Why both writing a lesson aim? Are they not printed in the coursebook? Ross and regular guest Dave Weller discuss why it’s a good idea to write a lesson aim, what a good lesson aim looks like, and what are the drawbacks to lesson aims…
How to Plan Lesson Aims and Why (With Dave Weller)
Ross Thorburn: All right, Dave Weller. Welcome back.
Dave Weller: Hurrah!
Ross: Today, I thought we could talk about something that you've written a lot about, which is lesson aims.
Dave: That seemed to be quite simple, I know, but they actually can be quite complex. The reasons behind them can be quite important as well.
Ross: What got you interested in that? Like I said, on your website, that's the thing that you've probably written the most about. Why did you choose that as a thing to focus on?
Dave: In the context that I train in, a lot of people tend not to do lesson aims or not see the point of them. That definitely reminds me of a light bulb moment I had years and years ago. I received a training about aims. Prior to that, I'd always just let my aims be set by the course book. I thought aims are for idiots.
[laughter]
Dave: Why would you bother spending all this extra time trying to think through what you should do, why you should do it, when you could just open a book and walk into class?
Ross: I thought, today, we could, maybe, split our conversation into three parts. Maybe, first of all, why bother planning aims or why bother writing them, how to write a good aim, and then are there any disadvantages or pitfalls to having aims.
Dave: Ooh, I like that last one.
Ross: [laughs] Great.
Why Bother Writing Lesson Aims
Ross: I know you touched on it already, but why bother writing good aims? When did you start deciding to spend more time writing aims?
Dave: After I received a training on writing aims, I realized that relying on the course book or someone else to set your aims meant that a lot of the time, the classes that you delivered would miss the mark. They wouldn't be applicable to the majority of the students in the class.
Really, it was a lazy way to outsource your thinking to somebody else who wasn't there, who didn't know your students and didn't know your teaching context, or even you. They weren't in the best position to make those decisions for you.
Ross: It's so true that the person that wrote that chapter in the book has never met you and never been to your school. They've never met your students. Who knows, right? They might never have taught a class before. You never know.
Dave: [laughs]
Ross: Seriously, though.
Dave: In some of the course books I've seen, that might be quite true.
Ross: In all seriousness. They're not necessarily going to be the best qualified people to do that.
Dave: Something that first‑year teachers did, as I did at that time, is you're really in survival mode. You're walking into class. You're trying to get all your basic classroom management techniques correct.
Managing a class, behavior management, delivering instructions, grading your language, and all these things are improving. The students, unfortunately, tend to almost take lowest priority, so you deliver or you execute your lesson plan.
If you can do that, you feel like you've had a successful lesson monitoring the impact that they have on the students and if they learn, tends to not be your highest priority because you're surviving as a first‑year teacher.
Ross: You also teach the plan or teach the students.
Dave: Precisely.
Ross: Obviously, there's other things that are important there as well. For example, if you are very clear on what you're trying to achieve in the lesson, then it gives you much more room to improvise and make better decisions, a bit like the army example that we spoke about before.
If the soldiers on the ground know what the objective is rather than just blindly following and carrying out orders, they are able to improvise because they know what they're trying to do or where they're trying to get to.
Dave: Obviously, I wasn't training my class to kill other people...
[laughter]
Dave: ...but I totally agree. That's almost an argument for making your aims explicit. If you have adult learners or students who are able to cognitively comprehend why you're doing this.
Even if not, I also think that having good aims is the first step to personalizing, to differentiating because it forces you to consider the personality, and the characters, and the levels, and abilities of the students in your class while you create that aim.
It forces you to move away from just treating the class as one homogeneous group that you just deliver the lesson to.
Ross: Or not even considering them at all and just considering the textbook, which is another possibility, right?
Dave: Absolutely. It's almost like the stereotype of the professor that bumbles into the lecture hall, delivers the lecture, then looks up and realizes...
