SWBAT Flashes
Dorothy
stressed the need for us, as teachers, to continuously ask what is my goal for this particular lesson? when prepping for a
class. It brought back flashes of
writing meticulous SWBAT (Students Will Be Able To) objectives within the daily
grind of lesson planning as a student teacher in the Philadelphia School
District. Those flashes didn’t
necessarily trigger warm, fuzzy memories—when you’re in thick of everyday
teaching, writing and refining lesson objectives can be monumental pain in the
ass—but it made me appreciate the discipline that my training has afforded
me. Curriculum design and its
component parts (like planning for next Wednesday’s lesson) are ultimately driven
by specific outcomes, goals, and objectives.
“Backwards
Design” (also referred to as “Backwards Planning”) is a way of “thinking
through” your teaching by first considering what learning outcomes, goals, and
objectives you would like your students to achieve. By considering this approach, more meaningfully-structured
lessons and purposefully-designed assessments might unfold. For the purposes of L2 acquisition
(learning a second language), instructors might want to think in terms of
targeting very specific language skills—not necessarily avoiding the big picture,
but thinking in terms of the small(er) picture first. Conjugating verbs in X-tense, producing Y-sounds, or construct/partake
in an authentic dialogue in Z-context.
Small is good; it’s about development then building upon that
development.
In
other news, some of the “techy” ideas/programs that I learned or was introduced
to in class included: TubeChop (truncates YouTubes clips; tubechop.com), Artpad
(think: capturing the creation of an MS Paint-like graphic; artpad.art.com),
and Acapela-Group (a text-to-speech program; acapela-group.com), and iFrames (ahem…
this one’s gonna take some time…).
Ahh, yes. SWBAT. My favorite part about SWBAT was that we were supposed to write it on the whiteboard, but I'm not sure anyone (myself included) ever told students what it stood for. Just another little taste of the Gilliam-esque alphabet soup students wade through in our institutions of education.
ReplyDeleteBut you make an excellent point -- by realizing the goal we have set for our students as educators, our planning and forethought and actions can all reflect and lead to the ultimate goal. This also makes me wonder: how much is technology a means to an end, or the end itself? I guess it all depends on what you're teaching, but when students need assistance with the technology, it's not really just a tool anymore. Hm. Thought-provoking post, Zack!
Hi Zack,
ReplyDeleteThank you for sharing your teaching experience, which reminded me of my own feeling when I wrote the SWBAT in my lesson plans. Although we do not always stick to the objectives we set nor they could be achieved every time, the SWBAT does help to make a more workable layout for our classes, which is important for both our students and ourselves. When so many of us as language teachers are overwhelmed by the development of educational technology and the possibilities it brings, there is always one strategy or principle we can hold on to: break things into manageable chunks and deal with them one by one.