Setting Teaching Goals

Goals are an odd thing. Teachers generally know the value of setting goals, creating a viable action plan and meeting goals. As teachers we deliver lessons aimed at helping our students create and reach personal and academic goals. As professionals we establish goals for ourselves annually and strive to meet them throughout the year.

Overall, I feel that I am a “goal oriented” person - I like having meaningful direction for my actions and enjoy reaching a bench mark for personal success. Yet every year I struggle to establish and articulate meaningful professional goals for myself. I want to set goals that will help develop my abilities as a teacher and benefit my students while still maintaining the components of being “realistic” and “attainable”. While every year I’m able to carefully craft these goals, I always question myself and wonder if I settled on the “right ones” for the year. It takes me forever! 

Thankfully, I finally feel that this year I managed to create well thought-out goals that will not only motivate me to use better teaching practices in my classroom but will feed my desire for professional and personal learning.

Even though my official professional goals have been set for the year, and I’m satisfied with them, I have continued to think about professional and personal goals. I now wonder if I can embrace other professional-esque goals for myself. Something along the lines of:

1.     Establish a better work-life balance: by using prep time more effectively and taking less work home with me at night. I know that I tend to “over work” on not only my actual job, but with my volunteer obligations and creative pursuits as well. I think this will help me to be a better teacher in the end as I’ll have some distance and time to reflect rather than being constantly engaged in the moment or current task at hand. (I guess my need for directed reflection  is why I started blogging this year, but still it will be a good challenge).

AND

2.       Take more risks: try new things inside and outside of the classroom, new teaching/learning styles with my students, seek out new experiences that I can integrate into the classroom as teachable moments. This could lead to some exciting learning opportunities for myself as well as my students. I’m not saying I’m going to go out and try anything extreme this year (don’t expect me to take up sky diving or something) but I do think I will be able to step out of my comfort zone and embrace new opportunities.

Extending this tradition of professional goals will mean that this is going to be an interesting year full of personal challenges. I guess I should consider revamping my personal goals as well… but that’s a post for another day!