Goal Setting & Monitoring
Overview
Setting overall goals with actionable steps for achievement can help students feel more confident in their skills and abilities. Since literacy instruction is often embedded in disciplinary classes in the upper grades, creating literacy-focused goals can help students focus their literacy development while learning in content classes. Goal setting can also help students strengthen their self-efficacy and Motivation as they build their capacity to successfully tackle difficult challenges. For Composition in particular, setting specific goals for the content and audience of the piece leads to improvements in the overall quality of writing.
Example: Use This Strategy in the Classroom
Watch how this sixth grade teacher infuses goal setting and monitoring during reading instruction. She shows how she combines group work, individual conferencing, and reflection to help her students achieve their specific achievement goals. Through this process, students are able to reflect on their learning and goals and revise them to meet their needs during the year.
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
When annotating, students engage deeply with a text and make their thinking visible while reading.
Checklists and rubrics help students understand expectations as they navigate more complex tasks and assignments.
Journaling allows students to reflect on their thinking and feelings, process their learning, and connect new information to what they know, supporting their identity development and Sense of Belonging.
When students reframe negative thoughts and tell themselves kind self-statements, they practice positive self-talk.
Student reflection on learning, particularly when done collaboratively, is critical for moving knowledge of content and strategies 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 and actively participate in the reading process.
