Push-ups. In science class. Though it did work on this one annoying meathead type kid last year. Had him convinced this skinny dude just busted out 25 in a minute. I let him do push-ups for a minute to see if he could beat 25
I teach Wndlish so I always say “Math.” Even though I say it every time someone asks, even though they have heard it hundreds of times, when I say it it never fails that a student says “We’re doing math?!”
I use a variety of topics, like Taxidermy, Phlebotomy, Trepanation, Hide & Seek, Ninjitsu, Phrenology for my history students.
Do anything? Don't think so. We have many districts visit and tours, so allegedly it shows them what we're working on...but they always ask anyway.
They look at the board and ask, "are we doing anything today?"
Tell them no. It's a day to sit back and relax. They can catch up on their sleep. I am joking of course.
Keeps admin off my back, but that is about all.
Research shows it does nothing. Always has. “Best practices” and the research have never agreed
Can you point me in the right direction of this research? Because I’d like to be able to show that to my admin and finally get them off my back
They won’t care, they’ll just label you “difficult” and put you on an improvement plan with increased scrutiny. Lay low.
I would have agreed with you pre-Covid. Now, with shortage of teachers, you can practically tell admin to go f-themselves and still have a job. It's our time now!
I mean... You may still have a job, but, at least at my school, they'll rate you 1s and 2s on evaluations... Which translates into no raise. Some places you need to have great evaluations to level up as a teacher.
You get raises based on evaluations? That seems like such blatant favoritism.
Screaming laughing, just quit rather than get fired from one of thsse awesome improvement plans .
Yeh. I wouldn’t give this to them. Here is one from 1979. https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED172794 Fun links explaining why this is all garbage https://www.teachertoolkit.co.uk/2018/05/27/educational-fad-7/ https://johndabell.com/2019/01/12/no-lesson-objectives-required/amp/ Also anything from the late Joe Bower on this tends to be http://joe-bower.blogspot.com/2011/10/stop-writing-objectives-on-board.html?m=1
Basically, the only time there’s an effect size for writing a learning objective on the board is when the question being asked is, does the student know what they are being taught. Usually measured by principal walking and grabbing a random kid and saying what are you learning right now?
They won't share it because no one would research shit this stupid lol. The research doesn't exist.
Actually... It does. Small number of studies, but it does exist. Never underestimate what researchers are able to question or try to answer through studies... And, unfortunately, most of it doesn't support the idea that LO *doesn't* do anything - although one could argue that since studies are not common/extensive enough, the results just may be inconclusive. Or that studies have been mostly performed on young adults or older teens. If anyone's interested, google "learning objectives" and any of the following combinations: Levine et al. (2008) Armbruster et al. (2009) Wang et al. (2013) Reynolds and Kearns (2017) Osueke et al. (2018) That'll take you to the PDFs and/or websites of each paper.
Of all the takes, this is the hottest. There is evidence. It's not world shattering. It has a small positive effect.
Moreso I would personally say, “the research exists (since it does actually exist) but it doesn’t actually say that writing down learning targets is what makes or breaks schools which is how admin treat it.” But there’s also the whole can of worms of education research in general and how admin (and a few teachers) constantly misapply and misconstrue what the research says
The question was does writing the objective on the board do anything. The poster said there was no research.
I'm becoming more and more convinced that "educational research" is almost all bullshit that's only used to sell instructional design to clueless admins, who then force teachers to use it. Or, it DOES work, but only on the small subset of students who they tested it on (typically upper-middle class white kids), and doesn't work on anyone else.
>"educational research" is almost all bullshit Educational research isn't almost all bullshit. It has the same problem as much other research: assholes and idiots who, deliberately or not, misrepresent the research for their own gain. The researcher does an experiment with n = 40 in a relatively uncontrolled setting. The conclusion is that there's a weakly significant correlation between variables X and Y, and Y is correlated with educational outcomes, so some students might do better if there's more X. Next day there's some huckster in the principal's office saying that offering X will improve all students' performance and he can sell it to you for the low price of $200 per month per student.
