Teach Effectively!

Good objectives are an important part of teaching effectively. Professor Plum (AKA M. Kozloff) has a fine introduction to the topic of objectives. Using lots of example and not-examples, he illustrates (with humor) why they’re important and what good ones look like.

I dropped a comment on the good Professor’s EducatioNation entry on objectives in which I referred to Bateman & Herr’s “Writing Measurable IEP Goals and Objectives” and that reference bears repeating here. If you need to write goals and objectives, this book tells you how. It’s filled with examples that clearly illustrate the critical concepts and use problems for which teachers commonly must write objectives.

While I’m at it, here’s a gratuitous comment: Most objectives can be written with just a few verbs. Those verbs are “say,” “write,” and “touch”; I’ll give a little on “read,” provided it means “read aloud” (which is a lot like saying). More on this in another post.