How can we change an educational environment for the better? Spoiler alert: intention. 💡
The start of a new school year, along with decisions about adopting new approaches, materials, and protocols, often brings a daunting question: where do we begin?
In this post, I’ll walk you through:
the importance of setting goals in Education,
the steps of well-informed goal getting, and
the basics of lesson planning.
Shall we?
Why tracing goals in Education?
Whenever I talk about setting educational goals, I can’t help but remember the well-known dialogue between Alice and the Cheshire Cat in Alice in Wonderland:
“– Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to walk from here?
– That depends a good deal on where you want to get to, said the Cat.
– I don’t much care where, said Alice.
–Then it doesn’t matter which way you walk, said the Cat.” (p. 89)
It turns out that while our instinct might come in handy in certain situations, teaching is way too serious a business to depend solely on gut feeling. After all, it deals with human beings, and can directly impact their self-esteem, career prospects, and their ability to engage with knowledge production.
That’s why it’s crucial to approach education with clear, result-driven goals. Well-informed decisions lead to better outcomes for everyone involved.
First Things First: How Can We Set Goals?
In my view, it all starts with understanding the unique profile of the learners we’re working with, considering factors like age, knowledge level, and background.
From there, educators, administrators, and instructional designers must align their decisions with the outcomes they hope to achieve.
Only then can we begin to map out the specific steps to reach our goals.
It might seem obvious, but goal setting often gets lost in the shuffle. It’s not always that easy to translate broad objectives into action. This is where lesson planning comes in– at least on a micro level.
Keep reading for some tips on how to integrate goal setting into your lesson plans.
What Are the Basics of Lesson Planning?
Kitty Purgason (2014) wrote a truly insightful chapter on that matter for the book Teaching English as a Second or Foreign Language.
In short, the author recommends educators to complete the following assertion to define the objectives:
“By the end of this lesson, students will be able to…”
(Purgason, 2014, p. 5)
With this in mind, we can actively choose:
the materials to be used and/ or adapted,
previous class work,
procedures and timing,
patterns of interaction,
contingency plans, and
follow-up ideias.
What about you? How do you approach goal setting and decision-making where you work? Remember that every institution is different, so there are other factors to be taken into consideration as well. (:
I hope this post has given you some useful insights and ideas to implement in your own practice.
Thanks for reading. See you next time!
References
Carroll, L., Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, with Forty-Two Illustrations by John Tenniel (Chicago: VolumeOne Publishing, 1998), A BookVirtual Digital Edition, v.1.2 (November 2000).
Purgason, K., 'Lesson Planning in Second/Foreign Language Teaching', in Teaching English as a Second or Foreign Language, ed. by M. Celce-Murcia, D. Brinton, and A. Snow (Boston: Cengage/National Geographic, 2014).
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