EDU 643

Action Map

To view my action map, please click here.

Defining Learning Objectives

For this activity, I utilised the supplied Defining Your Learning Objectives template document to define all of my learning objectives. At the end of my Action Map activity (above), you will see that I had previously outlined how my activity relates to SMART goals, on a whole. However, for this part of the activity, I wrote a singular SMART Goal, from the perspective of a student, that fully encompasses the lesson and learning objectives. To view my SMART Goal and learning objectives, please click here.

Reflection

I found this part of the lesson design process really interesting and enjoyable, specifically the aspect of applying SMART goals to my lesson planning. SMART Goals has been a topic I have taught my students in the past while teaching Phys-Ed and Health, (two of my other subjects) and I enjoyed seeing it mentioned here and applying it to this. I feel the SMART Goal method is so valuable, and think more educators and students can apply this technique to a multitude of areas of their lives, not only this, which is why I appreciated it so much.

After completing this step in the lesson design process, there were some areas that left me feeling unsure of myself. Not necessarily unsure of how to define learning objectives, or what to teach/assess during my lesson, but rather, unsure of how to extrapolate the information in the reading from Dirksen and apply it to my particular field, and how to do it in a way that makes sense for my class. Additionally, going through the process of creating a lesson where I would define these goals in advance for my students (in the “Focussing Objective” and “Performance Objective”) felt a bit strange to me, not because I don’t do this, but I don’t do this as formally as this method suggests one should.

As a Film and Media teacher, I know the power of video as a way to hook students and demonstrate a goal. In my class, I do what is described by the Focussing Objective and Performance Objective in different ways, but showing my students demonstrations through “minds-on” videos at the beginning of my lessons, with a connected discussion, as well as producing actual exemplars/example videos for my students and sharing these videos with all other learning materials for the activity. Since this is what I’m more used to doing for my lessons, writing all of this out felt strange and foreign. Though, thinking about UDL and differentiated learning methods, I do believe there is value in this. However, I feel in my field, my method of sharing actual video examples holds more value, then complementing these video that I provide my students with tutorials and related conversation, activities and text in a lesson outline would be the most beneficial way to execute this part of sharing this information with students.

Overall, I found this exercise to be stimulating and interesting and encouraged me to reflect on my own methods of how I inform my students of their learning objectives, and I appreciated this activity as it provided me the opportunity to reassess my own practice.