Goal Setting
Overview
Setting overall goals, as well as smaller goals as steps to reaching them, encourages consistent, achievable progress and helps students feel confident in their skills and abilities. When learners create their own goals, plan out steps to achieve them, and check their progress against these steps, they strengthen their self-efficacy as they build their capacity to tackle difficult challenges and be successful. For writing in particular, setting specific goals for the content and audience of a composition leads to improvements in the writing process.
Example: Use This Strategy in the Classroom
Watch this fifth grade teacher use SMART goals with her students. By sharing examples of her students' goals, this teacher provides a concrete overview of what makes up a SMART goal. Through this process, students are able to reflect on their learning and goals, maintaining them in their Short-term Memory.
Design It into Your Product
*Videos are chosen as examples of strategies in action. These choices are not endorsements of the products or evidence of use of research to develop the feature.*
See how products, such as Toodledo, allow learners to create tasks or lists of goals and self-monitor their progress. With functions like reminders and shareable lists, learners are able to stay more accountable to the goals they set.
Additional Resources
Additional examples, research, and professional development. These resources are possible representations of this strategy, not endorsements.
Factors Supported by this Strategy
More Metacognitive Supports Strategies
Checklists and rubrics help students develop their abilities to self-assess and revise their writing.
Providing space and time for students to reflect is critical for moving what they have learned into Long-term Memory.
When students engage in a dialogue with themselves, they are able to orient, organize, and focus their thinking.
When students monitor their comprehension, performance, and use of strategies when reading and writing, they build their Metacognition.
When students reframe negative thoughts and tell themselves kind self-statements, they practice positive self-talk.
