I had a few ideas for changing the class description. It is always a great idea to review and revise anything you are working on for a class. I definitely need to add some kind of sentence or two covering the types of class materials; texts, readings, Youtube, etc. I haven't quite worked out what yet, but expect a change in the statement next time I write.
Okay, we are at one of the more difficult parts of building a curriculum; determining objectives and deciding on how to assess them. I won't talk too much on formatting your objectives. SWBAT works just fine or some other statement of the same format. Objectives need to be clear. Have some people read what you come up with and try to tell you what the objectives mean in their own words. If you get a match, you probably have a good objective. Also, I never want for vocabulary to be an objective on its own, otherwise you get an objective that is not so productive. For example,, it might sound something like this; "students will be able to memorize fifteen vocabulary words ...." Instead, it is more productive to include vocabulary within in your objective. Personally, I like to include some vocabulary in every lesson. I believe it is a natural part of learning another language and your students will always have questions about words they do not readily understand. Objectives need to be able to be assessed easily. You may not always be the one presenting your lesson and other instructors will need to understand them in order to assess results. Finally, objectives need to be attainable. it is frustrating to not be able to achieve an objective; especially for ELL students. It is important to also understand that you as an instructor will certainly have some parts of your objective that are implied within your lessons.
Let's take a look at a simple objective on our topic of employment. "Students will be able to identify key parts of a standard job application." So, some questions; "what are the key parts of a standard job application?" And, "what is a standard job application?" These are the parts of your objective that will be implied from your lesson plans. So, the answer to the two questions are essentially up to you the instructor, but most adult Americans will have a good idea of what both mean. You have to convey this generality to ELL students who may have never seen or filled in a job application.
To ensure the students can achieve this objective, you as the instructor would build a lesson plan that explained what a standard job application looks like and what the key parts are that it contains. I don't want to get to far down into the minutia of it, but looking over a few sample applications will help you to define these concepts. As mentioned, vocabulary would included in the lesson and would be assessed as part of the overall objective. I would try to limit the new vocabulary presented to 5-7 words or terms. Students will definitely add a handful of additional words/terms as you present your lesson and as they ask questions on what is presented. The end goal is to have introduced no more that around 15 new words.terms; anymore will be difficult to retain. In my opinion less is more here. Thoroughly learning 10 words is better than sort of learning 20.
I think from there you could include a second lesson covering applications, ensuring that you build in some time for review. Thus, by the end of your block of lessons, you will have introduced somewhere around 20 new words/terms over your two lessons and will have reviewed the other important points of your objective. All that is left is to then include this objective in some form of assessment. We will get to that in a few posts.
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