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My name is Nick McGuinn and I work in the Department of Education.
I write learning outcomes because they really help me to focus on what I'm trying to teach and what I want the students to learn in a teaching
session. Contact time is short and precious and it's important, I think, to make the most of that.
So the way I like to think about it is, if the students were leaving a teaching session, and somebody were to stand at the door and say to them,
"What have you learned, what have you got out of that session?"
Having a learning outcome in mind really helps me to focus on that and to answer that difficult question.
It also helps me to think about using an output model of teaching wherein we shift the emphasis from "What am I teaching the students?" to
"What are the students learning here?" And so by working with learning outcomes it would help me to use a cognitive taxonomy or map like
Bloom's taxonomy for example, and start to think, "What kind of levels of cognition is this learning outcome attempting to address?"
and once I've made that decision, "What kind of active verb might I use in that learning outcome to engage the students in the learning outcome?"