169: Setting Realistic Goals for Teachers

Back-to-school season is the perfect time to reflect and reset your intentions. In this episode of the Shared Teaching Podcast, I walk you through how to set realistic, purposeful goals that you’ll actually stick to all year. Whether you’re in the classroom or a support role, these ideas will help reduce burnout and increase your impact.

BLOG POST / SHOW NOTES LINK: https://sharedteaching.com/realistic-goals-for-teachers/

In This Episode We’ll Talk About:

• Why teachers often struggle with following through on goals
• How to reflect on last school year to build better intentions
• Examples of teacher goals based on different teaching roles
• What makes a goal “realistic” for teachers
• How to use SMART goals the right way
• Breaking down big goals into manageable steps
• How to track your goals and adjust when things aren’t working
• Specific goal ideas for classroom teachers and support staff

Resources Helpful With This Episode:

• Episode 163: Reflecting on Your Writing Instruction

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Transcript

Hello and welcome back to the Shared Teaching Podcast. It's your host, Susan, and I'm here with another episode for you getting ready for back to school. As much as I don't want to be talking about it, and I want to still enjoy the last couple of weeks I have left of my summer, it's necessary, at least for me and maybe some of you. And if you're not ready, that's okay. This episode will be here when you are. 

So this is episode 169, and we are talking about setting realistic goals for ourselves for back to school. I know that every year I make some goals, but I fall into the habit of not following through. I don't write them down, I don't remind myself of them, and you just get so busy with the other things happening throughout the school year that you forget the intentionality that you had before you started. So I do not want that for you. We want to try our best to create these goals, maybe maintaining a better work life balance, having better classroom engagement. Maybe we want to smash out our goals and have an amazing evaluation. 

In this post or in this podcast episode as well, I'm going to walk you through how I start the year with purposeful, achievable goals and how you can do the same. So the first thing I ever do, of course, before I dive right into planning, is I'm going to reflect on the previous year and I have a couple of podcast episodes I've done this summer all about reflection. So you're more than welcome to take a look back at those. It was. Let's see, episode 163 was reflecting on our writing instruction to improve for the next year. And I believe there is one more that I'm not finding at the moment, but that is A-okay. Definitely listen to 163 if you're interested in changing or reflecting on your writing instruction. 

Okay, so what I'm going to reflect on is what routines or systems worked well. What did I struggle to stay consistent with? What feedback did I receive during my evaluations? And where do I want to grow this year? So using this reflection and then for me it's just kind of like in my head reflecting I don't necessarily write anything down. But you do you however you like to reflect. Maybe you like to just journal or I don't even know. Brain dump. There is the word I have summer fog brain. Don't you all. 

We're going to use this reflection and we're going to begin brainstorming a list of goals for the coming school year. If they're just ideas, they don't have to be fancy. They don't have to be realistic. I don't have to think about how I'm going to achieve them. I'm just going to come up with them. So for me, if you don't know, I am currently a gate specialist, which means I teach the gifted and talented education students, but I also support the general education teachers with their qualified students in their classroom, as well as try to find and identify other students in the school that might be gifted as well. So what I aim to do every year and this coming year especially, is I want to stick to my contract hours. That's very, very important for me. I want to increase student engagement. I want to send weekly messages to parents. This is where I kind of fell down a little bit last year. I was not so great at the parent communication, so I want to get better at that for this year. I was great my first year in this position. I kind of slumped the second year, and now I want to ramp it back up for the third year. And last but not least, I want to be a better support system to my general education teachers. 

So if I was still in the classroom and I was doing a grade level position. My goals, of course, might look a little bit different, but still some similar goals, which is sticking to contract hours. Maybe instead of reaching out to parents weekly with a message, I'm going to have some kind of newsletter for my parents that I send out every Monday so that they know what the week coming up looks like for their child, what they're studying, what the homework is, all that good stuff. If I do homework, that's a whole nother podcast. And then we're going to implement consistent, maybe math workshop routines. If I was really bad with my math and I want to get more engagement, maybe do some kind of center so I can pull small groups, I'm going to have some kind of workshop routine. And then maybe I want to get better about doing my writing feedback. So every student is touched upon and has their writing goals, and I want to make sure that that's clear for myself. 

