"We don't need no stinkin' Learning Objectives!"

How might that change how we teach if we replaced the term “learning objectives” with “doing objectives”? This seems to me to be a particularly pertinent question when teaching writing and online teaching cross paths. 

Few of us who teach writing depend solely on lectures to do so. When we teach in the classroom we devote time to class discussion, small group work, conferences with single students. Lecture becomes secondary. We go to these varied teaching strategies because we know we're teaching students how to do something, write. When we teach them information, that information isn't what's paramount. It's simply a means to an end. That end is doing things, not simply knowing things. 

I don't find lecture and test a particularly useful method in f2f classes. The only value of lecture is transferring of information, something that you don't really need to professor for in the first place. After all, there's a lot more information in that ten pound textbook than there is in 54 one hour lectures.

When we move the lecture and test model online, it's  flaws become immediately evident. It just doesn't work. 

However, this particular rant isn't about lecture and test, it's about how the philosophy behind lecture and test, "learning objectives" get surreptitiously moved online even when the lecture is left behind.

Okay, you might be thinking, but surely there are some classes that really are about simply transferring information. And, I can accept that. What I can't accept is that this is what those classes should be about. 

An example from my own teaching: I sometimes teach Rhetorical Theory. Though I am, as you might argue, trying to teach students information about rhetorical theory, I'm doing so for one reason, and it's not so they will be able to recite that information or regurgitate it on a test. I want them to learn that information so they can accomplish one specific task: they can analyze a text (defined widely to include novels, speeches, television and movies, the layout of a city or classroom, you name it; everything's a text). 

Thus, they may have a lot of "learning objectives" that all lead to one "doing objective." It's that doing objective that's important. Forget a fact or definition? I can live with that as a teacher. Don't learn how to analyze a text? I've failed as a teacher. That one "doing objective is more important than all the "learning objectives" put together. 

I think I'm going to start including a "doing objective on all my syllabi.