CU Denver STEM Education - STME

Why We need to have a learning objective

Mahasin Ibrahim -

The learning objective is the core of our lesson plan. We need to be very careful about creating it and then plan according to that objective. Here is the link to Zhou's Blog, which explains why it is crucial.

https://learninginnovation.duke.edu/blog/2017/03/learning-objectives/

Back to my lesson plan, the objective of lesson 1 is to recognize when an angle measures 90 degrees, 180 degrees, or 360 degrees and connect it to a formative question that I used for this lesson "What is the measurement of the full rotation angle?" In this question, I used bloom's taxonomy (Remember level 1) to recall students' previous knowledge of the names of the angles and their measures.

I can connect my exit ticket as a task to the lesson objective. Here is it:

An equilateral triangle's angles each have a measure of 60 degrees.

  1. Can you put copies of an equilateral triangle together to form a straight angle? Explain or show your reasoning.
  2. Can you put copies of an equilateral triangle together to form a right angle? Explain or show your reason.

Students can decide how to express their thoughts (Visual or written). My knowledge about my students, some of them are language barriers and may not prefer using text to explain, encouraged me to give them the option to choose the most comfortable way to explain and reason their answer.

During the 90minutes lesson, cognitive demands as students will:

  • Remember-Level 1-for warm-up
  • Understand-Level 2: students will use models/diagrams to explain the mathematical concept: warm-up and tasks in the body of the lesson, where I provide visual models.
  • Apply- Level 2-Construct model- Exit ticket- Body of the lesson
  • Analyze- a) Level 2- Classify angles: warm-up questions.
  • Analyze-b) Level-4- all parts of the lesson.

Language demands are :

Students read the problem, write their answers and reasoning, speak with peers and teacher, listen to the discussion, instruction, and guide questions. Their function will be: Draw, Recognize/ Identify/Describe, Explain, and find the measure.

I also found this video of learning objective from CU Boulder interesting: