SMART Goals

The district I am currently working in has made a strong focus on SMART goals. SMART is an acronym for Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Rewarding, Time. The idea behind these goals is that students and teachers are setting goals for themselves or classroom by developing a plan and giving yourself a timeline.

I like the idea of SMART Goals. It makes me think about each lesson in terms of "What I need to do", "When do I need to do it?" and "How will I reach that goal?".

I thought it would be fun to have my class start making some SMART weekly goals. We started by having a discussion about what a SMART Goal is and how we make one. We then discussed what are some things that we might need to work on. We attempted to shoot for vague things. We didn't want to get to specific yet. The students had some trouble with the "time frame" of the goal. Some said that they wanted to know all of their multiplication facts. I had to explain to them that these are weekly goals and that it may be difficult to memorize all of those facts in seven days.

We used sentence frames to state our goals. We practiced them orally before we wrote them down and put them on our SMART Goals Board. Check out our board and some of the goals we came up with below!