Translating goals objectives
An example from a common college goal

Teachers often have to translate someone else's statement of goals into objectives to use in their own classes. The goals may be set by:

• A school system.

• A state or national agency.

• A college.

• Employers.

Regardless of who provides the goals, teachers need to write objectives for them before they can hope to teach students to meet the goals. That means you and I have some work to do.

Goals objectives not necessarily 1 : 1

A writing program could have a single set of goals measured through different objectives for each year.

Each year as students move from middle school through high school, for example, students could work on the same old goals with different objectives.

With laddered objectives, students would build on each previous years' work in specific ways that would allow them to achieve the program goals by high school graduation.

It is also very possible that two different teachers might have the same learning goal but different objectives by which to measure achievement. When you are translating goals into objectives, there is no single right objective for a goal.

Example of goals set by colleges

Let's take a goal that many colleges list on their websites as behavior they expect high school students to exhibit if they don't want to spend their first year of college taking remedial courses:

High school graduates will be able to adapt their writing to the needs of the writing situation.

What terms in that goal statement need to be defined objectively so you could measure success?

Without being at all technical, I think we could safely agree that the goal's objectives would require students to:

• Know what a "writing situation" is.

• Be able to figure out what kind of writing a situation calls for

• Adjust to that situation.

Notice that the goal implies that students learn a way of writing that can be adapted to new situations. In other words, colleges have some way of writing that they consider a norm. For you to turn this goal into an objective, you have to figure out what that norm is.

Example objective #1

Here is one way to turn the goal shown above into a terminal objective for a course:

Within a week, high school writers will be able to write two papers, each under 750 words, on a single topic previously assigned or discussed in class. Each paper will be for a different audience specified in the writing prompt.

Here is another terminal objective for the same goal.

A second year high school student will be able to take the content of a paper s/he previously wrote on a class-related topic and rewrite it for a different purpose or audience within 72 hours.

For example, a student might be asked to take the content of a comparison essay and rewrite it as a single page memo.

As you can see, one goal might be measured through any of several objectives.

Both these objectives require a high level of intellectual function.

See another example of how to transform goals into objectives for use in teaching writing.