Goal Setting with Students
Welcome to the Modern Classrooms Project Podcast. Each week we bring you discussions with educators on how they use blended, self-paced, and mastery-based learning to better serve their students. In this episode, Zach is joined by Pickerington Local School District’s Instructional Technology Coach, Stephanie Howell to discuss different ways teachers can scaffold goal-setting for students.
Setting goals with students can be challenging because in reality, educators are often setting goals for students through their IEP goals or lesson objectives or even by standards. Students need more guidance when it comes to setting goals, making plans, and achieving those goals. Here are three takeaways from Stephanie’s podcast episode on goal setting.
Before we get started, Stephanie defines goal-setting so that we all have a common language.
Model how to set goals.
As educators, we expect for our students to know how to set goals by the time they walk into the classroom. That’s far from the case for most students.
We not only want to model content skills but also executive functioning skills such as goal-setting. Stephanie reminds us that, goal-setting is “best done in different classrooms where the teacher might model first and then … slowly letting the students take over control to where at the middle or end of the year, the students are really starting to own their own goals.” Stephanie also shares that Unit 0 (an introduction to your style of teaching and onboarding students to your classroom procedures) is a great place to model goal-setting. As an instructional coach, she models how to set goals that educators can take and implement right away in their classrooms.
“Kids don’t do what you expect, they do what you inspect.”
This was a quote from a caregiver that Stephanie heard and has been ruminating on since. It’s true that goal setting is expected, yet we don’t inspect it. We often set goals, but we have the tendency to not check in with ourselves and with each other. For goals to be achievable, we need to be more intentional with scheduling when we revisit the goals to see our progress.
This is an opportunity for educators to have conferences with students. It's a great inventory to know what students’ goals are, how they plan to achieve them, and what kind of support educators can give to their students. When we don’t check in on something, it’s less likely to be completed.
Gamify goal-setting.
We all know that gamifying content and skills have increased engagement and healthy competition in our classrooms, but have you considered gamifying goal-setting? This is exactly what Stephanie did with her use of Fast and Furious EduProtocol. Students were given a task via Kahoot, Quizizz, Gimkit to determine the class average based on their knowledge. Students saw each class average and their goal is to increase their knowledge every single day, which they did. She simply had a weekly table labeled Monday through Friday to showcase the class average. This doesn’t only show growth right away; it also has students do retrieval practice, be more cognizant of what they need to learn more about, and motivate them to continue improving their skills.
We’re so grateful for Stephanie joining us on the podcast to share some of her best practices when it comes to goal-setting. If you want more ideas, listen to the whole episode.
Our Host
Zach Diamond studied Music History and Theory at Oberlin College and received a Masters of Music in Music Education from Boston University. He taught music for five years in Lima, Peru, and is currently a Middle School music teacher at DC International School, a language-immersion school where he teaches in Spanish. He began implementing the Modern Classrooms Model in the 19-20 School Year and enthusiastically continues his work with the organization as a mentor and podcast producer.
Our Guest
Stephanie Howell is an Instructional Technology Coach for Grades 5-8 at Pickerington Local School District in Ohio. Stephanie is also a DMCE and an MCP mentor. She learned about our model through the Cult of Pedagogy podcast.
Follow her @mrshowell24 on Twitter.
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