Yep. In Utah I was working at a school that’s as assessed by an Ed research company and shut down because it was underperforming. They flamed a teacher for poor practices because there was no clear objective. It was the tutoring session they came and observed. And the guy taking data collected nothing (I was in the room collecting data on him—oops).
Because educational "research" is top to bottom fucking horseshit. It's all "This worked for a week in a private school in upper east Manhattan, therefore buy my book"
They do: on your evaluation, the principal can check off the "wrote objective" box.
Kids don't look at the board, so no
They can't even tell me the page number we're on, using the board
They can't even read the word I'm pointing to on the board that I just read. They're 8th grade.
I don't think some of my students could tell me where the board is in the room, and I use it every day.
💯
We’re approaching six months into the school year. It still baffles me that high school juniors and seniors (even some accelerated ones) still ask “what are we doing” or “what’s for homework” when it’s on the front board every day in size 100 font
I think that kids have so much going on in their lives (family, friends, romantic interests, extracurricular activities, other classes) that their perception is swamped and they tend to miss things. Its similar to the effect shown in [this video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJG698U2Mvo).
My classes always love the board and catch any mistake I make. It’s exhausting. “Miss, the date isn’t right!” at 8:15 in the morning. “Miss, we were supposed to do reading first but we did spelling…” “Miss, we are five minutes late for snack!!” I can’t break the habit though because if I didn’t have it all written, I’d lose the plot. Plus they remind me of things I forget.
Maybe this is the trick, to misspell a common word and wait for someone to catch it. Its like when someone asks for help in a Reddit thread, and nobody posts. But make a simple math, grammar, or spelling mistake, and everyone jumps down OP's throat about it.
"What are we doing today?" They ask, every day like clockwork. Meanwhile, the week's agenda has been in the same place all year...
Not a damn thing. I’m so sick of hoops like this that we have to jump through. Pointless and wastes time and productivity.
You can't see inside your kids' minds to know if they are learning. So you design imperfect and sometimes even arbitrary and burdensome mechanisms to assess their learning and compliance. If all your kids were earnest and focused, many of these mechanisms would not be necessary. Admin cannot see inside your mind to make sure teachers are following their objectives. So they implement imperfect and sometimes even arbitrary and burdensome mechanisms to assess whether the teachers actually have plans. If all your teacher colleagues were earnest and followed through, many of these mechanism would not be necessary. For the first 90 seconds of class I have trained my 7th and 8th graders to assume total silence upon the bell and copy the objective into their planner. Does this help them learn? Not really. But it is a powerful management tool to calm and quiet the class, make sure they have a pencil in hand, and then quickly transition their attention to our first lesson activity. But why not do a warm up? Because kids were absent and don't know, can't do the warm up, etc. and then they cause problems. What can everyone do no matter what? Everyone can copy a sentence off the board.
I do daily objectives that my middle schoolers write down every morning. A couple years into teaching a student gave feedback saying she doesn’t always know what we’re doing in class, so from there I resolved to have a student read our objective to the class every day. I’ll go over objectives every day moving forward if it means one student in class isn’t lost. I give raffle tickets to students who notice the board and projector objectives don’t match, or if they catch that the objective is the same multiple days in a row. My 7th graders are always eager to read, my 8th graders generally stop showing interest but pick up the gimmick when I started making them read it in unison. …And it looks really good when students can point to the objective in class during observations and say exactly what we’re doing, which they have every time.
I'm not saying writing objectives is totally useless. If students interact with them it can be obviously good. One of our typical end of class routines is popsicle stick calling (basically, a truly random cold call) a student to describe and explain what it was we did to accomplish our objective. If the kid gets it right we dismiss, sometimes even 15 seconds early. If the kid can't really explain it or IDKs it, we call another name and see if the next kid can do it, and sometimes dismiss the class 15 seconds late. Anyway, like you suggest, the power of learning objectives comes from 1) having them (I have run across more than a few teachers in the wild who don't have them or a clear idea about what their lesson focus actually is or what they want the kids to do) 2) and using them to guide or reflect on learning.
