1st September 2011 9:00
By Blue Tutors
We’ve written a piece before on lesson goals, and why it’s so important for a tutor to state the aim of a lesson before it begins. However, in our experience it seems as though many people misunderstand the crucial aspects that make a lesson goal a good lesson goal.
Probably the best way to decide on a lesson goal is to consider what you, the tutor, want to elicit from the student by the end of the lesson. Beginning the lesson by saying “Today we’re going to talk about the Second World War”, clearly doesn’t communicate what you’re looking for from the student, however, it’s commonly something we’ve seen a tutor say, thinking that it’s a good lesson goal.
A lesson goal is not a title, a brief name to give to a lesson so that it’s clear what the lesson will be about. For example, if one was to make a new year’s resolution to lose some weight, they wouldn’t say “my goal is to lose weight” because there is no temporal aspect, and no way of measuring whether the goal has been achieved (that’s assuming that the loss of 1 gram wouldn’t make the person feel as if they had achieved their goal).
So, enough about bad lesson goals. What we want to communicate is how to set a good lesson goal. A recipe is an excellent example of a good goal, because the chef knows exactly what is to be achieved, and will know whether he/she has been successful or not. You wouldn’t go to a restaurant, and give an instruction to ‘cook’ something, and then be annoyed when given an omelette because you wanted a fillet steak. Similarly, as tutors, we shouldn’t be telling students that we’re going to talk about the Second World War, and then find it strange when they refer everything to Hitler, when we wanted them to argue for and against the rights of a conscientious objector to refuse to fight.
Goals must be specific and measurable, and it is the measurable part of a lesson goal that tutors often find difficult to incorporate into lessons. Generally tutors understand the need for a lesson to be specific (“We’re going to learn maths” seems like a silly lesson goal to almost everyone), but we’ve come across a general reluctance to make lesson goals measurable, that is to communicate clearly what the student is to have achieved, so that the student can work towards the goal unaided if they’re capable enough. Many tutors see a lesson as a magic trick with a reveal at the end, something to amaze the student, and this is a stumbling block. We want students to know what the reveal is before the trick starts, and develop the skills to produce the reveal themselves.
With any subject, no matter what skills needed, an ideal goal is to say “we’re going to understand this concept, with the aim to answer this question”. Obviously the question could be an essay question, or a maths problem, or any of the other ways of testing a student’s understanding, but the crucial thing is that by setting this question as a goal, the student knows what he/she is working towards, and, at the end of the lesson, will be aware whether they’ve achieved the goal, or to what extent they’ve achieved the goal.
The huge benefit of good lesson goals is that it focuses a student. It takes away the disclarity and vagueness that many tutors feel exist when allowing the student to decide on the route of their lesson. Many tutors find that often a good lesson goal is all that’s needed when tutoring; if the student is aware of what’s required, then often they will achieve the goal without any further help from their tutor, and surely that’s what we ideally want?