30th August 2012 12:12
By Blue Tutors
Lesson Goals
Those of you who have read the tutoring advice pages on our website, and I hope that’s most of you, will realise how important it is to set a good lesson goal.
In the assessments this is a point on which many people fail; either because they don’t provide a goal at all and just launch in to what they are teaching us, or because they say things like ‘I thought we’d look at Charles Darwin’ or ‘Classical Poetry’.
While you may think the above are goals, they are not specific enough to class as such. ‘I thought we’d look at how Charles Darwin writes in the final paragraph of his On the Origin of Species and what impact this has on ...’ and ‘Today we are going to look at what it is about Ovid’s Amores that upset Augustus’ are far better goals than the former.
Having to specify a goal also prevents you from trying to achieve too much in a lesson. If you can gain understanding in one aspect of a subject that is enough for a lesson. Okay, if you can do two aspects and achieve understanding that’s fab, but don’t think you’re not doing enough if what you are doing is really sinking in.
More haste, less speed, as they say!