“We spread an abundant and delicate feast in the programs and each small guest assimilates what he can.” –Charlotte Mason
There are three basic components to conventional lesson planning for a classroom:
1) Objectives for student learning
2) Teaching/learning activities
3) Strategies to check student understanding
The teacher identifies what she wants students to understand and be able to do at the end of the lesson.
Then she designs a set of steps to get students to that goal.
Then she designs an evaluation to see if the steps worked.
You can find this process, or a version of it, here. And here. And here and here and here.
Teachers are supposed to do this for every class, all day, every day.
Students are supposed to encounter this in every class, all day, every day.
This is the first of a three-part post about the conventional lesson-planning process and how it fits into “education as a life.”
Today we’ll talk about the objectives step.
Learning objectives sound comfortingly comprehensive and concrete:
“The student will be able to identify the causes and effects of the Civil War.”
“The student will be able to identify the basic structure of an atom.”
“The student will be able to identify the traditional elements in a fairy tale.”
These are all admirable objectives. Most are. But look at that first bit again: “The student will be able to.” The student doesn’t have much say in the matter.
Did he decide he wanted to identify the causes and effects of the Civil War?
Because here’s the thing: your student won’t learn about the Civil War in any meaningful way unless he wants to. And if he wants to, if he enjoys thinking about the Civil War and understanding its complicated roots and complicated results, he will do it whether or not your objective said he should.
I should pause here and specify what I mean by “meaningful way.” If you believe education is a life, than any given successful lesson should foster a life-bettering relationship between the student and the material studied. This merits a future post of its own.
Unless the student delights in what she is learning, relishes it in a way unique to her, derives internal satisfaction from it, she will not consistently meet worth-while learning objectives. If she does delight in the subject, the objective often becomes irrelevant.
Does this mean that we should only teach students already eager to learn?
No. But everyone loves a feast. You don’t have trouble getting most people in most circumstances to sit down to a banquet table of well-prepared dishes.
If you prepare a feast—a Civil War feast, or a Mozart feast, or a solar system feast, or even a phonics feast—and invite your students to it, education will become a delight.
We train our palates to complexity through exposure to delights. Children and their minds and souls operate the same way, learning being part of the soul’s nourishment.
If you are the host at a feast, it’s rude to dictate to your guests exactly what they WILL or WILL NOT eat, and it’s impossible to dictate exactly how their bodies will digest that food or how they will use the energy it provides.
If you force a young person to eat a dish that she takes no delight in, she may be able to correctly analyze its ingredients and list them for you, but she isn’t likely to want to eat it again. She may technically get some nutritional value from what she’s eaten, but you have stripped the beauty of food and the process of eating around a table together, and reduced the likelihood that she will come back again to the same food willingly. And for what purpose?
How many people do you know who come out of high school literature class having met all of the learning objectives but hating The Great Gatsby? I know many.
Lesson planning still takes a great deal of time and energy when you approach it with a feast mindset. My students are guests at our table. We pore over and assemble ingredients for months. We want the dishes to be mentally and physically accessible. We want them to be healthful AND delicious. We want to delight our guests without surfeiting them. We want them to be hungry for the next day’s feast, eager for new delights.
That feast mindset can be a bit scary if you have any conventional training in education. It means relinquishing control over outcomes, broadening objectives into over-arching (sometimes un-measuarable) goals. How do you know if you’ve done it right? You don’t always. And you can’t press the issue. And every class will approach your standard dishes differently.
Last year I enjoyed Robert Frost during our spring term with my fifth and sixth graders. Each week we read a poem or two. I asked students to tell the poems back to me. I [usually] resisted the urge to editorialize their versions. If the students had something to say about it, questions or comments, we went over them. If they didn’t, we closed the book and went out to lunch.
They aren’t getting anything out of this. I can’t even tell if they are engaged. That’s what I thought for the first month or two.
But their comments began to get more and more perceptive. They wanted to talk longer and longer. They started to make connections between poems. When we got to “Two Tramps in Mud Time” in March, the students had an discussion about the relationship between work and leisure. I used their discussion as a jumping off point to invite guests to our class to discuss how they merge vocation and avocation in their lives.
The more we read, the more my students astounded me at what they understood, the themes they identified, and the pleasure they derived from both the sound and sense of the poems.
At the end of the year many of my students put Frost down on their feedback pages as one of their favorite parts of the year. It turned out this way because the students wanted it to. And it’s not exactly what I would have done with objectives. Did they know everything that I know about Frost by the end of the semester? No. Did they love him? Yes, and not just the “high performing” students.
Common Core says that sixth graders should be able to “cite textual evidence to support analysis of what a text says explicitly as well as inferences drawn from the text.”
I suppose my students were doing this in their conversations about Frost. Most of them, at some point or another during the semester, made a conclusion about one of the poems and said where it came from. If I had been writing objectives for each of our visits with Frost, I suppose they would have said something like this Common Core sample. But I don’t see why it’s helpful to think about it that way except when you are required to for administrative reasons.
What I’m really interested in is that my students love Robert Frost already at 12 years old, that the next time they meet him, they encounter him as soul- nourishment, a familiar and evocative taste.
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CC image courtesy of garlandcannon on Flickr.
I’d say that’s all fair and good.
Sounds a lot like a montessori-like philosophy, without disrespecting what the Common Core tries to accomplish. I mean, administrative necessities are not inherently bad – but it sounds like you’re saying they just aren’t too much in line with what an educator would normally try to do in a classroom for his/her students. True ?
Thanks for reading, Jeff!
I also have great respect for what Common Core is trying to accomplish and for Montessori as well, as different as they are from each other. So many great educators out there responding to their own contexts and students!
I think many teachers do emphasize objectives in the classroom — i.e. tell students what they should be doing with the material in front of them/design activities around those goals/evaluate for achievement of those goals. My thought is that the students take on a fundamentally passive role in that scenario, because (no matter how “active” the learning activities) the goals are dictated by someone else.
I find the feast metaphor compelling because of the agency it implies, and because of how it puts students in the place of honor. They don’t decide what dishes are laid in front of them, but how they interact with them, or what enchants them, is somewhat up to them. Out of our historical fiction about the Civil War, one student might retain a timeline of battles, another might retain and later use the author’s descriptive style, another might get interested in the clothes of the characters, and another involve himself more deeply in the emotional content of the story. Without objectives, I don’t have hold to them accountable to all have clone-similar relationships with the material when we finish. I think the parts that stick with them will be almost exclusively those points of personal relationship (and talking with adults about what they remember from school confirms this), and so I’m interested in nurturing that relationship. .
There’s also probably something to be said here about the difference between a “content-focused” classroom and a “skills-focused” classroom. Hopefully I’ll get a chance to do a post on that soon.