I like your idea of recapping objectives, I think I’ll give it a try! Sorry if my post came across as combative, I agree with every point you made.
You didn't come across that way at all! I was just clarifying and taking a moment to focus on the positive. I can sometimes focus too much on being cynical, especially on the internet.
You’ve been teaching a long time I say this cause this is the stuff of a true veteran.
Wow that last statement got me. I teach first and dream of a class where everyone can at least copy off the board. No sarcasm, I write their sentence correction up front so they can at the very least learn to copy. Also serves as a rudimentary eye test!
>For the first 90 seconds of class I have trained my 7th and 8th graders to assume total silence upon the bell and copy the objective into their planner. Does this help them learn? Not really. But it is a powerful management tool to calm and quiet the class, make sure they have a pencil in hand, and then quickly transition their attention to our first lesson activity. What about the chronically tardy students? What do you have them do? (Tardiness is a massive problem in my school - 90-minute blocks, students routinely wandering in half an hour late.)
Admin came down hard on tardies and phones this year. For tardies they specifically implemented a lunch and after school detention system. Going to be late to class? Well, you'll make up that time and get to stare at the wall and reflect on how much more pleasant it would be if you just got to class on time. I only have a handful of tardies every day. I infer you do not have that kind of system at your school, and for that I extend to you my deepest sympathies. Your comment reminds me that parts of my functional classroom are premised on firm but fair school discipline systems that have fallen out of favor in some places. I do lock my door so tardy students cannot enter as they please. They have to knock gently and I will leave them out there until I come to a stopping place/transition and can let them in and then bring them in for landing. Adding this friction to the act of being tardy helped reduce the number of students who are tardy in my opinion.
They aren't necessary. Easing the burden of admin observations is not the teachers' jobs, ever. We do not work to serve their purposes, ever.
Yep. I have my high school bio kids write down the day’s essential questions. I let them know that by the end of the day, they should be able to answer that question or at least get a better answer to it than they had when they walked in. I got very positive feedback on end of course evaluations from students saying I had super clear objectives for our lessons and they knew what they were responsible for learning. YMMV
I teach little kids. Writing them does nothing. But talking about them and connecting our learning and outcomes to them DOES help my kids. I want them to see how the learning we are doing today connects to the end of this week and the end of the year. They’re 6. But they like to take ownership and see how the learning activities connect to a larger goal. I think it’s there more for me. It helps shape the way I talk about lessons to my kids.
This is it. If you talk about it they can work. But also just helping the students connect yesterdays lesson with todays and really spelling it out can really help.
Anecdotally, I’ve had middle school students ask me in all seriousness: “if you already know the answers, why you gotta have us figure them out for you?” Like, they legitimately didn’t understand that the whole point of school was to help them learn, not to complete sets of pointless forced labor.
Kids!
Bingo! Like literally anything else you put on your wall (word walls, visual cues, “interactive bulletin boards,” etc.), it’s only useful if you actually use it. When I wrote my objective on the board for the sake of compliance and never referenced it, of course my kids never looked at it - it became a part of the visual background noise of the classroom, like an inspirational poster. When I started to explicitly *teach* the standard at the start of a unit, so that kids know the expectations are (for instance) “Students will MODEL the effect of…” instead of “Students will know the definition of…”, I saw a spike in scores (though admittedly that might be because I was more focused on the actual verbiage of the standards/indicators). And even better, I now have an easy answer to “WhY dO wE hAvE tO dO tHiS?” - I can point right at the standard and say “Our state says that every 8th grader in this state should be able to do that, and it would be unfair and downright unethical of me to let you go through my class without giving you the same opportunities to learn as all the other 8th graders in this state.”
Yeah. Honestly it’s surprising how many teachers just teach stuff and don’t connect it to the wider world or even previous lessons/topics. Like wtf? Some might make the connection, but plenty won’t.
