Building Competency in Diabetes Education THE ESSENTIALS

SELF-MANAGEMENT EDUCATION & SUPPORT: PROGRAM DEVELOPMENT| 11-19

Writing educational objectives: The complexity of learning diabetes self-management skills is clear. In developing a program to meet these needs, the educator’s skill must include the ability to design programs and/or individual interventions to meet the diverse and variable goals collaboratively established by the affected group/individual and the health-care provider (31). The demand for population-based approaches that address the needs of an entire population add another layer of complexity to the situation.

Objectives are our roadmap. We need a good map to get where we want to go without getting sidetracked or lost.

In Chapter 2: Foundations for Diabetes Self-Management Education and Support, we discussed the levels of complexity in learning and the appropriate content for each level. In order to write learning objectives, we also need to consider the domains of learning.

Domains of Learning: In his taxonomy of educational objectives, Bloom (1956) originally described the ways we learn which are referred to as the domains of learning - through thinking, feeling and doing (31-33). Also referred to as: • Cognitive (abstract, knowledge) • Affective (feeling, attitudes, beliefs) • Psychomotor (skill) Learning can occur at different levels of complexity in each domain. Table 1 shows the various levels within the cognitive domain and provides examples of objectives that would be appropriate for your own learning as an educator; examples of objectives for diabetes SME programs are given in the third column.