Working Through Goal Setting with Students
We’ve been thinking a lot about new semesters and fresh starts, which has brought up the idea of goal setting with students. Historically, we’ve had mixed feelings about goal setting activities. They seem like a great idea: we’ve all got New Year’s resolutions on our minds, they’re a key feature of Social Emotional Learning, students are determined to improve their grades, and goal setting activities seem like they should be relatively easy. And yet every time we try them, we’re disappointed. Teenagers, it turns out, are not great goal setters. Some live in the realm of the fantastical: despite their 37.4% first semester, they’ve decided they’re going to earn an A this semester. Some are reluctant to move the bar any higher. Others are so vague: how does one know when they’ve achieved “do better”?
For any attempt at goal setting with students to be meaningful, our students need guidance. They need to know how to accurately and honestly reflect on their past performance and habits. They need help narrowing their personal goals down to something specific enough to achieve. They need help calibrating their ideas, so they’re reasonable enough to be achieved. They need guidance to come up with a plan that will enable them to put that goal into place. They need help implementing the steps they will take toward achieving their goal and tracking their progress. The more we work on goal setting with students, the more we realize productive goal setting is hard! Even our own goals and action steps need some editing when we really think about them. We’ve tried a number of strategies over the years, and this is what we’ve found has the biggest impact on getting positive results from goal setting activities with students.
#1 Teach students how to understand their grades.
In our experience, very few students actually understand how they earned the grade they did. Many teachers use some sort of weighting, whether by creating categories or adjusting the point values of assignments, and students struggle to grasp this concept, mystified by the fact that they got a D when they turned in all their participation assignments but only missed one essay. It’s helpful to have students analyze their grades: which categories did they struggle in? How many zeros did they have? If you use an online grading system, this would be a great time to show students the comments feature: many of us send dozens of messages to our students about revising or making up assignments, only to find they never read a single one. Before getting to goals, help your students to see, specifically, what parts of their grades need improving. Encourage them to look at their grading category breakdown: maybe they just want to focus on homework completion, improving their writing, or studying for tests.
#2 Help them craft specific goals.
You can find many resources on SMART goals online, but we’ve found through our goal setting with students that it doesn’t have to be that formal. Many of our students set this goal: “I want to get good grades.” We encourage them to narrow their focus: “I want to earn a B in English this semester.” Another popular goal: “I will do all my homework.” We first have students double-check that this is actually something they need to focus on; on more than one occasion, we’ve had students who do all their homework set this goal. If this is an area they need to work on, again, we encourage them to narrow their focus: “I will do all my homework before 9 p.m. on weeknights.” You want to set students up for success, and specific (and reasonable) goals are an important part of that.
Pro-Tip: For struggling students, consider providing options, sentence starters, or sentence frames they can choose from.
#3 Remind students you’re asking them to improve, not be perfect.
Encourage students to set goals that are reasonable and realistic for them to achieve. It’s rare that a student who earns an F first semester will earn an A second semester, but raising an F to a D or a D to a C? That is within most students’ reach. Let your students know it’s okay to have goals that are good for them. Goals are not one-size-fits-all. You just want each student to make one improvement from what they did first semester.
#4 Brainstorm action steps together.
If everyone is setting an academic goal, there is likely to be a lot of overlap. Throw out a couple of sample goals (particularly ones you saw multiple students writing down) and have the class brainstorm action steps a student with that goal could take to improve (attending tutoring, making flashcards, studying vocabulary for 10 minutes every night, reading for 15 minutes, charging their Chromebook every night, making up tests they get low scores on). Not only does this create a “menu” of choices, but it also sparks creativity and encourages students to help one another by sharing successful strategies. Jump in yourself with suggestions as needed and compile the list in a Google Doc you can post on your LMS so students have access to it throughout the semester.
#5 Try to meet individually with students.
You may not have time in your schedule to do this. But if you do, pull your students up one by one to show you their goal and action steps. You’ll make the activity even more powerful. This gives you a chance to get to know your students better and get some insight into their thinking processes. It opens the door for conversations about what you’ve noticed in class or students’ study habits at home. It’s also helpful if students need to refine their goal and action steps so they are specific, reasonable, and achievable. A student who decides to study their notes for one hour every night is far less likely to experience success than a student who commits to studying their notes for ten minutes every day.
#6 Have students write their goals somewhere they can see and review them regularly.
In our study skills class, we had students write their semester goals on their agendas each week and then select one action step to focus on, based on what they were doing in class that week. If they had a test coming up, an action step about tutoring or studying made sense. But other weeks, an action step like “make flashcards” or “turn in all my assignments on time” or “raise my hand once to participate” worked better. Students need help seeing that improving their grades requires adjusting their strategies to suit the tasks that are in front of them. We’ve all had the student who wanders into tutoring in the first week of January with no homework but insisting, “My counselor told me to come here.”
#7 Celebrate achieved goals.
We had high hopes for this in our study skills class: we wanted to regularly celebrate students’ accomplishments and help them set new goals. Sometimes we didn’t quite get there. We could, though, celebrate when students successfully completed steps toward achieving their goals. For this particular group of students, that’s what they needed. Not all students require this constant reassurance, so you need to gauge the makeup of your classes to determine what’s right for them. For students who may need more affirmation than most, consider sending quick, encouraging or complimentary emails, or messages through platforms like GoGuardian. When you compliment individual students as you see them making progress, you’re giving them extra motivation to keep working toward those goals and teaching them that success, even small success, is worth celebrating.
We certainly didn’t have goal setting with students all figured out by the time we left the classroom. But we did learn a lot through several years of trial and error, and that’s really all anyone can ask of us (and all we can ask of our students): keep pushing the bar a little further forward and getting a little closer to our goals, whatever they may be.
Do you do work through goal setting activities with your students? What strategies have you developed to help students set reasonable and achievable goals? We know how valuable goals have been in our own lives, and we want to see students of all ages benefit from them as well. Continue the conversation with us at [email protected] or on Instagram @threeheads.works.