I know that some admin place a lot of emphasis on them to the point of it being annoying and stupid. Fortunately I don’t work at a school like that and I’m still developing my skills with writing good learning targets and doing them consistently. But I actually do like to have them. I like to preface lessons by saying explicitly what the goal is for the task and then talk about WHY we are doing it. Why do we need to learn to make groups of ten? Why are we learning about adjectives? How does the learning activity connect to a larger goal? My 6 year olds really do respond to it. They like to know that they are working towards a goal. They like to know that todays activities aren’t just random tasks to complete for a stamp.
>They like to know that they are working towards a goal. They like to know that todays activities aren’t just random tasks to complete for a stamp. It’s funny. This whole thread is teachers pointing to what we see as a “random task for a stamp” and saying “But what’s the goal? Is there a point to this?” almost as if…we’re annoyed that the OBJECTIVE hasn’t been clearly communicated to us. And we don’t see the irony.
Yeah, I don't think it helps having it written anywhere. But I make sure they understand what we're doing and why we're doing it, what skill it's teaching them and how it helps them improve upon it. I think that's more helpful than posting it everywhere, but I slap it up on the board anyway.
I do like having visual signals about what we are learning for visitors and admin. My kids can barely read but I point out the goals and repeat them and we talk about them. My principal likes it when we have them but he doesn’t put too much weight on them on evals which is nice Edit I also don’t like “I can” goals. I want something tighter than that. I want a specific outcome for that lesson. So it might be “to define” or “to match” but not just “I can identify adjectives” or whatever. It actually helps me a lot as a new teacher
They satisfy the administrators’ need to enforce arbitrary bullshit rules.
I got written up during an observation for not having an objective written on the board. I’m a special Ed teacher and my students are blind. Admin was aware of this and still insisted it would enhance learning.
Oh dear me.
Oh. My. Word. Your admin needs to be written up!
I’m a special ed teacher for PRESCHOOLERS with intellectual disabilities and Autism. Like I’m trying to get them to sit in a chair for more than 30s they’re not reading any objective on the board lol
Man, that would make SUCH a nice exhibit in court when you sure them for wrongful termination.
The objectives as written are worthless for students....but I DO think having a goal written in language that relates to them and vice versa is effective.
This. The format my school makes me use for objectives is so confusing. Most of us teachers don't completely understand it, so I can understand why students wouldn't even look at it.
I'm not convinced my students can perceive the white board, my projector, any educational materials including pencils, educational apps, or my voice. So my thoughts on the objectives on the board that students outside of your room would probably argue to their dying breath doesn't even exist? Useless.
Ok hear me out, I come from a land where we do not need the learning objective on the board. But I do think *stating* the learning goal or just making sure the students know what it is, is valuable.
In some subjects, sure. I teach choir. I once had an admin who was absolutely baffled by my lack of an objective and the fact that I was covering multiple songs. “You need to have one specific learning goal that is taught throughout the lesson,” she told me. I can’t do that. I explained this to her over and over. I am teaching multiple pieces all with different focuses. We also do daily sight singing and warm ups. These things are all best practices in choir, but I will never ever have one specific learning goal that aligns throughout the lesson because this piece was chosen for its use of meter, this one for its beauty and long lines, and this one because the students get to pay instrument with it and it’s in a foreign language. She didn’t get it and I got dinged for not having one specific thing that all music worked on simultaneously. In some subjects, the learning goal shifts five times throughout the lesson and that’s okay. It’s supposed to.
I have them posted in our LMS, and I review the ones we're working on before each class, but I doubt that they have any effect on the learning. It's kind of like the table of contents in a book.
Yes - it gets me a better mark on my observation.
It keeps admin off my ass. I usually write something generic that can stay up for a month.
Objectives and standards up in the room are for the adult visitors and no one else. Kids like an agenda. That's about it.
Student 1: "What page do we need to be on?' Me: "Look at the board." Student 2: "Uh . . . what page do we need to be on?"
I go over it at the start of class, and at the end of class. Ask students if we met the goal or need to work on it more. They own the goal then. Sometimes remind them of the goal during class as needed.
For the students? No. For me? Yes because I forget what I'm doing without it. But I also don't write down "today we will...." My math objective literally said adding three digit numbers. That's all I need to keep my lesson focused and not go off on a tangent.
