Mastery Objective or Activity?
Does your school or system require that objectives be posted in the classroom? Are they part of your lesson plans? Something that shows up in your curriculum? At some point in your teaching career you’ve probably encountered SWBAT – Students will be able to… But can you put SWBAT in front of just anything and call it an objective?
Often when teachers plan, whether it’s for a single lesson or the next unit, they focus on the activities students need to complete. With curricula that are packed with must-do projects, tests or worksheets, it’s easy to concentrate only on what work students have to get done and not what they should get out of doing that work.
The good news is that with a little reflection, it’s easy to upgrade an objective from the activity level to the mastery level. “SWBAT create a poster about the prairie” may become “SWBAT identify four species of prairie plants and animals and explain how they interact in their environment.” It’s still important for students to know what you want them to do – complete those worksheets or make a poster – but sometimes we forget to explain what it is we really want them to know. When we write objectives at the mastery level we not only clarify for students why they’re doing this work, but we also uncover the key elements for ourselves which makes classroom differentiation much easier.
For example, if a student has difficulty writing or breaking down a complex task, making the prairie poster could take more time than is available leaving her struggling to catch up. For some younger students who are still developing the motor skills for cutting and pasting or who could get lost for an hour looking for prairie pictures in a magazine, it’s difficult for them to meet the objective written at the activity level. This objective says the student must create a poster, implying that the most important skill is poster creation.
But when the teacher rewrites the objective at a mastery level, she opens up the possibilities for expressing the essential knowledge in other ways. Maybe now the student could walk the teacher through a textbook chapter using the illustrations to show what he knows about the prairie environment or select prairie pictures from a variety of choices, group them, and tell a partner how they interact.
Take a moment to look at the objectives posted on your board today or in a lesson plan for next week and reflect on what the objective really asks students to know and be able to do. Give yourself a pat on the back for your mastery level objectives and be on the look out for those that could use an upgrade!
–Claire Lambert
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