Effective Instruction Should Be Your Objective
May 14, 2008 – 5:55 am
It is no secret that top-level athletes, successful business people and achievers in all fields have at least one thing in common, they all tend to be compulsive goal-setters. They use short-term, intermediate and long-term goals to provide motivation and to serve as a road map to success. This type of focus on the future guides their preparation, their acquisition of knowledge and helps them organize their efforts to get the most out of their most valuable resource – their time.
My wife used to work with a teacher that had a ready response for students who claimed they “didn’t have time” to complete their homework. She would say, “Each of us has the same amount of minutes in a day. You can tell me that you didn’t complete the assignment because you didn’t make it a priority but don’t tell me you didn’t have the time.”
Setting clearly defined goals helps you to keep your priorities in order. Oftentimes the hardest part of completing a task is getting started and setting goals will help you focus on the task at hand. As a result, you will begin to see progress toward what might previously have seemed an insurmountable task.
We can carry this same goal-setting mentality into our training programs. Think of your training objectives as your training goals. Clearly defining your objectives for a training program is a critical step in the whole development process. Without training objectives, instructors don’t know exactly what is going to be taught, learners don’t know what they are expected to learn, and training managers don’t know why they are investing their training dollars in the course.
Think of training objectives as check points in your road map to a successful training program. If we use the entry level curriculum as an example, our overall goal is to successfully move the recruits from orientation to graduation. However, the training objectives clearly define the route we will take to get from point “A” to point “B”, so everyone know how we will get there.
The same process should be used for every in-service training program. I have heard many training managers complaining that agency administrators are only concerned that their personnel complete the minimum number of mandated training hours – not in the training itself. Yet so often, in-service training programs are pieced together to fill up a forty hour training week rather than to meet clearly defined training objectives.
A training objective should define what is to be learned, how well it is to be performed, and under what conditions it is to be performed. Obviously these objectives must be written in a clear, complete, and concise manner. The lesson plan should be designed to address the training objectives and the testing instrument, whether it is a written exam or practical exercise, should be based on the content of the lesson plan.
An effective training program should be based on the training triad of training objectives, lesson plans and testing instruments. However the training objective should always be at the top of the triangle. Remember, an effective training objective must clearly state the task to be accomplished, the conditions under which the task must be completed, and the standards for successful completion.
If this article sounds familiar – it should. These concepts are among the most fundamental aspects of the instructor development course that all instructor candidates must complete. If you are an instructor and you were already familiar with these concepts, someone else must have accomplished their training objectives.