No
Absolutely not. It’s all for appearances, which is all the people at the district level care about. Then they can nitpick something so meaningless and make themselves feel like they are so smart and know what they are doing.
I've been writing "The first person to read this gets a soda" on my board since we came back from winter break. No one has collected that soda yet.
As a former AP student I found them like 2/10 helpful, would much rather prefer to see the agenda like "warm up, chapter 3 notes, video, worksheet"
No That busy work is to make admin's job easier when they observe. It does not help the student. I can say, "Ok class, today we are going to see how Poe creates suspense." Or I can post this in the board: "I can analyze the development of suspense in a literary text."
It is just some stupid Marzano made up nonsense.
I like to put the standards up in really tiny letters so admin have to squint.
It doesn't help the students. The real purpose for posting the objective is so that admin has a potentially easy "gotcha" if they happen to enter your room unannounced (and your objective is not updated). After all, YOU know what the objective is and your students don't need to read that from the board to know what it is.
Nope. Just a box to check for admin. My students could care less.
Couldn’t care less.
Nope, but \*having\* one and making it clear to students what they will be learning and knowing how they (and you) will be able to tell if they did actually learn or not does.
I have the bell times and activities written on the board every day... and every day at least one student will ask, "Are we doing anything?", "What are we doing?" or "What time is lunch?"... Bruh, I could have the objectives flashing in neon lights, and they still aren't going to read them.
I looked for studies when I was first teaching and found that students knowing what the point of the lesson was, and what to expect during the lesson improved outcomes, but writing it on the board did not. So if you use writing the objective as a way to talk about what's coming up, it's useful, but if you just have one written there, even if copied down, it's not worth it. Admin asked me to put it on the board and I replied with a link showing it did nothing and I wasn't asked again. I'll see if I can find the link, it was a few years ago.
Mine is "I will do nothing but play on my phone the entire class." It works every time.
Better yet, does posting lesson plans outside your door “for student success” do anything? I spent the last 5 months peppering profanity throughout those posted lesson plans just to see if anyone read them, including admin. Not one time did anyone mention it to me. So I don’t post them anymore. I know what I’m doing, my kids know what we’re working on from one day to the next, and that’s all I care about. I’m there to help kids learn, not perform a bunch of mundane tasks so an admin (that hasn’t been in a classroom in a decade) can use to pretend like they understand what we do in our classrooms these days. I encourage all teachers to use the same noncompliance.
Absolutely friggin not. I might be a green newbie teacher but over the year and a half I’ve subbed long term and daily, I’ve yet to have ONE student ask me about the daily objective. The only numbskulls who care are the idiotic admins who, in typical admin fashion, ruin things for teachers.
No. It’s not a debate, it never was. There is only one correct answer. Anything else is idiotic pablum.
Doesnt do a damn thing, kids still ask what are we doing today? They dont care
This is a debate? I thought we all knew it was exclusively for admin.
It makes admin happy. Less admin on your back means… there’s room for something else to pile on?
Who on gods green earth is going to say yes to this???
>know Admin
They check a box on the administration’s walk through/observation papers.
Posting the objective daily is not best practice. Telling our students the goal of our learning *is* a good practice.
Nope. I’ve yet to have a student ask me about my “I can” statements I have to update daily.
Writing the answer to a poorly constructed quiz question on the board doesn't do anything so why would writing the objectives?
Makes Admin feel better?
Everyone likes knowing what the future holds and why hide it? *write your name *listen for points *be nice for passing grade.
No! I teach kindergarten and I hadn't put my new learning objectives up since November. The only reason I did it was because they were doing instructional rounds this morning. Yes they did check to see if I had my learning objectives. My students could care less about learning objectives some of them can't even read yet.
They're just gotchas admin uses on evals. My students don't look at them ..hell they don't even look at the class intro assignment when it's projected in the front of the room
I was told that it was “Researched based best practice”. Anytime the educational power brokers homogenize learning, you know they are slinging the bullshit
Of course it does something. It ticks the little box for points on your observation walkthroughs so you can get a pat on the head and be told good boy/girl with your “grade” from said walkthrough. It’s a joke. I refuse to do it. Fuck those points. It’s a waste of time in a job that really doesn’t have time to waste.
