Objectives That Say What Pupils Will Know

I remember sitting in a windowless professional development room during my third year of middle leadership, staring at a PowerPoint slide that claimed the secret to academic excellence was a complex, multi-tiered taxonomy of cognitive verbs. The consultant was droning on about how how learning objectives should be written required a level of linguistic precision that would make a neuroscientist sweat. I looked around the room at my colleagues—people who had spent their morning managing broken tablets and playground disputes—and realized we were being sold a fantasy. We were being told to engineer perfect intellectual outcomes through jargon, while the actual reality of the classroom was drifting further away from these polished, academic ideals.

I’m not here to give you another checklist of Bloom’s Taxonomy verbs that you’ll forget by the time the bell rings. Instead, I want to talk about what actually works when you’ve got thirty-two students, a broken projector, and ten minutes left in the period. I’m going to show you how to strip away the performative nonsense and write objectives that actually serve the learner and the teacher. We are going to focus on clarity over complexity, ensuring your goals survive the inevitable chaos of a real school day.

Ditching the Smart Framework for Goals That Actually Stick

We’ve all been told that the SMART learning goals framework is the gold standard. It’s tidy, it’s professional, and it looks wonderful in a departmental handbook. But let’s be honest: trying to make every single lesson objective “Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound” is a recipe for burnout. In a real classroom, time isn’t a neat little variable you can control; it’s a chaotic force that disappears the moment a student asks why they can’t go to the toilet or a printer jams. When you obsess over the mechanics of the framework, you often end up with goals that are technically perfect but pedagogically hollow.

Instead of chasing those rigid checkboxes, I prefer focusing on the actual cognitive heavy lifting. This is where a sensible Bloom’s Taxonomy application comes in—not as a way to tick off “higher-order thinking” for an observer, but as a way to figure out if the kids are actually grasping the concept or just mimicking my movements. Forget the acronym for a second and ask yourself: what is the actual point of this hour? If the goal doesn’t help you decide what to say when a student looks blankly at you halfway through the task, it’s probably just academic window dressing.

Using Action Verbs for Learning Outcomes That Survive Chaos

We’ve all seen them: the learning objectives that rely on “understanding,” “knowing,” or “appreciating.” They sound lovely in a middle leadership meeting, but they are functionally invisible when you’re trying to figure out if a Year 9 class has actually grasped the concept or if they’re just nodding because they want to get to lunch. You can’t walk around a room of thirty and see “understanding.” It’s too ghostly.

If you want to actually gauge progress, you need to lean into action verbs for learning outcomes that you can physically observe. Instead of “understanding the causes of the Industrial Revolution,” try “listing three key inventions” or “explaining the impact of the steam engine.” It’s a subtle shift in pedagogical goal setting, but it changes everything. It moves the target from a vague cloud to a concrete mark on a map. When you use verbs like identify, describe, or contrast, you aren’t just following some textbook version of Bloom’s Taxonomy application; you are giving yourself a way to actually see the learning happening before the bell rings.

Five ways to stop writing objectives that just sit there looking pretty

• Write for the student, not the observer. If you’re writing an objective that sounds like it was plucked from a theoretical textbook just to impress a visiting inspector, you’ve already lost. Your students don’t need to “comprehend the nuances of historical causality”; they need to know they are looking for three reasons why the treaty failed. Keep the language grounded in the reality of their vocabulary.
• Test the objective against the ‘Friday Afternoon Rule’. Before you commit to a goal, ask yourself: if I were exhausted, it was raining, and the class was restless, would this objective still be clear enough to guide them? If it’s too complex or multi-layered, it will collapse the moment the first bit of disruption hits.
• Focus on the ‘what’, not the ‘how’. I see far too many objectives that are actually just instructions in disguise—things like “Students will complete a Venn diagram.” That’s a task, not a learning goal. The objective is the knowledge they walk away with after the diagram is done. Don’t confuse the vehicle with the destination.
• Build in a ‘check-in’ point. A good objective should act as a compass. If you can’t look at a student’s work ten minutes into the lesson and immediately see if they are hitting that target, the objective is too vague. It needs to be sharp enough to allow for quick, instinctive feedback while you’re circulating the room.
• Stop trying to pack the whole lesson into one sentence. You don’t need a grand, sweeping manifesto for a forty-minute period. One clear, singular focus is worth more than a paragraph of “learning intentions” that overlap and confuse. Pick the one thing that actually matters for this specific chunk of time and stick to it.

The Reality Check: Three things to remember when the bell rings

Stop trying to satisfy an inspector’s checklist and start writing for the kids in front of you; if the objective doesn’t translate into a clear task for a distracted Year 9, it’s just wasted ink.

Ditch the academic fluff and the “SMART” obsession; aim instead for clarity that survives the chaos of a lesson where things inevitably go sideways.

Focus on what they are actually doing with the knowledge, not just what they are “understanding”—because “understanding” is invisible, but a well-constructed sentence or a solved equation is something you can actually see and teach.

The Reality Check

If your learning objective looks like it was copy-pasted from a government white paper or a shiny EdTech brochure, it’s going to fail the moment the bell rings. A real objective isn’t a performance for your observer; it’s a survival tool for you and a roadmap for the kid in the back row who hasn’t opened their book yet. If you can’t explain what they’re doing in plain English while you’re dodging a flying glue stick, you haven’t written a goal—you’ve just written jargon.

Ellery Mwangi-Selkirk

The Reality Check

At the end of the day, we aren’t writing these objectives for a folder of evidence to be scrutinized by an inspector; we are writing them so the thirty kids sitting in front of us actually know what they are supposed to be doing. If you can ditch the rigid, soul-crushing SMART constraints and stop chasing academic jargon in favour of clear, actionable verbs, you’ve already won half the battle. Remember, a learning objective isn’t a decorative piece of prose for your lesson plan; it is a functional tool designed to provide clarity in the middle of the beautiful, predictable chaos of a classroom.

I know how it feels when you’re staring at a blank planning template at 8:00 PM, wondering if any of this actually matters. It does. But don’t let the pursuit of pedagogical perfection rob you of the energy you need to actually teach. Focus on the small, practical shifts that make the lesson navigable for both you and your students. If your objectives are simple, grounded, and survive the contact with a wet Wednesday, you are doing more for your pupils than any high-flown framework ever could. Keep it real, keep it simple, and just keep teaching.

About Ellery Mwangi-Selkirk

Most educational advice is written for a classroom that does not exist — twenty motivated pupils, unlimited preparation time, no behaviour to manage. I write for the room you are actually in. What retrieval practice looks like when marking is already three weeks behind, why the seating plan matters more than the starter activity, and which of the last decade's initiatives left anything behind. Nineteen years taught me that the good ideas survive contact with a wet Wednesday and the rest do not.