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Ensure students Set Personal Learning Objectives

Learning more about personalized goal setting has forced me to reflect heavily on the goal-setting practices I implement in my own classroom. It was during an observation debrief meeting that I was faced with the harsh reality: While majority of my students were excited and knowledgeable about their goals, I had a few who clearly were not. Albert A. Bandura's Social Learning Theory and self Efficiacy helped me to focus on how to improve students' self efficiacy.

One way to create a routine opportunity for the improvement of their self-Efficiacy is through a dedicating a specific time of the day for sharing work. For example, students can share after daily literacy stations. They can students share their learning goals with the class, share the work that reflects their goal, and their classmates have sentence stems on the "share star" to help guide their peer feedback. The "share star" is a paper star with sentence stems on it. One side has sentence stems for the presenter, and the other side has sentence stems to help guide peer feedback. I have also used other fun objects like the "share bear" to increase student engagement. (This is a giant stuffed animal teddy bear with sentence stems on the front and back of his T-shirt.) Students LOVE engaging in share time because it is engaging and interactive- all while focusing on goals specific to their current performance level.

Presenter sentence stems: "I worked in the _______ station. My goal was to __________. Here is what I did:"
Peer Feedback sentence stems: "Your goal was to _____________. You met your goal because you _________________. OR Next time try _____________ so you can meet your goal."

Another example of improving self-efficiacy through goal-setting is displayed in this "goal getter" worksheet for students to complete using a performance rubric to understand the specific skill they need to practice, and a choice of strategies to help them practice the skill.

Understanding the sources of self efficiacy will help teachers to make share times even more intentional by providing opportunities within the classroom that encourage performance attainment, vicarious experiences, verbal persuasion, and improves physciological states. Teachers can plan to improve performance attainment by:

making sure the goal is of appropriate difficulty and correlates with the students personal goals and interests. (Atkinson, 1964; Deci & Ryan, 1985).

Feedback to every student must be intentional and specific since other students will use their classmates' experience as their own. This feedback should be clear, consise, and encourage/reward effort rather than the attainment of a specific achievement. (Dweck, 2010, p.28).

Verbal persuasion is heavily linked to intentional feedback as well ; Since students view teachers as a credible source, I need to make sure each student gets feedback from both me and their classmates! Improving Physciological states has always proved to be the most challenging. Understanding that my students' mood affects how they feel about their ability to successfully complete a task is only half the battle. I think the key in helping students to approach difficlt tasks as challenges to be mastered rather than threats to be avoided is to have a healthy balance of goal-setting. My feedback will be intentional, supportive and demanding if I can balance rewards for reaching certain benchmarks while consistently praising increased understanding or mastery goals. (Seifert, 2004, p.142)

References:

Dweck, C. S. (2010). Mindsets and equitable education. Principal Leadership, 10(5), 26-29.