Grounding My Teaching in What I Want Students to Learn

August 21, 2025

Dear colleagues, 

Welcome to fall 2025! I hope you all had a good summer and are ready for another academic year. Well, ready or not, the academic year has started, and, as George Clinton would say, "here we come." As Emily Gravett has cycled out of the CFI fold and I am succeeding her as the assistant director who gets to organize all the CFI teaching programs, we decided that I would start the toolbox year off. Don't worry! You will hear, er, read, from Emily in the coming weeks again as well. 

I wanted to write about a fairly basic idea that you’ve all probably heard and read much about in the past: learning objectives. Of course, Bloom's Taxonomy. Some of you may engage in some vigorous eye rolling at the thought of it. Others may salivate. At least most of you know what I'm talking about: Well-defined learning goals that are aspirational, realistic but challenging, measurable, that have to be listed on the syllabus, and that we (ideally) use to create assignments and learning activities. So, here are some thoughts. 

First, I find it useful to find a quiet moment at the beginning of the semester (and once in a while in the midst of it) to do some thoughtful reflecting on what I actually want my students to learn. Mostly for inspiration, I take a look at Bloom's Taxonomy, or Fink's circle of learning goals. Also, largely for inspiration, I take a look at what the expectations of those who pay my salary are; I teach regularly a general education course, which comes with its own sets of learning objectives at JMU (here are the ones for the American Experience class I teach). I may also consider what I hope students will remember about my class in 5 years (or abouts). Or I pick a central learning goal, outcome, or objective, and ask: Why? And then follow the 9 Whys liberating structure to uncover, at a fairly foundational level, why it is important that I teach what I teach. 

OK, the 9 Whys require some more detailed explanation. To go through a 9 Whys process, you take a statement, such as a learning objective, and ask yourself (or a group of colleagues) what justifies it. Once you have that justification, you ask for the justification of the justification: the second why. And so on, all the way to the 9th why, or however far you get (the process gets rather difficult rather quickly). For example, if my learning objective is: "Students will be able to conduct research about current political institutions, events, and developments," then: 

1. My answer to the first why will be, "This is so that students will be able to distinguish reliable political information from unreliable political information."  
2. Why should they be able to do that? Well, I may answer, I cannot tell them everything in a semester, and they wouldn't remember it anyway, so I better enable them to keep learning about politics.  
3. But why should they have to know so much more about politics? Politics keeps changing, and people may need new, unexpected knowledge to make sense of these changes. 
4. But why can't they just rely on other teachers by then? There are plenty of information sources about politics. I'd say that, yes, that's what they'll need to do, but they will also have to evaluate how reliable those sources are, and that's where research skills come in. 
5. OK, fine, but why do we need people to expand their political knowledge at all? Well, if they stop being well-informed, our future graduates (that's who we are talking about, after all) will not be able to engage in political processes in a way that represents their interests, values, and backgrounds correctly. 
6. But why should they engage in politics that way? Because that's what a democracy needs! 
7. OK, but why do we need a democracy? Well, there are several reasons: ... 

And we've not yet reached why no. 8, and we're down for some serious, basic political theory. Maybe you’d run out of patience by this point, but I find it helpful. 

I find the 9 Whys to be a useful activity to do with students as well, at the beginning of the semester. That's my second point about learning objectives (or goals, or outcomes, as you wish): They're something that's worth discussing with students. For example, I regularly give students Fink's scheme of learning goals as a first- or second week reading, and then ask them: "What is it that you want to learn in this class? It may be something on the syllabus, but it may also be something that I have not thought about. You have my permission to identify your own learning goals. (You still have to achieve the learning goals I defined as well. Sorry!)” 

If students define their own goals, I believe they’ll have more of a stake in class and thus more ownership of their learning. 

My third point about learning objectives is that they can go beyond Bloom's taxonomy. In fact, Bloom's taxonomy as we know it is only one of three taxonomies developed by the team around Benjamin Bloom (and its follow-up teams). Besides the taxonomy of cognitive learning, there's a taxonomy of affective learning and of psychomotor learning. There's more to learning than intellectual work! (For example, in my U.S. government class, among other things, I want students to find out what political issues they care about, a task that is as affective as it is cognitive.) Fink's circle integrates cognitive and affective learning as well as social aspects of learning: Making connections with other people, learning about oneself. I think that we can make important discoveries about our teaching if we consider the possible affective and social learning that our students may encounter, and the learning opportunities that we can create intentionally. 

As part of my third point, I'd also like to suggest that we do not strictly adhere to the narrow definition of learning objectives that I noted above (well-defined, aspirational, etc.). Correspondingly, I have not always stuck to the term “objective” and above have used terms like "goals" or "outcomes" as well, which can lead to broader formulations of what we hope students will take away from our classes. For example, one of my goals is to help students grow up. Is that a learning objective, or something else—larger, less well-defined, a different type of learning for each student? Some instructors just want students to have a particular experience in their classes, such as a particular intellectual exchange, or a struggle with a particular conundrum, or the encounter with people who disagree with them. What students learn from these experiences may differ from student to student. If you ask me, I think these are legitimate ways to frame our aspirations for learning. (And we may want to investigate if they do not in fact imply well-defined but unnamed learning objectives as well.) 

Finally, keeping learning objectives, goals, and outcomes in mind, if not always front and center, may help us navigate the fraught shoals of today's teaching, such as AI use of students, the excessive focus on grades over learning, and similar. Whenever students ask, " Can I use ChatGPT?", "Can I get my grade bumped up?", "Can I get extra credit?" (and the like), then I say to the student, does this help achieve our learning objectives? Does it enable you to better show how you have achieved the objectives? Is this a better way to capture your learning, and how? A focus on learning objectives (goals, outcomes) can help me refocus the conversation, and the teaching experience, on what actually matters: Student learning.