The next thing we need to ask ourselves, after we've kind of brainstormed a few ideas of what we want to happen is how we can make these goals realistic. So a realistic goal is going to align with your current role and responsibilities. It must be able to be accomplished within your school day or some kind of reasonable effort outside of it. We don't want something that's going to take us like five hours outside of our contract time every day to complete this goal, whatever goal it is you've set. We want to make sure it doesn't require daily perfection, but it is going to get better with consistent progress. It's going to consider the energy you have, the time and the resources available to you. We're not going to invest millions in our classroom to try to make this goal happen, right? It should be something that is easy and sustainable for us. And then, of course, we want it to support our wellbeing and our professional growth. 

When you set a realistic goal, it's really easy to get kind of swept up in the excitement of a fresh start. And we really have to keep the mindset that progress matters more than perfection. So I know as teachers, we're all familiar with Smart goals, and as much as I groan every time I hear about them, there is something to them that helps people stick with them when we write them this way. So I encourage you to use the Smart acronym as you're planning out your goal. And if you're not familiar, let's go ahead and go over it really quick. So it's the acronym Smart. So S stands for specific. So you want to have your goal written in a very clear manner. Then the next is measurable. So you want to make sure that there is some kind of number attached some kind of day or A timeline attached to your goal. So you are able to figure out if you've met that goal or not. A is achievable. Our goal should be realistic and attainable within, like I said, our capability and our resources. R is relevant. Your goals should align with our overall objective and priority, and make sure that they contribute to whatever your larger vision is. So, for example, if our goal is to get out of the classroom by the end of the day and not stay past our contract time, then our goal is not going to be eating healthier snacks at lunch. Right? Those just don't align. So it should match with what our outcome is, which is leaving work early. So maybe our one of our goals is not talking to our neighboring friends during our planning period. And then we lose our entire planning period. So maybe we say, okay, I talk for five minutes and then I tell them, I'm so sorry, but I got to get this done. Last but not least is time bound. T goals should have a defined deadline so that we have that kind of sense of urgency and we are going to actually complete and finish it. So hopefully that is helpful. 

When I'm thinking about my Smart goal, I'm going to say something along the lines of let me go back and look at mine. Okay. So I want to have weekly messages to parents. It's already kind of in there as time bound, but I'm going to get a little bit more specific. And I might say something about how every Monday morning by 8 a.m. I am going to have a sorry, my phone's ringing. Okay. Welcome to life. So what I was saying is I am going to have a Smart goal for my weekly messages to parents. So I might say something like Every Monday I will send a message and we use Classdojo. So I will send a classdojo message to all families about what's happening in the coming week. And I will also message at least two families a positive message each week as I go through the class, and then I will repeat the process. So it's very specific. I'm saying when I'm doing it, I'm saying how often I'm doing it, and then that way I can track it. So I can look at my planner and I can put like newsletter in the corner and I'm just going to check. So I'm not really going to do a newsletter, at least not that I'm thinking I'm just going to do like a quick little blurb that says like, hey, this is what we're working on because I only see students, um, some of them once a week and then some of them only twice a week, so it doesn't really make sense for me to spend my time creating a newsletter. But a newsletter is definitely something that I had done as a first and second grade teacher, and I find it really invaluable and the parents really liked having them. I did a printed copy and then I also sent a or I did a printed copy sent home, and then I also attached an image to Classdojo of the newsletter. And that's really easy to do nowadays. So I did it both ways so that I wasn't missing any parents. And then they have the information. 

