Chapter 8, page 175
couldn’t figure out why. When I consulted my department chair, he simply asked me, “What were your
goals for this class?” I couldn’t answer. Students left the class unsure of what they were supposed to learn
because I had set up an activity that—no matter how hands on it was—had no clear goals. When I revised
this (and many other activities) so that they were clearly focused on clearly specified instructional goals, the
classes started to fall together better. I was able to communicate to students what the instructional goals
were, and this helped them understand better the point of the activities. And I modified the activities, too, to
fit the goals more tightly.
Example 2. A recently hired history professor is teaching classes on her own for the first time. Although
she uses a fairly traditional history textbook, she has the central goal of promoting “historical thinking”
among the students. Her classes are heavily focused on discussions in which students debate what can be
concluded from primary source documents. In each class, she clearly articulates the range of reasoning
strategies that she hopes to see used in the discussion. Her exams consist of 30% multiple choice
questions about the textbook, 50% short-answer questions about the textbook, and 20% essay questions
in which she provides them with original source documents and asks them to draw conclusions and
explain their responses. As the semester progresses, she finds that students participate less and less in
the discussions. Lately she has been dreading going to class. She supposes that her students just don’t
like to think.
This professor’s problem is a mismatch between her goals and activities, on the one hand, and her
assessments, on the other. Although nearly 100% of her classes are focused on reasoning goals, only 20%
of her exams have this focus. It is no wonder that students become less and less willing to participate in
activities that are poorly represented on the exams. They become angry that she is not preparing them for
the tests she gives. This professor should either change her goals and activities to reflect what is on the
exams or change her exams to reflect her goals and activities. Here you can see that when exams are out of
sync with goals and activities, students become disaffected and unwilling to participate in the class
activities.
Example 3. This is a variant on the previous example. This time the same history professor has the same
central goal of promoting “historical thinking” using primary source documents. Her exams are heavily
focused on this. But her classes are mostly lecture classes in which lectures about the historical events
described in the textbook. She provides information that goes beyond the text but very seldom brings in
any primary sources. She occasionally provides pointers on how to think about primary source
documents, but this activity takes up less than 10% of all class time. She is baffled at the end of the
semester when she finds that she has received awful teaching evaluations.
This time the professor’s problem is a mismatch between her goals and assessments, on the one
hand, and her class activities, on the other. Her assessments are admirably tied to her goals, but she does
not provide instruction during class activities that prepare students properly for the assessments. If she
wants students to learn the difficult strategies involved in thinking like a historian, she must provide
instruction that helps them understand these strategies and give them many opportunities to use the
strategies they are learning.
The examples above illustrate some of the problems that can arise when goals, class activities, and
instruction are not tightly aligned.
Figure 8.2 below elaborates slightly on the instructional cycle (Zola, 19xx). Once a teacher establishes
instructional goals, the teacher can give pretests to find out what students know. The teacher designs
instruction that is responsible to what students still need to learn. While providing instruction, the teacher
monitors how learners are doing and diagnoses any learning difficulties that she notices; she uses this
information immediately to revise her planned instructional procedures. At the end of the instructional
cycle, she gives an assessment that is tightly linked to goals and classroom activities. Then she uses the