While eating my lunch, I read Iris Jastram‘s post Using Learning
Outcomes and had a small a-ha! moment, and then fired off an
all-staff email musing about it. And then I thought, “Well,
that’d make a fine blog post.” So here’s that email. I just read
a blog post about information literacy instruction and learning
outcomes, and suddenly thought about how learning outcomes can
apply to our planning processes. What if we thought about all
new projects through the lens of formal learning outcomes? Would
that help us stay focused on our goals and mission? The relevant
paragraphs are: Back when I attended Immersion many moons ago,
they presented me with a formula for a learning outcome:
“Students will” + [verb phrase] + “in order to” + [goal]. Then
we used action words from Bloom’s Taxonomy [PDF] (the higher
order the better, usually) to come up with the verb phrase
describing what students would be able to do, and connected that
action to a compelling reason for them to know how to do that.
So, for example (and no