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What Does Swbat Mean

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.

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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

Retrieval

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.

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