At the end of the previous school year, all students at my school were required to evaluate the courses that they had attended. Most of the students I taught that year responded positively to my instruction.

However, there was one student who gave me striking comments on his evaluation sheet. He said the classroom activities were highly engaging, and that he and his fellow classmates had a lot of fun and had enjoyed them very much. The problem was (as he said later in his evaluation sheet) that he just did not see any clear objectives in those activities.

No matter how well we prepare learning materials, and how smoothly we deliver them in the class; how interesting and engaging our instructional strategies are; how carefully we assess students' achievement; and how much time we devote to correcting students' work and providing them with feedback -- all these noble tasks will be useless if they are not organized around clear goals.

This student, indeed, had made a very good point; that instructional strategies or activities should be applied in the classroom with the aims of the instructor in mind. Creative and engaging classroom activities are simply not sufficient for yielding effective instruction. At the same time, the student had raised a very crucial reminder: We teachers are -- probably obliviously -- focused too much on classroom activities and coverage of learning materials, while overlooking individual goals.

Instructional goals are like the finish line that keeps a marathon runner moving forward on the track. They are also the destination toward which a traveler heads. Overlooking goals, therefore, may lead to disoriented instruction in which teachers do not have a sense of where they are going or what students need to achieve.

Goals are the desired results that must be accomplished. They refer to the knowledge and understandings that students need to grasp and learn, as well as the skills they need to master by the end of a course.

Clear goals, as well as appropriate strategies to achieve them, will lead to effective classroom instruction, which in turn will enable student learning.

Teaching may be like organizing a vacation trip for students. The persons in charge cannot decide whether they will take a bus, train, or plane without having knowledge of their destination, and they cannot get to a predetermined destination without knowing how to get there. In short, their choice of transportation alternatives depends largely on where they are going.

The point is that defining instructional goals (the destination) helps teachers determine the most appropriate strategy to achieve them. Defining goals also helps teachers focus their instruction on learning materials that need to be taught, and allows them to leave out that which is not essential. This will shift teachers from coverage-oriented teaching to goal-oriented instruction.

In practice, however, teachers' selection of instructional strategies and activities is not necessarily based on what students need to accomplish. Consequently, teachers often conduct classroom activities for the sake of the activities themselves.

Part of this issue is that (especially in the case of the most experienced and veteran teachers) teaching is almost like a day-to-day routine. The danger with teaching practices that have turned into repetitive rituals is that teachers can lose sight of the goals that supposedly guide their instruction.

When this happens, becomes nothing but a meaningless and mechanistic activity.

What are the consequences of this disoriented teaching?

First, teachers may end up dumping information on students without necessarily being aware of what learning material is essential and what is not. This is where the problem of coverage lies.

Teachers may feel there is never enough time to cover all learning materials in their curriculum. The truth is that there will never be enough time if teachers are coverage-focused.

Second, the assessment -- which is a vital element of instruction -- may not hit its target because it is unclear what needs to be assessed. If this happens, we teachers will probably fail to discover whether or not our students have learned anything. There is nothing more critical to instruction than solid evidence that our students have really learned something.

Goals need not only to be part of the school's written curriculum, but also must be clearly articulated to students at the lesson level.

It is not only teachers who should have a sense of the destination. Students also need to know where teachers are taking them.

The writer, a teacher at SMA Kolese De Britto, Yogyakarta, is currently attending a graduate program at Loyola University Chicago, U.S.. He can be reached at widinugrohous@yahoo.com

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