Alignment

In order to determine if your lessons and activities are going to be effective, they must be aligned to objectives, both enabling and terminal. If our activities reinforce skills that are not among our learning goals, our teaching hasn't been effective. There are several ways to determine this. By designing your training backwards -- by describing in detail what the students must do or show to prove they have met the learning goals, you will be able to take those outcomes and break them down into enabling objectives and map each of your lessons to one or more of those goals. Activities can address multiple objectives, but they must be specific enough to guide the students to the appropriate level of mastery. We can have different activities to introduce, reinforce, and measure learning and all of those should be mapped to stated learning outcomes.