SWBAT stands for “Students Will Be Able To…” and it should begin all of the lesson objectives that you write as a teacher. Using SWBAT properly places the focus of a lesson plan on what the students learn and do rather that what the teacher teaches and does. As I have previously written, too many teachers make the lesson planning mistake of listing activities without purpose and focus on teaching rather than learning.
When I first started teaching, I wasted a lot of unnecessary time on lesson planning. A part of that time would be spent trying to craft or decide on the best lesson objectives for my students. Unfortunately, I would often go with the default “SWBAT explain…”, which lacks clarity and can get to repetitive.
In The Religion Teacher’s Guide to Lesson Planning I developed a list of categorized SWBAT verb lesson objective examples to help teachers and catechists use as a cheat sheet for creating lesson objectives. You can find that list below.
I based these verbs off of two great taxonomies of learning objectives: Bloom’s Taxonomy and Marzano’s New Taxonomy. The three categories are meant to show an increasing level of thinking from memorization and repetition to creating new ideas based on what is known. I broke them down into three categories, because I always struggled to organize the various verbs in my head.
Retrieval objective verbs challenge students to memorize and repeat definitions and lists, describe main ideas, or recognize concepts from a list.
Comprehension objectives measure understanding of concepts.
Critical Thinking objectives ask students to take what they have learned and think about new concepts for themselves.
Examples of SWBAT Verbs
Retreival
SWBAT…
- Recognize/Identify from a list…
- State/Recall the definition of…/Define…
- Name/List the three…of…
- Label…
- Describe who, what, where, when…
Comprehension
SWBAT…
- Summarize…
- Paraphrase…
- Describe the key parts of…
- Describe the ways in which…
- Explain why/the meaning of…
- Explain how…
- Depict/illustrate/draw…
Critical Thinking
SWBAT…
- Compare and contrast…
- Differentiate…
- Make connections between…
- Categorize/Classify/Organize/Sort…
- Create an analogy/metaphor for…
- Critique/Revise/Analyze…errors/problems/misunderstandings/
- Create a generalization…
- Make a prediction
- Create a rule/principle/criteria for…
- Defend/Develop/provide evidence for/support an argument for…
- Form a conclusion…
SWBAT…
- Select the best way to…
- Rate the…according to a criteria…
- Develop a strategy to…
- Test the idea that…
If you would like actual examples of full lesson objectives or information about why I divided the verbs in the way I did, sign-up to receive your free copy of The Religion Teacher’s Guide to Lesson Planning. It includes this resource and many others to help teachers create better lesson plans.
About Jared Dees
I am a DRE. Can I get copies for all my teachers? Your site is so straight forward and informative!
So easy to pass lessons onto our teachers!
Thank you and may the good Lord bless you now and always. Your have helped me as I am in class
where the students are babies in their religious knowledge even though they are already 16 years old.
Next May is Confirmation and I feel that I don’t have time to complete the text book given as I need to go down to basics all the time. Can you help me further please.
Thank you and God Bless
mary
I find the resources on this website fantastic. Thank You.