Goals for the New Year

It's time to go back to school and the calendar has turned to another year. As we return to school, it's time to take stock of what is working and what needs to be adjusted in order to move our students closer to proficiency.

How do you know where all of your students have made growth and where you measure up? It is time to review all of that data and develop an action plan for moving forward.

Having a system to track, review, and compare data is essential for any school. We use a system developed in Microsoft 365 to share our data, but any system of tracking and sharing data works, as long as it is consistently used and everyone agrees on the data points. 

Having data doesn't do any good if it isn't being used to design targeted instruction. Today's teachers must be able to must be data experts who use data to plan instruction that meets students where they are and moves them to the next level. 

Moving students to the next level can be extremely overwhelming when you have large numbers of students who are below level, so it is important to set short-term, as well as long-term, goals. Many new teachers get stuck here - wasting valuable time on lessons that don't move students closer to the goal. Your long-term, or year end, goals are similar to the concept of planning for college as soon as your child is born. You know that you have to begin the savings account, you have the conversation with you spouse, and you set a goal of how much you would like to have saved by the time your child is eighteen or ready to go to college (and trust me, it won't be enough). Short-term goals are similar to your plan to actually put the money in the account - whether you use a 529 or a savings account, you have a system to put away the money each month and then you progress monitor to see how close you are getting to your goal. It's actually the short-term goals that you can adjust and make changes to in order to get you closer to your long-term goal. So as important as the end of the year goal is, if you are not setting short-term goals that will get your students closer to the mark, and then reviewing each and every day to see how much progress they have made, you will find yourself short when it really comes time. 

So, it's time to measure up. How much progress have your students made to date? Where are your students in terms of the year-end goals? What teacher actions will you implement in order to move your students over the next 6-8 weeks? Here is an example of a tool for planning your mid-year data discussions and instructional planning.