Gaining Clarity on Our Goals

Gaining Clarity on Our Goals

                “Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards”

                                                                       -Soren KierKegaard, Journals 1843.

Many times I have heard teachers talking about the importance of goals, the importance of having clear what students need, what the Ministry establishes, what the school wants, and what teachers should do in order to reach goals; however, do we really know what to do and how to do it? Every time that I read something, that I come back home I wonder the same; unfortunately, the answer is always: no, we do not know. The following question, if we are still interested, should be why.

We have been talking about backward design which, according to Grant Wiggins And Jay McTighe, is goal directed; this means not only take into account the aim for specific results but at the same time design accordingly; from that point of view, the stages suggested in chapter 1 entail a relation between them, especially Stage 1 which will give the evidence for Stage 2, will suggest the type of instructions and learning experiences needed in Stage 3; the objective? to avoid common mistakes at the moment of designing or even better at the moment of teaching. According to these authors there are two recurring problems in design: aimless coverage of content and isolated activities, while disconnected from intellectual goals in the learner’s minds.

I could not resist staying here, on the first page of this chapter, not because I did not read it but because here we have most of the answers we usually attempt to reply; when I think in our current educational problems I usually think about how neglected this is and I am not sure if those who allegedly know what to do, really know it; our system does not answer to the needs of those students who do not have a real possibility neither to their dreams or capacities, otherwise the gap between schools would not exist, therefore, something is wrong, something is not giving the results or what it should… the first rapprochement seems to be the lack of clarity in our goals.

Understanding by Design

“…too many teachers focus on the teaching and not the learning”.

                                               Grant Wiggins And Jay McTighe

This seems to be the problem when analyzing the teaching-learning process; teachers prepare their classes thinking about how but not taking into consideration what, even better the what  is previously given by the ministry, however, is not always the answer for student’s reality, needs and interests.

The objectives then, are the answer, nonetheless, how often teachers really focus on them?

Backward design suggests something that it seems obvious, but at the moment of thinking about what we are doing, makes us wonder not only about our profession but how we are doing it; maybe because there are too many things to do, maybe because time is not enough or even worst, only because we “know” what to do but we do not know.

The obvious is, to design classes considering three main stages: identify desired results, determine acceptable evidence and plan learning experiences and instruction, in other words, it is a backward glance, in which we consider first what it is expected, what concrete evidence we have to achieve the goals and finally prepare and think the best method to use, the materials needed, the activities, strategies, procedures we are going to use with a particular group of students, in a particular reality.

If we think about it, everything is done on the other way around; we usually think of how we are going to teach a content, which material or method we are going to use and finally on the results we expect from that; as the text says: “a typical episode of what might be called content-focused design instead of results-focused design” (p. 15).

This new focus is an alert…something is telling us that we need to start thinking clearly… I wonder if the Chilean problem (that a common student cannot speak English in spite of his/her 8 or 9 years of English instruction) is because teachers are focusing on how but not on what… maybe you can help me.

be patient

We are working for you