Make Learning Objectives Honest

Lately, learning outcomes/goals/objectives have become all the rage in higher ed. (As this post is written in English rather than ed-speak, I will use these terms interchangeably.) These typically have the form, "After this lesson (or unit or class), you should be able to do X".  But does learning work that way?

As a practitioner of Brazilian jiu jitsu, I get twice-weekly immersion in the experience of being a student. During a typical lesson, the instructor explains and demonstrates a new technique and then has us try it out. Very often, the initial result is complete confusion. How do I get from the starting position to the intermediate one? Where do I grab? And which limb should I be using, anyway? (This is not just a result of my disability -- many physiotypical students go through the same thing.)

Even after the initial confusion abates and I can execute the move, I don't really know the technique. I may forget it by the next session. I may be able to do it on a cooperating partner, but what about one who's resisting? How do I set up the technique and when is a good time to use it? What small details make the difference between success and failure? Learning these things takes years. At what point can I be said to know the technique?

Academic learning is just as messy and multi-layered as physical. Coming to understand anything nontrivial takes time. Learning objectives that say, "After this lesson/activity/whatever, you should be able to do X" lie to students about the nature of learning. At most, a single learning experience or even a short sequence of learning experiences can make you slightly better at a skill or deepen your understanding of a concept. They should not promise to do more.

 Education consultant and blogger David Didau writes:

All too often our learning intentions are lesson menus; here is what you should know, or be able to do by the end of today’s lesson. Students are unlikely to do more than merely mimic the understanding or expertise we want them to master.

If instead we were to share our intention for students to struggle with threshold concepts, then we could tell them that it might take them weeks to wrap their heads around such troublesome knowledge. We could remind them that in this lesson they are making progress towards a goal and that there is no expectation for them to ‘get it’ in the next hour or even the next week...

Learning does not follow a neat, linear trajectory, it’s liminal. Students not only need to spend time in that confusing, frustrating in-between space, they need to know how important it is to stay there for as long as need be. If learning intentions rush or limit this experience then they might be doing more harm than good.

If you agree with this critique but still like the idea of explicit learning goals (or are required to write them), what else could you do? One possibility is to use thought-focused rather than action-focused language. I like the following possible goals for lessons or short sequences:

1. Introduce a concept or skill
2. Deepen your understanding of a concept or practice a skill
3. Connect a concept or skill to others
4. Extend a concept or skill to new contexts

If the purpose of writing goals is to structure a course and show students what they will be learning, consider using organizing questions. There can be a few overarching questions for a course -- one class I taught used "How do systems behave?",  "How can we use math to model biological systems?" and "How can we use models to predict behavior?". Each question can have subquestions and sub-subquestions that you can introduce at the start of a lesson. The virtue of this approach is that few things pique curiosity like a question.

There's nothing wrong with explicitly stating the purpose of a lesson. But let's do it in ways that don't mislead student about learning.