Ross: There's no one there.
Dave: [laughs] Precisely.
Ross: Also, I guess it's probably a good way for you to measure or to start paying attention to, "Did my class work, or did it actually achieve what I wanted it to achieve?" That maybe helps you get out of that potential edutainment area where everyone smiled. They laughed. They had so much fun. It was such a great class.
If you have an aim, and you're very clear about the aim, you can actually tell, did the students get out of it what they were meant to get out of it?
Dave: Even if you misjudge them, say, it's a fairly new class where you don't know the students quite as well. You might pick an aim for them that isn't appropriate.
When you're in the middle of class, that can come as a realization to you. You go, "Ah, OK, it's time to either grade it, make it slightly easier for them or make it more difficult or even change it completely if it's, perhaps, on a topic that might not be of interest that you thought would be."
How to Write a Lesson Aim
Ross: The standard thing that gets taught on most courses is SMART, S‑M‑A‑R‑T. Was it Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time‑bound? [laughs]
Dave: Well done for memory [inaudible 05:49] .
Ross: With that, there's some useful things in there for teachers. I do especially like the measurable. That's one of more useful things to point out to teachers. People often have a tendency to write things for aims.
The students will learn these words. Then you can get into this thing of, well, how do you measure if someone has learned? Well, you can't. What's a more useful verb in there? Relevant is also useful.
That relates to what you were saying a minute ago. You have to think about the students and what they can do. Maybe, achievable is quite good. Actually, it's not that a bad model.
[laughter]
Dave: OK, scrap it. Let's just use that from now on.
[laughter]
Ross: What other things that you would recommend that teachers think about when writing an aim?
Dave: There's a couple of things, really. I used to always say by the end of the lesson, the learners will be able to do something. The problem with that is you're setting a very high standard or a very low standard. Either you're pushing every learner to achieve it, which is an impossible task, depending on the difficulty and how new it is.
Ross: You're assuming homogeneousness among the students, or that everyone's going to start at the same level and then reach the same level.
Dave: Precisely. I always find it better to use what the students will be better able to use and then your target language.
Ross: I'm more of a fan of that as well. I almost see it like, imagine all the students as dots on a graph at different levels. The point, surely, is not all of them make their way over some line or some hurdle, but just that everyone's made some progress. That's much better than everyone getting over this singular point.
Dave: Precisely. Then you're effectively able to use things like positive reinforcement as well. If certain learners achieve it and others don't, especially the strong learners, you only say, "Well done. You use this correctly."
Then other students, the weaker students who maybe would frequently miss out on hitting the aims would feel disheartened and discouraged. At least, if you use better able to, you can see an improvement.
Because your aim is using it better, they've achieving the aim that you have for them and say you're genuinely able to offer them praise and encouragement.
Ross: How else do you phrase your aim?
Dave: I tend to think of the language that we use in classrooms in four levels. From biggest to smallest, it will be the topic and the context, the function, and then the form. The topic would be jobs, or the Internet, or something, the wide, broad subject.
The context would be the real life situation that the language takes place in. If the topic is the what, then the context will mostly be like the where, the who, the when. Then underneath that or within that would be the function. That would be the why.
Why are we communicating in the first place? Things like giving advice, making a complaint, those are the examples of the function of the language. Then the smallest part of that would be the form. This would be the the lexis or vocabulary, the grammar and the phonology of the language that you want to use.
If you almost use that as a little checklist of the language that you're going to be using, you can make sure the students are clear on the topic.
Set a clear context at the beginning. Understand why they're communicating and the situation. Then, of course, at some stage in the lesson, you would check the accuracy of the form as well.
Ross: Presumably there, are you going from the top to the bottom then? Are you going from the topic all the way down to the form?
Dave: Usually, yes.
Ross: Often, the problem or a common mistake maybe that teachers make ‑‑ I was definitely guilty of this in my first few years ‑‑ was you start off with a language and then you go, "Oh, OK. When might people say this?"
