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Originally Posted by Bill O'Rights
How is it even possible to teach without a specific goal in mind? Now, I'm certainly not the brightest bulb in the box, but even I can determine that that concept is doomed to failure before it begins. I don't even tie my shoes without a specific goal in mind.
I should hope that the progenitor of that plan (or lack of a plan) was formally stripped of his/her teaching credentials in a public ceremony.
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It wasn't so much that there were no goals, it's that they came bottom up instead of top down in the planning stages.
In other words, I might assign an essay to my students, grade it, mark errors, and return it to the student. I might have them learn to diagram sentences with the goal being to learn how to diagram sentences. The assignment becomes the goal. The students are going to learn something, but not as much as they could.
Now, instead, I might look at my goals and see being able to write clearly, with good paragraph formation, clear transitions, using standard spelling and sentence structure, editing and proofreading to improve. I take this and I start designing lessons around meeting these goals, and in doing so, I realize that there is no outcome that benefits from sentence diagramming, so I don't have to use valuable class time on that.
In social studies or in studying a novel, the bottom up approach was even worse. A teacher would teach a unit on, say, the Civil War, with the goal being to learn about the civil war, and decide when it was test time what needed to be on the test as she reviewed the material. In a goal oriented approach, you'd start with a list of specific things you'd want students to know about the Civil War, such as being able to identify the economic and cultural factors that led to the start of the war. In a novel, let's say
Holes, an outcome might be for the students to be able to draw parallels between the three storylines presented and explain how they're connected to each other.
It's a difference between "We're going to study the Civil War and have a test and there are some cool, fun projects we can do" and "Students need to be able to demonstrate knowledge of X, Y, and Z concerning the Civil War and this is how they're going to do that" and then planning activities and instruction around that outcome. When done right, it focuses instruction on the most important goals and avoids wasting time on those that aren't as important, and allows the teacher to emphasize those points from the very beginning to maximize the students' later performance.
Teaching to the test isn't a bad thing, it's actually a very efficient teaching strategy if the test is a good one.