The new year has officially arrived and if you’re like a lot of people you’ve set yourself some resolutions. You know those promises you make to yourself to lose weight, quit smoking, or break some other noxious habit.
What about this year making a New Year’s Resolution that has a shot of attainability? Are you SMART? Do you include all the steps to goal setting?
Teachers learn about goal setting for their classrooms. A seemingly random set of letters is drilled into their heads during their education classes…TSWBAT…the student will be able to.
Every lesson is supposed to be created with this in mind. The student will be able to….
This phrase though has little meaning if the teacher fails to create a lesson plan that spells out just what the student will be able to do after the lesson and what accuracy level the teacher will set to know the student has achieved the lesson’s goal. One teacher’s goal statement will be something like: The student will be able to accurately kick a ball into a soccer net with 70% accuracy.
Notice the statement relays just what is expected and how the teacher will know if s/he succeeded. The statement is concrete and measurable. The lesson plan would then continue to state how the teacher would go about teaching his/her students how to kick a soccer ball and how much time s/he expected to use to accomplish this goal.
We can take this idea and apply it to any goals we may set as long as we meet a few basic, SMART criteria.
S-Is this goal specific? Is it new or designed to stretch your abilities?
M-Is this goal meaningful? In the above example, kicking a soccer ball into the net is meaningful for anyone learning the game of soccer, or anyone who wants to learn how to kick a ball.
A-Is it obtainable? Seventy per cent is seven successes out of ten. You can measure your success easily. Kick a soccer ball ten times toward a soccer net and count how many go into the net. Is this too easy? Or too hard? A goal should stretch you in some way, and only you know if what you’ve set for yourself is reasonable which brings us to the next letter in our acronym.
R-Is the goal realistic? A teacher has to consider how many students s/he has, how much time s/he can spend in teaching kicking fundamentals, and be flexible enough to adjust the plan for achieving the goal. Perhaps in her class of thirty students, she has to give individual instruction to ten to fifteen students. Perhaps a goal of teaching them how to kick a soccer ball into the net had been planed for one fifty-five minute period along with the testing. Teaching ten to fifteen students individually will blow the fifty-five minutes allotted out of the water.
T-How long will it take you to achieve this goal? Perhaps our teacher will work on this particular skill for a week or two. Determining length of time to achieve the goal will depend on how motivated s/he is to teach, how motivated the students are to learn and pass, and how much prior experience the students (and the teacher!) have with the material. Kindergartners will need significantly more time than juniors in high school.
Can you be SMART and apply these principals to your New Year’s goals? Can you apply them to your writing, your weight loss, your determination to break a bad habit? I’m sure you can, if you know what it is you want to accomplish, are motivated and make your goals measurable over a reasonable amount of time.
Today is the first day of a brand new year. Be SMART with your resolutions and you’ll have a much better chance at accomplishing them!
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