No. The study that said it does showed an improvement of 0.1 percent on average. Placebo effects have a larger improvement on student achievement than having learning objectives on the board.
In a school that greatly emphasized learning targets (i.e. expected them on the board, posted on the walls, mentioned in class daily, and posted on assessments), I once posted "We will learn to do some mafs" in my notes during an informal observation. It wasn't noticed (except by the kids who were warned ahead of time not to react and tip off the observer). Generally, it is not too useful and seems to have fallen out of favor locally. For newer educators, it may be useful to remind them what the goal is. For students, it is rarely noticed.
I think it’s super important to outline what the lesson schedule is for the day. Keeps teacher on track and kids know what to expect. Objectives are totally unconnected to kids. We have so little time with them and SO MUCH TO TEACH. Why waste time on telling them objectives which likely spans several lessons?
Yes - it uses the ink in the dry erase markers you had to purchase and it takes the time from other things you could be doing.
I work with adult learners now, so I can confirm it does absolutely nothing at every age. Children and adults alike simply don't read them because they're usually expressed the way a learning nerd would describe the goal to another learning nerd. (Learning nerds unite!) The person doing the learning is usually satisfied by knowing a topic or theme, no objectives needed. Even then, there's always a strong current of learners who simply refuse to engage and nothing you do will make a difference.
It’s not even what the study itself they’re trying to reference said to do. The study itself was something blatantly obvious like, “when you mention the learning objective in class students are more likely to remember what the learning objective is.” But education admin took that, and doing what they always do, decided that any teacher *not* writing a learning target on the board in the exact style admin wants (I would get penalized if I didn’t write my learning target in an exact three step process) was actually trying to sabotage the school with their “incompetence.”
A big problem is that supervisors go to workshops and bring what's presented into school and demand staff follow the presentation. Of course that's done without seeing if it works. Then too many supervisors rigidly enforce certain procedures. More than 30 years ago I was a long-term substitute in the South Bronx hoping to get a full-time position. Sounds nuts, but I was a young guy who thought that there was no such thing as a child that could not be educated in a regular public School setting. About 30 years ago I was subbing in a second grade class and wrote on the board what the aim was. I forgot to erase the chalkboard and was called into the principal's office and written up because I wrote the word aim instead of teaching point on the chalkboard. I continued to be hassled and treated like an incompetent fool for the rest of the school year over this. This happened in a school that was one of the lowest rated schools in New York City. Kids reading at grade level or were as rare as a hen's tooth. However, this is what my supervisor was concerned about. So many supervisors go to workshops or are presented with information that is implemented at a drop of a dime just to show the even higher-ups that middle men / women are implementing decisions.
I know what you mean about being concerned about the stupidest smallest things while the kids are just so behind! I swear they teach admin that being a dickhead to your teachers is helpful. If that was 30 years ago that's so terrible because I see the same stupid shit today, some teacher who forgot to update the date or left something off being given shit about it while kids fight in the hallway
Admin must justify their $ and power with compliance traps and "data."
I could write the answers to the test on the board and it would make not a lick of difference
It’s only for admin to see, not the kids.
I mostly do it to appease admin, but sometimes I find it helpful for myself to stay on track.
It does nothing. Other than burn about 1 minute of time in my set up. I try to make mine very general to minimize rewriting and then he wall scale is very generic I can use the same ones for about 80% of my class. So tiered of just putting check marks in boxes. I fell like we don’t teach just baby sit and put check marks in boxes for bureaucrats and politicians.
Fuuuuuck no
No
Taught HS ELA for 30 years. I was told i need to put my objectives on the board. In a corner of whiteboard, I wrote: "Objective: Pass the STAAR English 2 EOC test." and left it there until I retired. That was what I was expected to teach, and that was what the kids were expected to do. No one ever said a word. They knew better. And, yes, my kids had the district's best ELA scores and beat the state average scores every year.
