Planning a Series of Objectives

When it comes to medium-term planning, that is, planning a unit, scheme of work or across the course of a term, it can be particularly helpful to begin by planning a series of objectives that together connect to the wider aims you have for learners’ learning.

Here is an example to illustrate:

I am sitting down to plan a unit of work looking at the Sociology of the Mass Media with my Year 11 GCSE class.

My aims are threefold. First, I want to get them to a position where they are prepared to answer exam questions on the topic.

Second, I want them to be able to connect their knowledge and understanding of the mass media to their wider sociological knowledge.

Third, I want to help them to critically analyse their own experiences of the mass media, including how it influences their identity.

You will note that these aims cover the instrumental aspects of teaching as well as the less prosaic ones.

Having defined my aims I now look at the time I have available.

Let us imagine that I have twelve lessons in which to cover the content set out in the exam board’s specification.

I divide it up accordingly, perhaps roughly at this point, and then sit down to plan my twelve learning objectives.

This is where we hit upon another great advantage of using Bloom’s Taxonomy to help us plan our lessons.

I have two routes to mastery that I want to pursue with my learners.

The first is a series of individual routes.

That is, the lessons themselves. In each one I want learners to make progress so that they come to master the content about which we are learning.

The second is the general route.

That is, mastery in relation to those three aims I set out above.

In this case, my intention is to construct a sequence of lessons that allow my learners to achieve the overarching aims.

Using the taxonomy to plan a series of objectives in advance makes this relatively simple.

First, I can go through my twelve lessons and, for each one, either specify a definite objective in the form of a statement or question or do the analytical work necessary to gain a general idea of where I want to take learners while still leaving myself the flexibility I might feel I need to be creative.

Next, I can review the group of objectives to see whether they also allow learners to achieve the wider aims.

If each one is sufficiently challenging and if I have made use of a range of keywords from the top levels of the taxonomy, it is likely this will be the case.

If it isn’t, however, I can go back and tinker with my objectives until I have them as I want.

For example, I might feel that I have fallen someway short in my desire to help learners critically analyse their own experiences of mass media.

Looking at my objectives, I notice that I have prioritised the evaluation of sociological arguments concerning areas like censorship, bias and the relationship between the media and the audience.

I don’t want to jettison any of this as it will help learners gain mastery over these areas ready for their exams.

However, I note that what I can do is broaden these objectives to encompass critical evaluation of the arguments as well as how these relate to people’s experiences of the media, thus satisfying all three of the wider aims I outlined.

Approaching medium-term planning in this way helps you to sustain a level of challenge across a series of lessons while also allowing you to achieve both your narrow, lesson-specific aims and your wider ones.

It also makes the subsequent planning of individual lessons simpler.

This is because you can work back from your objectives and because you can do your work safe in the knowledge that the bigger picture has already been taken care of.

Using Outcomes to Promote Mastery

We can finish by thinking a little about how outcomes can be used to promote mastery in the medium-term.

Having followed the advice above and defined a set of challenging objectives across a series of lessons, with these carefully designed to meet our various aims, we can now think about our learning outcomes in the medium-term.

The process here is similar to that concerning objectives.

By defining, loosely or specifically, the outcomes we want learners to achieve during each lesson, we give ourselves a clear overview of how we intend to take them along the path to mastery.

We can review the map this creates, examining it to identify:

• Gaps
• Repetition
• Any areas where challenge is not as great as we would like
• Whether or not the outcomes meet our lesson aims as well as our wider aims
• The extent to which we feel the outcomes will lead to excellent progress for all learners

During this process, we are critically assessing the quality of the outcomes we have settled on – or started to settle on if we are leaving them loosely defined until later on in our planning. 

This gives us the chance to sieve our ideas, refining them and intensifying their impact.

Ultimately, this should help us to produce lessons that are individually more effective and which, when brought together as a unit or scheme of work, help learners to make more progress than would otherwise be the case.

It goes without saying that Bloom’s Taxonomy is a major part of this process – as it is the taxonomy that has informed the creation of our outcomes, just as it has informed the creation of our objectives.

In conclusion, we can say that the taxonomy is an essential tool on which we must call if we want to plan challenging objectives and outcomes.

It provides a framework of mastery we can use to ensure this stage of our planning is effective and that it makes a suitable contribution towards our wider aim of maximising progress.

Personally, I don’t think we can underestimate how much of the work the taxonomy can do for us, and what a powerful framework it is for shaping our planning.

I’ve included these elsewhere, but in case you haven’t got hold of them yet, here’s a set of Bloom’s keywords, covering analysis, synthesis and evaluation, you can use when developing objectives and outcomes.

Analysis:

• Analyse, Appraise, Categorize, Compare, Contrast, Differentiate, Discriminate, Distinguish, Examine, Experiment, Explore, Investigate, Question, Research, Test.

Synthesis:

• Combine, Compose, Construct, Create, Devise, Design, Formulate, Hypothesise, Integrate, Merge, Organise, Plan, Propose, Synthesise, Unite.

Evaluation:

• Appraise, Argue, Assess, Critique, Defend, Evaluate, Examine, Grade, Inspect, Judge, Justify, Rank, Rate, Review, Value.