How To Write A Lesson Objective

Every lesson needs an objective, and every objective should have four clear parts:

• Thinking Skill: The verb – what students will be doing with their brains (⚠️ this is very often left out, but it’s the most important piece!)
• Content: The topic that students will be learning about. A topic by itself is not a lesson! (more on that here)
• Resource(s): Where students will get the information.
• Product: The result – what students will make to show their learning off (this is so often over-emphasized)

I learned most of this from my mentor, the great Mrs. Cole.

Shortcut: I created The Differentiator to help you develop differentiated objectives. But you’ll understand it much better if you read this whole article.

I also made a handy animated GIF!

The Thinking Skill

The thinking skill represents what students’ brains will be doing. Use good ol’ Bloom’s Taxonomy.

Are students memorizing? Making categories? Comparing and contrasting? Picking the “best” using criteria? Developing a new idea? These are all different thinking skills.

The thinking skill is the core of the objective and it is where you’ll pump up low-level lessons.

⚠️ Beware low-level thinking that masquerades as high-level thinking:

• “Create a list of the 50 United States” is at the bottom of Bloom’s despite having that fancy-looking word “create” in it.
• “Understand the causes of the American Revolution” is horribly vague and masks a mere memory lesson. Use a more specific word.
• “Research” often means “reword existing knowledge,” which is also at the bottom of Bloom’s.

Content

The content is what students are learning about. Typically, this comes from your standards.

You might wonder:

“But if I have to teach my 5th grade standards, how can I possibly differentiate the content?”

This is where the prompts of Depth and Complexity come in. They help us to push deeper into more specific bits of your content. Students still work with the same content, but you take those who are ready much further:

• Rather than thinking about just Paul Revere, students could ponder “The 🚦 rules Paul Revere followed” or “Paul Revere’s ⚖️ ethical decisions.”
• Instead of just considering triangles, students could analyze patterns in triangles or rules that triangles must follow.
• Go beyond learning about “the planets,” but consider how our understanding of planets has ⏳ changed over time or how different people have 👓different points of view of each planet.

Depth and Complexity will help you to focus students’ thinking more deeply on a specific part of your content. This helps remind me that, in order to go deeper, we have to get more specific. We can’t ask kids to think both broadly and deeply at the same time.

Intermission: Combining Thinking Skills and Content

Ok, let’s look at how we can differentiate an objective by playing with both the Thinking Skill and the Content.

We begin with a lesson objective for 6th-grade social studies in California built from a Thinking Skill and Content:

“Students will list three tools early humans used to survive…”

• Thinking Skill: list
• Content: tools of early humans

That objective has a low-level thinking skill: listing. Let’s pump up this objective by raising the thinking skill using Bloom’s:

“Students will judge the three most important tools of early humans…”

• Thinking Skill: judge importance
• Content: tools of early humans

Another option:

“Students will compare and contrast tools from early humans in China, Rome, and India…”

• Thinking Skill: compare and contrast (analyze)
• Content: tools of early humans from three civilizations

Now our students are at the analyze level of Bloom’s and we’ve embedded the depth and complexity prompt of Multiple Perspectives by noting specific groups of people.

Scaffold Higher-Level Thinking

The higher you climb, the more important it is to scaffold the task with a sequence (I wrote much more about writing sequences here). Here’s a ladder of Bloom’s I might have students climb:

• List five tools used by early humans in China, Rome, and India.
• Compare and contrast the tools across different civilizations. Identify three patterns.
• Choose the most important tool from each place. Explain your reasoning.
• Create a similar tool that a new civilization might have used. Explain why it would have been essential for those people.

Instead of starting at “create,” I’ve built out several steps to help students be more successful. This is an example of “Low Floors, High Ceilings.”

Differentiate the Resources

Hopefully, it’s obvious that your students will need more sophisticated resources when we ask for higher levels of thinking. Provide a wide range of resources to enable students to go deeper. Rather than chapter one, lesson one, consider offering:

• encyclopedias
• newspapers
• magazines
• expert interviews
• alternate textbooks
• maps
• art

Now our objective grows to:

Students will compare and contrast tools from early humans in China, Rome, and India using their textbook, a list of websites (see the whiteboard), and a video embedded on the class website.

• Thinking Skill: compare and contrast
• Content: tools of early humans from three civilizations
• Resources: textbook, list of websites, a video

When we differentiate the resources, we’re providing the raw materials for students’ brains to process. When we climb Bloom’s, we also need to provide better resources.

More on resources here.

Differentiating the Product

Finally, you can differentiate the product. This is what students will make to show that they’ve done the thinking we asked from them.

The product can also be a place to introduce choice. Taking our original objective and offering three different product choices can spice things up for our students:

Students will compare and contrast tools from early humans in China, Rome, and India using their textbook, a list of websites found on the board, and a video embedded on the class website. They may create a presentation, an advertisement, or a mini-encyclopedia.”

• Thinking Skill: compare and contrast
• Content: tools of early humans from three civilizations
• Resources: textbook, list of websites, a video
• Products: presentation, advertisement, mini-encyclopedia

Note: You’ll need to be clear about how a product will demonstrate the learning you expect from students. I always model a product first, usually creating an example as well as a low-quality non-example. I can’t just say “create a presentation” and then be surprised when those presentations stink. Products must be taught.

Note 2: Graphic organizers can be a great way to organize thinking, but I don’t think they should be a final product.

Electronic Version: The Differentiator

Based on these ideas, I created The Differentiator to help you quickly and easily develop differentiated objectives based on these four levers.