How to Highlight Children's Goals for the School Year

Every child is a unique and has a different learning style. They approach school and learning in a totally individualized way. Because of this, I believe educators should prepare a set of standard goals for each student. This guide, prepared at the beginning of the year can keep us on track and focused on the strengths and weaknesses for each, which will provide us with a strong evaluation tool if we continue to utilize it throughout the year.

When we provide a set of goals for each child, we can also help other teachers when students leave our classroom and they have a better understanding of how this student performs academically. So, this is a good place to start. At the beginning of the year, if available, we should review goals from the previous year. Parents are often pretty straight forward when they know that their child has specific needs in the classroom as well and we often know about these pretty early in the school year. During initial assessments, we can prepare a set of specific goals that we would like the student to work on and achieve during the time in our classroom. This allows us to have a guideline for each student and their abilities, what they might be capable of during the course of the school year.

It is important for us to be realistic. If we realize a student struggled the previous year in school, it would be unrealistic for them to totally master new skills that are cumulative. Creating goals are an excellent resource, and they can also always be revised.

It is important to start small and work up. If we create goals at the beginning of the school year, we can revisit them and revise a goal that better fits a student.

Having goals provides accountability for us as educators to students, parents, and the teachers students will receive in the following years. However, we are doing a disservice to them if we do not have a plan of action, ensuring that we have a plan for each student and provide resources for ourselves on how we want to approach each students list of goals. In a classroom of the same aged children, many of our goals might be the same. Based on a child's learning style and method of learning, however, we might choose to approach their goal from a different avenue. One child might need another student working beside them to assure them and allow them to feel confident in their tasks, while another might need individual attention from you before they can work with another student.

For myself, having specific goals written down are helpful because they show me where I started in the year and what I hope to complete by the end for each child's academic goals.