Interactive Objectives

Objectives are something that are instilled into the UK classroom with the firm belief that if pupils know what they are aiming for, it will help them navigate the route there. However, objective sharing can become a stale, necessary evil rather than an integral introduction to the lesson. In this post, I hope to show you how you can make objectives a little bit more interesting for yourself and your pupils.

Gap Fill

I tested this out in an observation earlier this week and it worked really well. It really got pupils thinking about, and engaging with, the objectives. In addition, when you consider that part of the AQA GCSE French exam contains a type of gap fill exercise based on grammar, this type of exposure will really help pupils further down the line.

Create a Sentence

By having broken up a sentence and placing the words randomly around the board, pupils will automatically try to start making a sentence. There may be a few possibilities about how the sentence could work but that all tests your pupils knowledge of the language while having them actively engaging with their objective for the lesson.

Of course, this could either be in TL or English based on the ability and age of the group. Pupils will also pick up on visual clues such as the full stop and capital letter and work the objective out using the end pieces to guide them.

Bloom's in Target Language

With Bloom's Taxonomy becoming more and more prominent as the years go on, it's worth familiarising your classes with the type of verbs used in the target language. Bloom's Taxonomy goes through the stages of learning and how to access those higher order thinking skills that enable pupils to really gain the most from your lessons. It it turns out that lots of the key terms are actually cognates making it a lot more accessible for pupils.

Odd One Out

Give pupils a series of objectives based on their title. Which ones do they think they will actually be carrying out today? Why? Why not? Provoke a discussion by adding additional Red Herrings in if necessary.

Revisit and Remove

Everytime you come back to your objectives have a word or two missing. Can they remember what the original objective was? These slides can be placed randomly throughout your presentation/resources so that pupils are constantly reminded of their objective.

Do you have any tips on making objectives more interesting?

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