Stop writing the objectives on the board

How often have you been told that writing the lesson's objectives on the board is best practice? Can you think of even one reason why doing this might be a bad idea? Because the prevailing wind of conventional wisdom consistently blows in favor of content-bloated, prefabricated externally mandated standardized standards, it takes courage to pause and reflect.

Mike Fishback offers this post titled Objectively Speaking where he identifies three reasons why we should question the wisdom behind writing the lesson's objective on the board.

1. Communicating objectives to students sends a strong message about who is driving the learning.
2. Communicating objectives to students gives away the ending before the uncovering even begins.
3. Communicating objectives to students discourages students and teachers from pursuing potentially constructive lines of inquiry that appear tangential to the objectives.

I often share this clip of Alfie Kohn telling a story of a grade one class discovering the need for standardized measurement.

Watch this clip and think about what affect writing the objective on the board would have had on student learning.



I think we can all agree that writing the objective on the board might have ruined this experience in some way for some of the kids. When I hear that teachers are mandated to write the objectives on the board and are subject to being evaluated based on their compliance, I become concerned.

At the very least, teachers should be afforded the professional responsibility to decide whether writing the objective on the board is pedagogically appropriate.