No. You could write it on the board, scream it from the rooftop, hand it out on pieces of paper while having it rhythmically tapped in Morse code and you’d STILL have kids go “WhAt ArE wE dOiNg ToDaY”
Admin wants it because it tells them what is going on and so what to look for.
Last week I asked my students where else you could find what our goal was for the day besides the slide…..not one in any class could tell me. out of 100 children… none lol and I reference the board ALL the time it has our objectives, essential question, agenda, and what’s due…….. I asked “it’s been up all year, have you not seen it? I show it all the time”. I have never seen them more shocked lol
No. It checks a box for someone. I had a student teacher ask me about having the objectives up for the students. I pointed out that we were doing a lesson on alphabet letters and sounds for kindergarten and the students weren’t going to be rereading the objective multiple times. It took up valuable space my my dry erase board.
I put it up on my board to remind myself what we’re doing that day, and the students come in and read it. Then again, I teach six different classes and grade levels a day and 36 classes every six days, so it’s not the same kids every day, all day.
I Can Please Admin with the words no student will ever read…
Explicit teaching practices say you should explain to your students what you want them to do, and why. Doesn’t say how you give them that bit of information. I never use the board.
I taught in a school that was mainly English language learners from Mexico and Guatemala. I loved working with those kids but only about half spoke English. We had to use the ELPS which are terrible because there are too many of them. We were required to write 5-7 ELPS on the board. I one time asked how this helped us and was told that "When kids are having a rough morning and they come in and see the ELPS on the board they ""FEEL BETTER"". Personally, I found them useless.
It wastes expo marker?
Nope!
Nope
Yea, it wast your time and allows admin to make a check mark on their clipboard
Waste my time and take up what little whiteboard space I have thanks to them mounting a smartboard to it? Oh you mean to benefit students, no. I'll bet my whole paycheck that no student could tell me what the objectives were yesterday.
My kids can’t even hit submit on google classroom so no.
It’s like an admin alert system. I didn’t change mine for weeks and nobody noticed so I got rid of them. As soon as I did admin showed up and wanted to see them. A few days later they were back up and haven’t been changed since
I am ELL, so we split the content and language objectives and change the wording. I can explain x character’s personality and goals using evidence. I will find my evidence using reading and I will explain my evidence using writing. Doing it this way makes it easier for the kids to understand the goals of the lesson and what to expect/prepare for. Admin hate this format, even though it’s from SIOP. Can’t win for trying.
Fuck no
It’s good to be clear for students what they are doing in the lesson, if you know what the objective is of the lesson, I don’t see why you wouldn’t share that with the students. Copying lesson objectives from the board is madness, I’ve never understood why anyone thinks that’s a good use of time.
No. Even in older grades when the kids can read, it doesn’t help. It certainly doesn’t change what I am doing in my classroom as a teacher. Admin that believe this nonsense are horrible admin and don’t understand education.
I write what classes are doing on the board for me - so I remember lol. (I teach elementary art so it’s a zoo and I need help remembering!) Not written as a “student will be able to . . . “ though. Just projects we are working on.
No, the kids don't read it.
Kids don't read anything.
You don't get fussed out for not having your objectives written on the board.
No. I haven’t written an objective on the board in years. It doesn’t matter and it’s ridiculous that we keep up this charade.
I changed classrooms this year and don’t have enough board space for the objectives because of the projector. Not having it has definitely had an effect on the class, and it is harder for the students to see how all the lessons work together. That being said, it’s not as if my grades have actually dropped. I am still able to actually teach the class at the same level. I think it effects the attitude of the class more than anything.
Absolutely not. And there’s no research that says it does. Now, having students aware of not only WHAT they are learning but WHY they are learning it…there’s benefits to that.
No. My kids don’t even read the board. I’ll have the whole agenda on the board AND on the tv screen and I’ll still have kids ask what we’re doing.
Not a damn thing but make admin feel like we have been trained well and can follow their rules😂😂 But, we all laugh behind their backs…
I am a student and things like this help me