The saying, “If you don’t know where you’re going, you may wind up someplace you didn’t plan to be”, is definitely true for teaching. It’s surprising how many of us begin a new unit, or a new lesson, without a clear idea of what achievement or success will look like when we are finished. We plan to the content to be mastered, break it into manageable parts, think about preparation, materials, texts, technology, and meeting the needs of diverse learners. We hope that when we finish the final activity, our students will be able to prove that they learned what we intended.
All too often, we have no real idea how students will prove that what they learned, and how well they learned it, is what we intended. Too often, we don’t know exactly what we expect from our students, even though we write objectives and specify outcomes. We use words like, “students will enjoy reading”, “students will have a deeper appreciation for”, “students will master the concepts of….”, “students will demonstrate their understanding of… “. But how do we define the target we want students to hit? What is the Bull’s Eye for them?
Targeted teaching specifies not only the clear objective to be met, but also the level or degree of mastery expected of all students. Defining the objective in this way, “18 of 20 students will memorize multiplication tables to 12 and demonstrate mastery with an average performance of 85% on a teacher-constructed math test consisting of twenty items incorporating both numeric and word problems” is quite different from, “Students will memorize multiplication tables”.
When we begin with the latter, we wind up someplace we didn’t plan to be, usually with less success than we desired. Typically, when we assess the outcome of our teaching, we describe student responses in these ways: “Students enjoyed reading the stories”, “Students understood” and, “Students mastered the skill.” That’s all well and good, but how do we measure enjoyment, mastery, or understanding? What constitutes a high (or low) level of enjoyment, understanding, or mastery?
It may be that the lesson or unit was well developed and well received. However it falls far short of being a “great” lesson if it fails to meet the outcome you were hoping to achieve. Students got the “gist” of what we taught, but we don’t know how well they can integrate the new information with the old. We don’t know how well they will remember the information from the new lesson by the time we have started teaching the next. Beginning with these specific and measurable outcomes in mind, and building assessment measures of objectives into the lesson is “teaching to the target”. Preparing lessons to meet each student’s highest ability level on the assessment measure, is teaching to the target, and is one important difference between truly masterful teachers and others. Masterful teachers prepare lessons from finish to start, with measurable achievement as their goal!
Tags: Degree, Students, Teaching