Defining Objectives

Overview

Teaching: 60 min
Exercises: 0 min

Questions

• How do we define the objectives of a lesson?

• What are the benefits of doing this before writing the content?

• What are the challenges associated with writing learning objectives?

• How do considerations of cognitive load influence the structure of a lesson?

Objectives

• Define high-level learning objectives for their lesson.

• Define objectives for episodes.

• Choose appropriate verbs to describe skills taught in a lesson or episode.

• Describe three ways in which concept maps can be used in the development and/or teaching of a lesson.

Reading List

• Instructor Training: Working with Learning Objectives.
• Learning Objectives section of Teaching Tech Together
• Concept Maps and Seven Plus or Minus Two sections of Teaching Tech Together.

Discussion Prompts

• Given its target audience, and the expected duration of the workshops where it will be taught, what level(s) of Bloom’s Taxonomy could you expect learners to reach by the end of your lesson?
• How challenging did you find it to define specific learning objectives for your lesson?
• Did the process of defining target audience and learning objectives change what you plan to teach in your lesson? If so, how?
• How do you plan to break your lesson up into episodes, in the context of what you know about short- and long-term memory?
• Do you think concept maps can be a helpful tool when planning the structure of your lesson?
• In what other ways, if any, do you plan to make use of concept maps in the development and/or content of your lesson?

Homework Tasks

Note for groups of participants collaborating on a single lesson: ALL: a task to be done by all collaborators on a lesson; ONE: a task to be done by only one participant per lesson, ideally after discussion with their collaborators.

• (ONE) Create placeholder files for the other episodes in your lesson. Optionally, add learning objectives to these episode files too.
• (ALL) Schedule an opportunity to teach at least one episode of your new lesson. This trial run should take place between sessions 7 and 8(26 March 2021 - 9 April 2021). See the Episode Trial Run callout below for more details.
• (ALL) Read Chapter 4: Designing Challenges of the Curriculum Development Handbook.
• (ONE) If your lesson will use an example dataset, in the Data Set section of your Lesson Design Notes briefly describe the features and requirements an ideal dataset would have.
• (ALL) Identify at least one appropriate example data set/narrative for your lesson, and add a link to the data set in the shared notes document.
• (ALL) In the Data Set section of your Lesson Design Notes, briefly summarise:
  • why you chose these datasets/examples,
  • what advantages they have as a tool for learning,
  • and what disadvantages/difficulties/complexities they would introduce.

Episode Trial Run

Between sessions 7 and 8 of the Study Groups program, every lesson developer will teach one of the episodes they have been developing. You should choose that episode now. Where a lesson has multiple collaborators participating in the program, each participant should prepare to teach an episode, ideally in the same event as the other trial runs for that lesson. Given that you will be teaching it in three or four weeks’ time, you may want to focus on your chosen episode for the remainder of the Study Groups program. These trial run sessions are expected to take no more than 60 minutes per episode.

You can choose the format and audience for this trial run. It could:

• take place online or in-person.
• be a private session attended by invitation only, or open to external participants.
• be delivered to members of your own network, community, or institution.
• be delivered to the other Study Group participants, developers of lessons in The Carpentries Incubator, or The Carpentries community as a whole.

However you choose to do it, please make sure you schedule this session as soon a possible.

Feedback and experience collected from testing lesson material like this will be most useful if the audience taught closely matches the intended audience for the lesson itself. However this is often not easy for a short trial run, especially if your chosen episode does not appear early in the lesson (as audience members will not have benefited from learning the previous episodes first). In this case, try to ensure that members of the audience are briefed on what kind of feedback to give (see session 7 for more information).

The Curriculum Community Developer can provide support for these sessions. For example, by providing access to an account with a paid Zoom license for the trial run, by helping advertise the session to The Carpentries (sub)communities, by listing sessions on The Carpentries Community Calendar, etc.

Key Points

• Key points will be defined during discussion.