We have our goals. We are breaking them down to make them more realistic, and we want to make sure that we are only choosing our top three goals. So we want to remember that of course, teaching is a marathon, not a sprint, and we have all year to work on these. So if we accomplish the 2 or 3 goals that we pick at the beginning of the school year? Then we just pick some new goals as we move through the school year to work on. But we're not going to do all six of them at the same time at the beginning of the year, because that's just really overwhelming. 

So if you're a newer teacher, I would recommend probably only doing like two goals, right? Like regular communication with parents is so, so important. So I would probably put that at like the top priority of my list. And then also maybe not spending more than, let's say five hours a week outside of our contract time. And then you can kind of whittle it down as you go. But I know in the beginning, when you first start teaching, you want to do all the things, especially when you see Pinterest and Instagram and TikTok videos and all these rooms look so amazing. But you have to remember, teachers are in their rooms most of the summer to make it look that amazing, spending eight hours a day for multiple days. I don't have the time and patience for that. I pick one color scheme and I just go with it. So this year I found a really cute poster at Hobby Lobby. There are actually two posters and I loved the color scheme on them. And then I found some matching duct tape that I'm going to use for borders, and I'm hoping to do a short little reel on how I do that later. I've been doing it for several years now instead of buying border, and I just love it. It stands up so well. Anyway, that is a whole different episode or video or whatever you want to call it. 

So let's get back to our purpose here. 

So choosing our top three goals, we want to really prioritize. We're going to ask ourselves what which goals would make the biggest impact on our students. Which goals would improve my teaching life the most, and which ones am I truly excited to tackle? And then you're going to choose from those and then make them actionable. Okay, so we already kind of talked about Smart goals, But let's go ahead and break down those goals into small steps, maybe in a different way that makes more sense. So first, if you're going to say you want to stick to your contract hours, you want to decide on what your work hours are. You're going to write them down, and you're going to stick to them as if they are the teaching times that you must stick to. This is when your reading blocks happens. This is when your math block happens. Because I know you all have some of those admin that they want to see reading during reading time. When they walk into your room and it says reading on the schedule. So you are going to stick to them like it's that schedule. Okay. 

You're going to batch your tasks by the day. So if your goal is to stick to your contract hours, you are going to pick different days of the week for your prep times to have a specific focus. So my favorite is making sure I have all my plans and copies done by Friday. So I kind of have to backwards plan to figure out like how is that going to happen? So maybe I do math on Mondays. Tuesday I'm doing writing, Wednesday I'm doing reading and science. And I'm planning each day for something like that. And then I plan a day for just all the photocopies. So as I'm sitting there and planning, I'm not getting up in photocopying. I am just putting the master copy that I need photocopies on with little sticky note because I'm very forgetful. I will write on the sticky note like which days this lesson is for? And I don't have to write the subject because it's usually really obvious when you look at the paper. And then I put it in one of those sterilite drawers, and then when it's copy day, I take that stack out and maybe I'm spending the whole prep time copying, but dang, does it feel good when I have all my copies ready for the week. And I used to aim for two weeks, but that was because I've been teaching for a while and you get really used to your flow. So I was always at least two weeks ahead, which is amazing when it comes to I need a sub last minute and then, oh, they can just stick with my regular scheduled lessons, My copies are in the labeled folders that say like Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday with the subjects on them, and they just pull those papers out and they're good to go. 

Okay, last, um, or maybe not last, the last two steps for breaking down your goals is you want to make sure to have some kind of weekly planner. I kind of use, like, big notepads that say like, weekly goal kind of things on them. And then the I will just, like, jot notes for each day of the week as I'm coming through with my plans, and I'm going to assign those time blocks to when I'm figuring those things out. Right. Okay. And then you want to communicate your boundaries. You're going to let people know, like your parents and your team. These are when I'm accomplishing these things. Like, please know that I'm getting this stuff done on my preps. I would like to use my preps. And if you have meetings and stuff, then you're going to have to figure out different ways to work around that or work with your team to do that. But that is just an idea of how you can break down your goals. 

