4/18/22
Goal setting is an essential part of strong teaching and learning. Also, for those of us who are a bit 'type A' and thrive on direction and structure, goals fill our hearts with joy and give us a sense of purpose. In addition to goal setting helping educators with things like backwards design, students also benefit from knowing where they are headed on their learning journey. After all, what reason would Frodo have had for making the journey to the Crack of Doom without knowing it was all in the effort to destroy the Ring? How many times would he have turned back towards his hobbit hole when faced with a challenge had he not known his aim?
So where do we start when goal setting? SMART goals are specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and timely. SMART goals are shown to be highly effective as they succinctly establish many of the criteria for success students and teachers need as they dive into a unit or lesson. It's important to engage students in the goal setting process so they feel ownership and agency in their learning journey.
I typically teach students the SMART goal acronym and we begin our first goal setting session together a few weeks into the school year. These sessions are repeated every 3 weeks, and after each I choose one student goal that exemplifies each of the components of a SMART goal (5 exemplars total). I then have the students who wrote the exemplars speak a bit about their goal with the class and explain their thinking behind the specificity, measure, attainability, relevance or time described in the goal.
This is just one piece of the puzzle when it comes to making goal setting a meaningful part of a classroom culture and helping students take ownership, find motivation and embrace agency in the classroom. Helping students embody a growth mindset, establishing a culture of revision, holding high expectations, creating meaningful assessment systems, teaching students how to gather and analyze data, defining progress towards a goal, teaching reflective practices, and helping students adjust their practice based on data are also all important pieces of the puzzle.
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