- Planning instruction
plays critically (a general goal), but doing so may require that they learn details about the characters and
plots of the major plays (a specific objective). Since general goals usually take longer to reach than specific
objectives, instructional planning has to include both time frames.- Plan for what students do, not what the teacher does. This idea may seem obvious, but it is easy to overlook
it when devising lesson plans. Consider that example again about teaching Shakespeare. If you want
students to learn the details about Shakespeare’s plays, it is tempting to plan objectives like “Summarize the
plot of each play to students”, or “Write and hand out to students an outline of the plays”. Unfortunately
these objectives describe only what the teacher does, and makes the assumption (often unwarranted) that
students will remember what the teacher says or puts in writing for them. A better version of the same
objective should focus on the actions of students, not of teachers—for example, “Students will write a
summary, from memory, of each of the major plays of Shakespeare”. This version focuses on what students
do instead of what the teacher does. (Of course you may still have to devise activities that help students to
reach the objective, such as providing guided practice in writing summaries of plays.) - To insure diversity of goals and objectives when planning, consider organizing goals and objectives by using
a systematic classification scheme of educational objectives. At the beginning of this section we stated that
there is a need, when devising goals and objectives, for both the specific and the general. Actually a more
accurate statement is that there is a need for goals and objectives that refer to a variety of cognitive
processes and that have varying degrees of specificity or generality. One widely used classification scheme
that does so, for example, is one proposed 50 years ago by Benjamin Bloom (1956) and revised recently by
his associates (Anderson & Krathwohl, 2001). We describe this system, called a taxonomy of objectives, in
the next section.
Taxonomies of educational objectives
When educators have proposed taxonomies of educational objectives, they have tended to focus on one of three
areas or domains of psychological functioning: either students’ cognition (thought), students’ feelings and emotions
(affect), or students’ physical skills (psychomotor abilities). Of these three areas, they have tended to focus the most
attention on cognition. The taxonomy originated by Benjamin Bloom, for example, deals entirely with cognitive
outcomes of instruction.
Bloom’s Taxonomy:
In its original form, Bloom’s Taxonomy of educational objectives referred to forms of cognition or thinking,
which were divided into the six levels (Bloom, et al., 1956). Table 31 summarizes the levels, and offers two kinds of
examples—simple ones based on the children’s story, Goldilocks and the Three Bears, and complex ones more
typical of goals and objectives used in classrooms. The levels form a loose hierarchy from simple to complex
thinking, at least when applied to some subjects and topics. When planning for these subjects it can therefore be
helpful not only for insuring diversity among learning objectives, but also for sequencing materials. In learning
about geography, for example, it may sometimes make sense to begin with information about specific places or
societies (knowledge and comprehension), and work gradually toward comparisons and assessments among the
places or societies (analysis and synthesis).
Table 31: Bloom’s Taxonomy of objectives: cognitive domain219