Recapping TLDC: Writing Learning Objectives (Dr. Heidi Kirby)

This is a series of posts recapping and reacting to sessions from the recent January 2023 Training, Learning, and Development Community (TLDC) event to support teachers transitioning to L&D. The full event recordings can be found at the TLDC website.

Summary: Heidi starts by introducing a familiar concept: Bloom’s, particularly the cognitive domain that most educators will have familiarity with. However, she also illustrates something people may not know: Blooms has other domains (Affective, Psychomotor) that should be considered. I have seen these considered in some K12 settings, particularly at the Elementary level and in CTE (Career Technical Education) courses, such as an ROTC program design, but I have also seen a lot of schools fall back onto purely Blooms or modern day 4-pt learning scales that align with things like Marzano and Danielsen, which really aren’t effective at writing skills-based objectives (I say as a former teacher, who taught skills-based classes as well as content-based ones). Heidi finally dives into Mager’s, the big mindset shift that she focuses on: contextualizing the learning you want to happen and the outcomes in performance.

I also want to call out her focus in an aside on the rarely used Bloom’s Affective Domain—this is so important and so rarely explicitly considered (though this is improving) in both training and education concepts. This is a big component of training humans, just like it’s a big component of educating humans. From an educational perspective, this is where the focus on SEL (Social Emotional Learning) is crucial. That also looks different in schools where we’re educating humans as whole beings and those humans may need more guidance and structure than the employees we are training and developing (though supporting humans in their ongoing and autonomous development to improve performance can be holistic too, and that’s a hallmark of good organizational culture that values employee experience, even if it looks different in a Fortune 500 company than a Kindergarten circle or High School Student Government class). But it is something I think good teachers maybe don’t all know about but naturally pick up when they do and can speak to, both in education and in a training environment, where you can understand and hopefully “sell” why addressing those emotions is crucial to your DEIB training if it is to succeed, why employee experience matters, and how it intersects with learning and performance.

I love this quote because the context of learning is so often bulldozed past in any setting, and it really shouldn’t be…ever. Not even in K12, frankly. This is the big difference between education and training/performance focus: the context and the way we consider the context. The variety is larger, and also the need to rethink context for each separate goal is larger as well. Less assumptions can be made. (Though frankly, I think K12 at a larger scale can benefit from this too, but it’s usually outside of the circle of influence for many teachers or doing it will make you mad….to see what child development and literacy is reduced to in the context for “success” on state tests, school metrics, etc.)

Some people will say the big difference between K12 education and corporate training is pedagogy vs. andragogy. I personally think that’s a baby step, not a leap, especially if you’ve taught older students at any point. There’s a huge leap between Kindergarten and 12th graders in a university-level class (I’ve taught both). There’s a tiny hop between my CTE program kids and the workforce in many cases, and where there are large leaps, it’s in background knowledge (yeah, a doctor knows more about their domain than an 18 year old), not age.

Others will say the big difference is training is a singular event and education is ongoing, though frankly good training programs don’t need to be a singular event. The mindset is shifting on that to the power of programs., I think.

Others will say corporate training is skills based, but education is content. But any English teacher knows better than that. (English is predominantly skills-based. So are many classes. Content-based classes exist, like social studies, but they have been mostly integrated with skills due to Common Core and later curriculum changes, which embedded skills-based goals in most courses, alongside content/knowledge-based goals.)

No, the real difference isn’t even human development in my view. It’s purpose. In education, I feel we often either feel frustrated by our purpose because individual teachers find their purpose misaligned with organizational purpose (higher test scores isn’t a purpose many aspire to, but it’s probably a big part of your School Improvement Plan, and that’s the organizational purpose). But I love corporate training because that’s not the case. My purpose is to develop training that improves human performance to specific goals (patient care metrics, engagement metrics that impact the bottom line, documentation metrics, legal requirements) so that they can do their job better. So, the purpose overall is more straightforward (not simple, and there are plenty of hiccups and barriers) and the purpose of each individual thing I design and develop, each program I contribute to, analyze, implement, or evaluate, is something I can begin to define honestly and point out misalignment clearly, without an emotional barrier. I love this personally. But it’s not for everyone. The biggest difference is you lose the ability to look at individual learners and their journeys and you focus solely on goals, metrics, and how to achieve very specific things. It is still helpful to care about humans, but it is different. It is thinking about those humans as part of a healthy system, and you serve the system. Of course, if you are in a bad system (bad learning culture, toxic company), many problems emerge, and in some ways, that’s probably worse. You can’t close your door and teach—you’re interconnected. So the system you’re in is crucial, comes back to Sara’s talk on learning culture.

So, our homework this time is back to something very concrete and straightforward: let’s look at learning objectives!

So, what exercise do I have for you? Let’s think about context:

Here’s the PDF, if you’re looking for that, though again I think a notebook or flexible workspace to keep all this stuff will serve you better than using these PDFs directly. PDF: Contextualize with Mager’s

So here’s your assignment:

1. Look at your learning goals/objectives: Schools call these a few different things, but you hopefully make learning goals in some form currently, as that’s generally a part of every modern teaching and teacher evaluation system. Hopefully your Professional Development (the ones you have to take) also have objectives. So if you want to see a training context you fully understand, you can pull the slides from that PD you attended (or delivered, even better) too! This can be for a professional development IF you lead them, but it can be for a regular class as well. You can also analyze others’ goals if for some reason you don’t get to write your own or if you want to look at a Professional Development with an adult audience and you haven’t delivered PD.

2. Think about how your learning goals connect to your standards AND to your context/real world: Then think about Mager’s theory. We really should do this in schools anyway (and with PD training, some do, and those are the “good” PDs you’ve been to—and if that sounds mythical to you, they DO exist, just not as common as they should be). But even with students, this is something I find beneficial to consider frankly. I taught in a program where students were earning certifications or college credit through not just tests, but also long-term tasks we documented and sent out, and the standards aligned to that but there were contextual considerations for the tasks as well. The real world is how your kids are assessed, and there are usually big gaps between the actual standards and the context of assessment (things not assessed, things that are assessed that are not more “standardized testing” than the actual learning) if you are looking at a subject where the area is a tested one. This is also great for PDs — were the PDs you took aligned to the context in which they wanted you to use the information or should that PD specialist have maybe considered Mager’s and gotten the contextual pieces?

Why is this helpful? Good learning is good learning. That’s what I strongly believe, at least. Believe it or not, I do not fundamentally approach learning differently in corporate than I do in teaching (though some of that depends on how you approached teaching). My foundational understanding of adult learning is not fundamentally different than how I approached many high school programs. It is very different than how I taught Kindergarten, but I had already taught across systems, countries, grade levels, conducted PDs, and I can tell you there are always differences but many methods work across contexts. AND many methods fail inexplicably when people don’t consider and understand their particular context, no matter how sound the approach to learning is — that’s why Mager’s and models like it are helpful. All learning is the same, but all learning is different. Contextualization is crucial to that difference.

More in this Loom about what I mean:

About this Activity (Watch on Loom) (Loom Transcript)

The point of this homework is to both build and maintain your understanding of crafting a target. One thing that’s true in both K12 education and corporate training (and anywhere else someone is learning, teaching, or training) is that you’re much more likely to have and notice success when you know what you’re aiming for.

About the Speaker: Check out Heidi Kirby on LinkedIn and her Useful Stuff site.