Buckland Weekly #32: Not so SMART

I’m going to venture into an area where my views might be considered contentious (or even flat out wrong) by educational theorists back home in England. I’m going to talk about something that, because of the limited time available, I rather gloss over when I do the teacher orientations here in China. I’m going to discuss lesson objectives and SMART targets. Probably more than any other specifically teaching topic my views on this are not the mainstream ones.

The reason I’ve decided to bring it up was a post on another facebook group, where a teacher listed her lesson aims and the lesson aims that the inspector thought she should have in an observation. I’ll paraphrase her a little as the specifics aren’t relevant to the point I want to make, only the general principal. (And her aims were reading and writing aims where we focus entirely on speaking and listening.)

Let’s write some aims in the style the teacher thought appropriate. Let’s assume, for this exercise, that the lesson topic is “the environment” (and of course that it is an EFL class).

The teacher’s aims might be

1. Students will be able to express a view upon the topic and express agreement or disagreement with other students’ views.

2. Students will show an understanding of polite discourse strategies.

3. Students will be able to identify and challenge false statements and offer counter arguments.

In the post that I saw, the inspector had offered an alternative in the form of

1. Students will understand the importance of taking protective measures to ensure that the consequences of pollution on the environment are minimized.

The majority of the subsequent discussion focused on the teacher’s aims suggesting that they were too vague and not SMART enough (we’ll come on to SMART later.) Almost no one mentioned the glaring problem with the alternative.

This is a language class. The alternative is NOT a language based objective. It’s a political objective. In my view it has absolutely no place on a lesson plan unless you are teaching civics or environmental studies. As English teachers our role is NOT to shape the minds and opinions of our students. It’s to give them the tools to express their own minds and opinions. We can argue all day about whether the teacher’s aims were good or bad but the inspector’s suggestion was, in my opinion, just plain wrong.

So, let’s get more general and ask a few important questions.

How many aims should there be?

How detailed and specific should they be?

How do you go about writing good aims?

What do you do in the classroom to ensure the aims are met?

Should you include lesson aims on your lesson plan at all?

Assuming for the moment that the answer to the last question is going to be “yes”, let’s look at the others.

How many aims should you have? Well, your lesson will be about forty minutes long to a class of between fifty and eighty students. How many objectives is it feasible to have in those circumstances? I’d say two or three, similar, perhaps, to the ones in the example. You could have just one in some classes; you would find it impossible with more than four or five. I’d say one to three is a good number.

The next two questions – “how detailed should they be” and “how do you write them” are where we come to SMART targets and where I’m going to go against the conventional advice. For those who haven’t come across it before SMART is an acronym from the world of business jargon. You see it in various forms. The one I am most familiar with is Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, Time-Limited. The theory is that all your aims should show all of those features. You should be specific. You shouldn’t say “Students will learn new vocabulary.” You should say “Students will learn the following list of ten new words.” It should be measurable (and you should show how you can measure it –“There will be a spelling test for the words at the end of the lesson.”) It should be achievable – “ten words” is OK, “a thousand words” is impossible. It should be realistic. The words in question should relate directly to the topic and be within the normal expected vocabulary range for discussion of it – very obscure or technical terms should be left out. And you should set a time for it – “by the end of the lesson/activity”. So, in this case you would end up with something like

“Students will, by the end of the lesson, learn the meanings and spellings of the following ten words and will be able to complete a spelling and comprehension task demonstrating their new knowledge.”

I would like to suggest that this is nonsense, especially when teaching in a Chinese state school.

And it is nonsense because of the next question – what do you do in the classroom? In a business context, where you may be trying to implement a new sales strategy or design and build a new car then this kind of thinking makes sense but a classroom isn’t like that. A classroom is filled with people and people are crazy unpredictable things. You can set all the SMART targets you like but unless you set a target along the lines of “Each student will speak one word by the end of the class.” you won’t be able to implement it. Possibly not even then.

So, the last question. Should you include lesson aims on your plan at all?

You might think from what I’ve said so far that I’m going to say “no”, but I’m not. It is important to know exactly what you are setting out to achieve in a lesson, and with each individual task you have in the lesson. What I would say is that you shouldn’t worry too much about exactly how you phrase it or about whether it is SMART or not. Just think about what you are trying to do. Is the lesson primarily intended to give students new vocabulary on a specific topic? Is it intended to practice asking and answering personal questions? Is it intended to develop their skills in taking part in a discussion?

None of those things is even vaguely SMART but I would suggest that given the class sizes and the lesson lengths – not to mention that we are employed solely to improve their speaking and listening skills - they are far more realistic aims than you would come up with in an hour of trying to bend them into something more specific. As for the other things in the acronym they all kind of come automatically with a sensible lesson plan. You know how long each activity will take, you will have designed it to be achievable, you will know your classes well enough to make it realistic. You don’t have to make your overall aims fit all those criteria too. If your lesson is well designed and planned that will be enough.

And do, please, make sure that your aims are genuine language aims, not aims intended to push your own views onto the students as that inspector’s aim so clearly was.