Step 2. Learning Goals

After you have reviewed the situational factors, decide what you want students to get out of the course. Many people take a content-centered approach to this task: “I want students to learn about topic X, topic Y, and topic Z.” This is an easy, natural approach but it generally results in an overemphasis on “understand and remember” kinds of learning. These are important. But when teachers take a learning-centered approach, they usually identify several additional kinds of significant learning.

I recommend that teachers ask themselves: “What would I like the impact of this course to be on students, 2-3 years after the course is over? What would distinguish students who have taken this course from students who have not?”

When students and teachers think about what students can learn that is truly significant, their answers usually include, but do not focus on, “understand and remember” kinds of learning. More often they emphasize such things as critical thinking, learning how to creatively use knowledge from the course, learning to solve real-world problems, changing the way students think about themselves and others, realizing the importance of life-long learning, etc.

After many years of studying people’s responses to the question of what constitutes significant learning, I have proposed a “taxonomy of significant learning.” It consists of six major types of significant learning, with a number of sub-categories. This taxonomy is shown in Table 1 (below). The taxonomy identifies significant kinds of learning that you may want to include as important learning goals for your course.

Table 1 A Taxonomy of Significant Learning.JPG

One important feature of this particular taxonomy is that each kind of learning is interactive, as illustrated in Figure 1. This means that each kind of learning can stimulate other kinds of learning. This has major implications for the learning goals you choose for your course. It may seem intimidating to try to include all six kinds of significant learning. But the more you can realistically include, the more the goals will support each other—and the more valuable will be your students’ learning.

Figure 1 Interactive Nature of Significant Learning.JPG

Fink, L. Dee, A Self-Directed Guide to Designing Courses for Significant Learning, pages 8-10