Curriculum - Objectives And Outcomes

LESSON 2

Welcome to the second lesson of the Teacher Training course. This lesson take a more in-depth look at the purpose of considering your curriculum and your aims of teaching. Please feel free to ask questions, make comments, and suggest ways in which to improve this lesson in any way.

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Introduction - What difference do your lessons make?

· If you have read the Curriculum - Overview page, you will by now be aware that the most important consideration in formulating objectives, etc., is what you are teaching this material for.
· Another way of putting this is to ask what difference you expect (or just vainly hope) it will make to your students.
· In other words, what outcomes (or simply, learning) are you looking for? 

· Some rather sad people called educationalists argue long and hard about the difference between “aims”, “objectives” and ”outcomes”.
· Don't be too hard on them—they are (sometimes) over-worked, (usually) under-paid, and they have lost much of the status and respect they used to enjoy! Lol.

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Aims, Objectives and Outcomes

· Aims are broad statements of what learning you hope to generate.
· The Aim is the point of the whole thing.
· As such, even hard-liners concede that it can be fairly vague, and non-behavioural terms, such as “understand”, and “appreciate” or “develop” are rather grudgingly accepted.
· The Aim is almost certainly more than the sum of the Objectives, and regardless of what many people say, the Aim is what matters.
· It is the End, and all the rest is just Means.

· Objectives are statements of what you are going to teach, although expressed as if the students were going to learn it..

· Outcomes (more accurately “desired outcomes”) are statements of what you are going to assess.
· You may not end up assessing all of them, but they are statements of what a student will know or be able to do, if she or he has learned everything in the course or session.

· For practical purposes, objectives and outcomes ought to be the same thing—particularly if you are specifying them before you start teaching.
· However, the terms are used in a variety of different senses in different texts, so if you are looking them up always check where the author is coming from, and in practice outcomes are more flexible.

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Behavoural Objectives

· The text-books will tell you that Objectives should be SMART:

· Specific
They should state clearly what the student should know/be able to do, and at what level. 
· Measurable
You should be able to conceive of how their attainment might be assessed
· Attainable
—by the students
· Realistic
Could be seen as similar to attainability, but refers to their appropriateness to the overall task. "Valid" in assessment-speak.
· Time-appropriate
Or achievable within the time-span of the session/lesson/course.

· This is fair enough, but it is important not to let the tail of defining the objectives wag the dog of the aims of the course or session.
· For example, the hard-liners will insist that all objectives are predicated on a behavioural verb. (Incidentally, given that competence-based curricula have largely been developed by people of this ilk, how is it that performance criteria are written in the passive voice?) Such a verb defines an activity which students can observably undertake, such as:

· · define
· · list
· · state
· · calculate
· · make
· · perform

· By using such verbs, it is possible to tie Objectives into assessable Outcomes, which can be valuable.
· But what happens when you really want students to "understand" something, or even to have come to their own conclusions about a debatable topic?
· What happens when you want them to change their frame of reference so that they see something differently?
· What happens when you want them to be creative?
· How is it possible to attain critical reflection and transformative learning?

· Part of the answer is here. It involves recognising that behavioural objectives may not go the whole way, but that there is a set of necessary (although not sufficient) conditions to be met, and you can specify those.
· The trouble is that you end up unable to specify the interesting bits.

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Handling Outcomes

· It is here that the Outcome comes into its own.
· In my humble opinion (and plenty of people would not agree with me), it's OK to use terms like "understand" and "appreciate" in outcomes.
· Indeed, sometimes it is difficult to think of any other terms which are worth using.
· The guiding principle, however, is that it should be clear not only to you, but also to students, colleagues, etc, what counts as evidence that an outcome has been met.

· So if this were part of a course, an outcome for this page/unit might read:

· · Understands principles of curriculum planning.

· My hard-line friends will ask "How will you know?" which is a fair question.
· I might reply that a student will show me a set of Aims and Outcomes he has developed for a course.
· "OK," they say, "why not set that up as an objective? Something like:

· · Specifies aims for a course
· · Specifies objectives for a course
· · Gives three respects in which aims differ from objectives"

· "Because," I reply, "that is not the only valid way in which someone might demonstrate their understanding."
· They might present me with an academic critique of the assumptions implicit in the behavioural model.
· They may undertake an analysis of a hidden curriculum and use the language of objectives to articulate what is being taught unintentionally.
· They may expose the semantic inconsistencies in an example ;)
· All or any of these would be sufficient to show me that they understood.
· If you really must avoid reference to internal states such as "understand", you can produce a description of what someone is likely to do:

· · Demonstrate knowledge, comprehension and application of theoretical principles through the example of a course outline.
· · Discuss the appropriateness or otherwise of an outcome-based model to course design in their particular area of teaching.

· ...but in each case there has been a slight shift from content to process, becoming more explicit about how evidence is to be provided, rather than the evidence itself.
  

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Conclusion

· My problem is that this can become restrictive: and indeed that it can hold back the level of sophistication with which the student tackles the task.

· So for any course above the most basic and standardised, give me outcomes every time!

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