Learning objectives: What they are and how to write them

Every teacher has written a learning objective on the board, watched students copy it down, and then quietly wondered whether anyone, themselves included, would still remember it by the end of the lesson. Objectives have a strange status in our day-to-day practice. They are everywhere, they feel mandatory, and they often add very little to what actually happens in the room.

That does not mean they are pointless. A well-written objective gives a lesson direction, helps students know what success looks like, and gives you a clear thing to assess against. The problem is that the version most of us were trained to write, the SMART-style, verb-first, jargon-heavy sentence, tends to do none of those things particularly well.

This guide is a primer for ECTs, HoDs writing department templates, and anyone who has ever felt that their objectives could be doing more work. It covers what a learning objective actually is, why it matters, and how to write ones that shape the lesson rather than sit at the top of it.

A learning objective is a short statement of what you want students to know, understand, or be able to do by the end of a lesson or unit. That is the textbook definition, and like most textbook definitions it is technically correct and slightly misleading.

The useful way to think about it is this: A learning objective is the answer to the question "what would I see, hear, or read at the end of this lesson that would tell me it worked?" If you cannot answer that, the objective is probably too vague. If you can, you have something concrete enough to plan against and assess against.

Objectives differ from learning outcomes in scope. Outcomes tend to describe the longer-term destination across a unit or scheme of work. Objectives describe the next stop on that journey, usually a single lesson. They also differ from success criteria, which break the objective down into the specific moves students need to make to meet it.

It is fair to ask whether the time spent crafting objectives pays off. For most teachers, the honest answer is that it pays off when objectives are doing real work and not much when they are decorative.

A good objective does three things. It clarifies your own thinking before you teach. It signals to students what the lesson is for, which tends to improve focus and self-regulation. And it gives you a sharp instrument for assessment in the moment, because you know what you are looking for.

The Education Endowment Foundation's guidance on feedback and assessment makes a related point: Students benefit when they understand what they are being asked to learn and what success looks like. Objectives, paired with clear success criteria, are one of the simpler ways to make that visible.

Where objectives fail to add value, it is usually because they are written for an audience that is not in the room, often a future observer or an internal monitoring spreadsheet, rather than for the students or the teacher. That is the version worth fixing.

Most teachers meet Bloom's taxonomy during initial teacher training and then carry around a vague sense that objectives should use a verb from one of the higher levels. It is worth revisiting more carefully, because the taxonomy is useful when you treat it as a thinking tool rather than a verb menu.

The revised version of Bloom's taxonomy, set out by Anderson and Krathwohl in 2001, describes six broad categories of cognitive process: Remembering, understanding, applying, analysing, evaluating, and creating. The ordering implies that later categories tend to build on earlier ones, though in practice good lessons usually move between them.

Where the taxonomy helps is in spotting when your objectives are stuck at one level. A scheme of work that only ever asks students to define, list, and describe is going to leave gaps in their thinking even if the content coverage is fine. Mixing in verbs that demand application, analysis, and evaluation tends to produce richer lessons and more useful assessment.

Where it can mislead is in treating higher levels as automatically better. Remembering and understanding are foundational, and students cannot evaluate something they cannot first describe. The verb is not the lesson; the underlying task is.

A learning objective that actually shapes a lesson tends to have three ingredients. The first is a verb that describes what students will be doing cognitively, not just what activity they will sit through. "Explain" beats "learn about". The second is the content the verb is acting on, specific enough that you could not swap it out for a different topic. The third is some signal of the standard or condition, even if it is implicit, so you know what good looks like.

Put together, those three ingredients produce something like: "Students will be able to explain why the reactivity of Group 1 metals increases down the group, using ideas about atomic structure." That is a real lesson. The verb is precise, the content is specific, and the standard is built in through the reference to atomic structure.

Compare that to: "Students will learn about Group 1 metals." Same topic, no clarity on what students are actually being asked to do or how you would know they had done it. Most of the work to fix an objective is in moving from the second version towards the first.

Some verbs do more work than others when they appear in objectives. The table below offers a starting point for each level of Bloom's taxonomy, with subject-relevant examples. The list is not exhaustive, and the same verb can sit at different levels depending on what comes after it.

A few patterns come up again and again in objectives that are not earning their keep. They are worth scanning for in your own planning, especially when you are writing under time pressure.

The first is using activity language instead of learning language. "Complete the worksheet on osmosis" describes what students will do, not what they will learn. A worksheet might be the vehicle, but it is not the destination.

The second is hedging with verbs that cannot be assessed. "Appreciate the importance of" or "be aware of" sound respectable but leave you with nothing to look for at the end of the lesson. Swap them for verbs that produce visible evidence.

The third is bundling too much into a single objective. If your objective lists three different things students will know, understand, and be able to do, it is probably two or three lessons compressed into one. Split it.

The fourth is borrowing the language of the specification wholesale. Exam-board specifications are written for teachers to interpret. Pasting their phrasing into your objective often leaves students staring at vocabulary that has not been taught yet.

Once the objective is written, the next question is how to share it with the class. There is no single right answer here, and a fair amount depends on the age group and the subject.

For most secondary lessons, putting the objective on the board and briefly talking through it tends to work. The talking-through is the part that matters. "By the end of today, you should be able to explain why metals get more reactive down the group, using what you already know about atoms" lands differently from a silent slide.

Some teachers prefer to reveal the objective partway through the lesson, after a hook or a puzzle, so that students discover what the question is rather than being told upfront. That can work well, particularly in subjects where curiosity is part of the engagement. It is not a universal improvement, though, and for some students the lack of an upfront frame is unsettling.

A reasonable middle ground is to share the objective at the start, return to it explicitly at the end, and use it as the basis for a quick check of understanding. That keeps the objective working as a frame rather than a formality.

A learning objective is one part of a broader planning chain. It sits between your unit-level outcomes (what students should know by the end of the topic), and your success criteria (the specific moves they need to make in this lesson). It also feeds directly into your assessment plan, because the question "have students met the objective?" is what you are answering when you check for understanding.

That means a strong objective makes the rest of the lesson easier to plan. Once you know what you are aiming for, you can pick a hook that opens the question, choose examples that build the relevant thinking, and decide what an exit ticket should look like. A weak objective forces all those decisions to happen by feel, which tends to produce a busier lesson without much sense of what was actually learned.

If you are building a department-wide template, the most useful thing you can do is leave space for an objective and a small number of success criteria on the lesson plan, and to model what a good one looks like in your shared resources. Tools like Cognito's lesson resources tend to align learning objectives to specification points by default, which can give departments a reasonable starting point when writing their own.