With the start of a new term comes reflection and goal setting for both teachers and students.

This week’s post offers suggestions to help your students set achievable goals for the term.

5 Tips to Goal Set with Students

1. Hold an individual conference with each student. 

Individual conferences are a great tool for discussing how they progressed on the goals that they set the previous term and why they think that they were or were not successful. Often students need assistance in determining if they achieved their goal or not.

2. Ask students to set 2 goals for improvement this term and provide written feedback on how you could assist the student in achieving these.  

This might be on a goal setting sheet, blog, google form, post it etc. You might also like to set categories for students to set goals under for example: achievement, behaviours, effort.

I often ask my students how I can help them and they never seem to have any

suggestions for me. The old adage of you don’t know what you don’t know applies here. Feedback in this tip is essential.

3. Get your students to think SMART. 

Often students set goals for themselves without any notion of how they might achieve them. Ensure that students set goals with the SMART framework in mind. You may even get them to list the strategies that will enlist to ensure they achieve them.

4. Plan times to check in on student progress. 

A term can be a long time for a student. Plan time to check in with a student about their progress towards their goal. This also helps students who have forgotten or gotten a little slack in working towards their goal to refocus.

5. Share students goals with parents. 

Remember that we are not in this alone. Parents are just as invested in their childs success at school as much as we are and often more.

Letting a parent know their students goals in your class can add an additional layer of follow up and also helps maintain that relationship that you began building at the beginning of the year.

Using a mail merge like the one here can be a great way to easily share your students goals with their parents and even with themselves.

How do you help your students set goals for the term? Please share in the comments below or on our facebook page.