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.
