Setting up goals for the term? Let your students know!
Goal setting 📅📈 is an important process in framing and directing the effort you put into your classroom. Without a goal in mind, it is hard to know where you want to go. In many schools and educational contexts, we often use these in various ways. Whether it be through Professional Learning Communities, coaching, or other structures, we as educators are generally familiar with this process. But how often do we share this information with our students? What would be the benefit? Why would you even?
Letting your students in on your plans can be a powerful way to connect with your class. The act of sharing is a vulnerable one. It provides transparency, offers up a look behind the curtain, and provides students with a new vantage point. A view that shows you as a professional. One that is learning and looking to become a better teacher than before.
Let your students be ‘in the know’ and set up expectations
‘What I am looking to do this term?’ is a great way to start one of your first webinars 💻. I am a big fan of transparency; it puts you in a vulnerable space but gives you so much more in return. However, allowing your students to be ‘in the know’ when it comes to your own professional development area may seem like a teacher’s worst nightmare. As one once told me ‘why would I let students know that!’ 😲.
But hear me out. 👂👂
Being transparent about your own goals flips the traditional dynamic. It keeps us accountable to our students when we publicise that information. This social pressure, and the feeling of ‘not letting your students down’ can be a powerful motivator to keep focused on your target. It lets students know that you are there to get better. You are there to authentically help them connect and learn. And you are there to try new strategies, make mistakes, and learn.
When letting students know your goals, it is also a good opportunity to set-up expectations with your students. If your goal is to get more talking during online lessons, tell your students what you’d like to see from them. What type of engagement you can imagine from them when they are online? Are there particular icons you will use to indicate sections of the lesson that are for discussion? Do you want them to use chat only or push them outside their comfort zones and use the microphone functions? Allowing your students know takes away a lot of the guesswork that can happen when first entering the online environment. For some students this may be their first online experience, and for many they may have some experience but a clear way of approaching this environment is yet to be solidified.
Use this as an opportunity. 🚪
Getting student feedback, reflecting, and trying again
Being transparent about your goals helps you get better feedback from your students. If they know what you are working on, they can keep that in mind as they provide you with feedback. Feedback can be difficult to find in the online space. It can be rich in data (click throughs, page views, etc 🖱️) but rich in a different way than the physical space. We can’t necessarily always see the reaction of students and that flow of information can often be missing online. Any way we can target students’ feedback to our personal development, we should.
Showing your students the process by which you learn and grow as a professional can be a great trust building exercise
Being open allows students to comment directly on your progress. This can be a little jarring at first, but honesty about how you are going online should be welcome. Remember that it’s often very invisible to us online. It also provides you with an opportunity to take on feedback, a modelling opportunity. As you take on student feedback you are showing and signalling to your students that it’s okay to not get it right the first go and to adapt based on information people are feeding you. This is ultimately part of the learning process that we’d want all our students to undertake, so why not be the one to start?
Get your students involved in goal setting
Goal setting can be a powerful motivator for students as well. Keeping an eye on the bigger picture can help students do more in the present. Modelling the goal setting process can be a very powerful teaching tool and ‘most human behavior is learned observationally through modelling’ (Bandura, 1977). Showing your students the process by which you learn and grow as a professional can be a great trust building exercise, prompting them to keep their own goals in mind. You can even use the same first webinar, where you talk about your goals, to get your students to talk about theirs. Many of them will have career aspirations in mind, this will help you tap into that information in future sessions and to keep that in mind when planning your lessons.
Where to from here
Whether you start small or want to dive headfirst into it, the aim is to just have a go. You may not feel fully comfortable divulging your entire professional development plan but you can start with your goals for the term, maybe even your goals for the lesson. It helps clarify what you’ll be putting time and effort into, which in turn helps students prioritise their own actions.
Take that extra time to communicate with your students and watch the experiment play out 🔬.
Bill Simmalavong
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Bandura, A. (1977). Social Learning Theory. New York: General Learning Press.