Writing Learning Objectives in the Social Studies Classroom

As I noted in class, the art of writing clear learning objectives is probably not essential to the work of teaching. As long as we are thoughtful about our purpose, concise formulations of how cognitive operations interact with specific subject-matter content are probably not going to make or break us as teachers.

On other hand, what Andrew and I noticed in class today was that by asking you to specify your cognitive operation, we tended to push you beyond simply asking students to “recall” or “know” the facts and theories of the social science disciplines.

This is a good thing.

It’s helpful to know about Turner’s “Frontier Thesis”—but it’s even more useful to debate whether or not that thesis really explains anything about the American character. That is, we must always recall there are many ways to interact with content—that true knowledge requires us to turn it about in our heads, and to ultimately decide on its significance and power.

It’s also really helpful, especially in world history, to get specific about content. Viewed in one way, all the material in a social studies courses are case examples about how humans act in certain situations. We should thoughtfully choose our case examples in order to broaden our students’ view of the world and to help them best understand the big ideas we are attempting to explore.

Teaching is not purely linear. In a good Socratic discussion, for example, we don’t always know where we will end up. We don’t know what the students will have learned. In this case, writing a learning objective is not even possible.

But the reality is that the current policies and trends require that we be able to formulate what we want students to do ahead of time. And that we be able to express these students performances in concise and technical language. Hence, the need for us to practice writing these learner outcomes and to include them on all of our public documents.