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Achieving more with focus: Fostering Student Goal Setting

1. What is goal setting?

   1. A goal is what the student is trying to learn or achieve--an outcome or accomplishment

   2. Guided by 3 questions

      1. Where am I going?

      2. Where am I now?

      3. What strategy or strategies will help me get to where I need to go?

   3. Goal setting and goal achievement influence learning and generate motivation to learn

      1. Providing a learning target that students can see and understand

      2. Helping students gather information about how they are doing in pursuit of that target

2. How Does Goal Setting Affect Student Learning and Achievement

   1. Goals focus student attention on the learning task and the learning target.

   2. Goals stimulate appropriate student effort.

   3. Clear and realistic goals increase student persistence.

   4. Goals increase a student's desire and capacity to learn new strategies.

3. What Common Misconceptions Might Teachers Have About Goal Setting

   1. It is important that students have goals that inspire them to achieve more.

      1. Talking Points

         1. Effective goal setting is a continuous process of learning how to learn.

         2. Effective goals are precise, detailed, and linked to the current classroom task, not to general academic aims.

   2. Goal setting is a planned event to help students prepare for the next unit, report period, or part of the school year.

      1. Talking Points

         1. Goal setting is an ongoing and continuous part of the formative assessment process.

         2. Teachers and their students use the goal-setting process to constantly inform their learning decisions in the classroom.

   3. Goal setting is a study skill.

      1. Talking Points

         1. Goal setting is a learning process that helps students learn how to learn during the day-to-day, minute by minute work of the classroom.

         2. Students of all ages and in all grades learn more effectively and construct conceptual understandings in more meaningful ways when they take ownership of their learning through the goal setting process.

4. What is the Motivation Connection?

   1. Phase 1: Setting the Goal

      1. Students learn to describe a specific short-term learning goal that is just right in the terms of challenge and attainment.

         1. Involve students in examining the specific bite sized chunks that make up the goal.

         2. The time frame they have to learn those chunks

         3. What they will be asked to do or produce at the end of that time frame to demonstrate the learning.

   2. Phase 2: Selecting the Strategy

      1. Students use their judgement to choose a strategy or a set of strategies with "power"--a strategy they predict will have the most power to help them advance toward their goal.

   3. Phase 3: Assessing Performance

      1. Students self-assess and self-regulate as they monitor and adust what they are doing.

      2. Learning to gauge their progress toward their goal puts students in control of their own learning and means that students learn to attribute their success on the task to the things they can control--the set of strategies they chose and the amount and direction of their effort.

      3. They learn to gather evidence to assess the effectiveness of the strategies and to adjust their own performance.

   4. A Continuous Process

      1. This continuous process of setting a goal, choosing a strategy, and assessing performance, all focused on improving learning during the task at hand is what gives formative goal setting its power for increasing student achievement and motivation to learn.

5. What Are Specific Strategies I Can Share With Teachers

   1. Using Feedback that Feeds Forward

   2. Modeling Goal Setting

   3. Providing Goal Setting Guides p. 71-75

6. How Will I Recognize Goal Setting When I See It?

   1. Lesson plans reflect intentions to include goal setting within the lesson.

   2. Assignments follow a logical sequence that that scaffolds learners and breaks complex tasks into doable parts.

   3. Lessons include frequent progress checks for students to gauge their learning.

   4. Timelines for learning seem reasonable and practical

   5. Students are encouraged to revise and resubmit assignments.