Then you go from the language up to the topic. Then, often, you end up with lots of rather contrived activities and situations.
Dave: Absolutely. For the rest of the aim, putting that altogether, there are four things that you should take into account. The first one is the context you're operating in is what's required by the syllabus or the curriculum that you're using.
[laughter]
Ross: Go back to the course book, basically?
Dave: Yes. Just use the course book. No, if you stray too far from that, you may well get an irate boss pulling you into the office and getting complaints from the students that they've purchased this course book or the course for specific reasons. You've just been having a rant about your favorite topics in the classroom.
Ross: That's the learning center part, is it?
Dave: Yes, that will be the learner center part, personalizing it. Of course, a specific which make sure the language, one of the three, which is the four levels we talked about. Lastly, you need your aims to be observable.
You're not a mind reader. Just because you deliver the lesson to the whole group doesn't mean they've learned it. You need to be looking out for specific spoken language or written language to make sure they're producing utterances correctly or fluently.
Ross: More fluently or more correctly than at the beginning.
Dave: Indeed, yes. Those aims are for your learners. If you have the spare capacity, don't forget to include personal aims for you as the teacher as well. It's always nice to have something you're working on, to improving.
It could be as simple as, "I want to improve or expand my error correction techniques." It could be, "I want to try a new methodology." As long as you're working on something as a teacher, even if it's not every class, even if it's just maybe one or two classes a week or your experimentation classes, then that's still keeping you developing as a teacher.
Ross: It's not that whole idea of sub‑aims. You mentioned one there which is a sub‑aim for yourself. Then I guess you can also have sub‑aims for, "I'm going to work on this pronunciation," which might not make it into your main aim. You might include some skill, like reading for fluency or something as well, right?
Dave: Absolutely, yes, especially the main aims tend to be set in most part by the curriculum. The sub‑aims would be things that you've noticed particular learners might be weaker on. Or a group of learners in the class might have trouble with fossilized pronunciation, for example, in which case, yes, that would be a great thing to include in a sub‑aim.
[music]
Ross: Let's talk about some potential drawbacks of having aims. We tend to analyze, or maybe not analyze but, at least, evaluate teaching and learning on a lesson‑by‑lesson basis. This was a good class. Students achieved this aim, but I feel that that paradigm has a problem.
It assumes that learning happens over one‑hour spaces of time, but I think it doesn't. One of the issues for me for having aims is that we tend to forget about some really, really important things that we know impact learning and things like recycling is a great example.
It often gets completely forgotten about when we look at an aim fit. Did you help students transfer that language from their short‑term memory into their long‑term memory?
Dave: I think a lot of people, if they think about that, they assume that the curriculum will take care of that for them. That's a great thing to do for the teachers to have a look ahead and see what's coming up in the ...
Ross: Future units or something?
Dave: Future units for the rest of the term. It's hard for them to take that into account all at once.
Ross: I just feel it with some of those things that if we didn't have this idea of measuring each class on a single aim, it might be a lot easier for teachers to do some of those things, to think about, "OK, what language here in this class can I preview that is gonna come up in future units?
What language can I review or recycle from previous units? What are some things that I can do that are going to help to increase students' interest and motivation in the English language?"
They seem like smaller skills within the context of a class but, overall, in terms of a whole course, those things might actually end up being more important than the seven words or the one grammar point you're trying to focus on in this lesson.
Dave: That is leading into a different area. It's almost helping your learners become better learners in the classroom. The ability to teach those meta‑learning strategies, things like, as you mentioned, repetition, space repetition, interleaving, all those things. If teachers were more aware of those, they could weave those into their aims as perhaps sub‑aims.
[music]
Ross: Dave, thanks again for coming on. Do you want to give the blog a quick plug?
Dave: Sure. If you want to read more about these topics, then please visit barefootteflteacher.com.
Ross: Great.