Where they are going, and how they are getting there....

In life, we create goals, where we want to be in 5 years, 10 years, etc.  We also create steps to reach those goals.  This past week we have been discussing and studying goals and objectives in education.  Much like the goals we create for ourselves in life, we must also as educators create goals, or our vision of what we want our students to attain.  To simplify this goals and make them manageable, we break them down into more specific steps, or objectives.  

Ex.:  Students will have an understanding of the influence immigration has had on the American culture. (This is a goal)...  Given the task of researching native cultural traditions of one of the five main immigrant populations during the early 1900's, the student will orally present to the class on how those traditions have transferred into the American culture according to the rubric and scoring at least 3 out of 4 overall.  (This is an objective)

It looks and sounds easier than it is.  While we as educators have a vision of the goals we want our students to attain, we also have to consider the standards that our administrators, districts, and state and national governments want our students to achieve.  In class, we have been working on developing goals and objectives for our unit plans.  We start with the standards, and then break them down further to the key ideas; Our goals are developed out of these two concepts.  With our goal in hand, we also consider the performance indicators; our objectives are developed out of these two concepts.
The standards are not the only thing to consider when developing goals and objectives.  We must also consider levels of thinking, referring extensively to Bloom's Taxonomy. Bloom's Taxonomy, for those that do not know, breaks learning down into levels of thinking with each next level more complex than the one before.  Here is a graphic to illustrate:

 

 For our students success we not only want them to have a foundation of knowledge, but also be able to apply that knowledge, even make judgments or opinions based on that knowledge.  We want their understanding of a topic to encompass each level of learning.