Okay, you want to track your progress. So remember, at the beginning of the podcast, I talked about how we're not going to get anywhere if we are not tracking it. If it's not forefront in our minds, we don't know what the goal is if we don't write it down and see it daily. So just jot a quick little blurb at the top of your planner. If you use a planner, put it at the top of your lesson plans. If you, you know, have printable lesson plans, maybe it's a digital reminder. Maybe it's just a sticky note on your computer. You want to make sure that you are checking in on your goal and making it a priority. So if you're seeing that sticky note that says leave that contract time, then that's going to remind you, yes, I wanted to do that. And it's okay if some days you can't. There are days where you cannot do it and it's going to feel impossible. Things like you're preparing for conferences or it's the back to school paperwork time, and you're getting all the data gathered, and you have to do the spreadsheets for your class, and your team and admin wants these things done. Or it's the crazy back to school videos and you have like 90 of them to watch. So sometimes you're not going to make it, but when you do, it's going to feel amazing. 

And last but not least, if you have trouble with your goals, if it's not working for you, for you, then feel free to stop and readjust. Right. It's just like when we're in the classroom, we're going to adjust. We're going to be flexible and we're going to reflect on why is that not working. So I hope this has been helpful. I do have a couple ideas for other goals that you can create if you're a little bit stuck. So if you are a classroom teacher, maybe you're preparing your materials for the upcoming week. Every Friday afternoon, you're sending one positive message home per student each month. Incorporate a three minute brain break every hour for your students. Maybe you're implementing a morning routine that allows for independent student work, or you're giving some kind of formative feedback to students weekly. If you're a support staff or specialist and you're listening to this podcast, thank you. Welcome. You want to maybe support your classroom teachers with monthly co-teaching. So ask them, hey, is this something that we can do? Can I co-teach with you once a month? You're developing a small resource library for targeted student needs. So maybe like a little task card checkouts or something that students are going to use. You're going to schedule one observation or a data collection session each week on a targeted student. Or maybe you're going to host some kind of parent communication night per quarter. Or maybe it's just a flyer that you're sending home that talks about the importance of how to if you're like a support staff for students that have autism, maybe it's like a helpful checklist of things that you do at the school that can cross over at home, that the parents can look at. Please make sure that you're always double checking with your teacher or your admin if these things are okay to do. And, um, hopefully they'll say yes because they would love to see you taking that initiative. But always check in, especially when it comes home to comes to, not comes home, comes to sending things home. I've had admin in the past that no matter how long you've been a teacher, that they want to see everything you are sending home before you send it home. So just check with your admin, see how they feel like, what is their policy on that? And then if you're a teacher, a couple more ideas is using maybe one planning period per week for professional development. Maybe that's watching some videos, reading a book, or listening to this podcast. You're going to maybe declutter one classroom area each month. If you're feeling very overwhelmed. You have too many things. It's not organized. You're just doing small motions to make it better. Maybe you're going to keep some kind of win journal. I've talked about this in my Writing Reflection podcast episode, but just little quick wins written down in a journal that's going to, like, make you feel good when you sit down and you read through them, and then maybe unplugging your school emails by 5 p.m. each day. You have to have a cutoff when these parents are no longer allowed to reach you. And I love that for Classdojo because you can set that up in Classdojo and then you don't even see anything. So that is beautiful. And then the parents know, like, hey, it's outside of her quiet time. Hours. Like she's not going to respond. So they hopefully will not expect you to respond. So make sure you have those hard and fast rules that you have set up at the beginning of the school year. And I love this for you. 

I would love to hear what goals that you are setting, so please feel free to leave a review on this podcast through Apple and tell me, say episode 169. I am setting my goals. They are. And tell me what your goals are because I love the spirit of sharing. That's why I called this shared teaching and I would love to hear more from all of you about what you're doing in your classroom. So stay tuned for an all new episode coming up.