Have Goals (Kenilworth & Farwell) from Flickr via Wylio

© 2010 Ky, Flickr | CC-BY | via Wylio

Today was the first day after our Spring Break and, as usual, I’m exhausted. The first day after time-off can really take a lot out of me!

It also means that there’s just a little more than two months left in the school year, and it made today a great time to do a goal-setting activity with students in my Beginning and Advanced English Language Learner class.

Students entered the classroom to find an “End-of-School-Year Goals” sheet on their desks. You can download a copy, and I’ll also reproduce it at the bottom of this post.

You’ll see that it combines learning goals and performance goals, which I have previously discussed.

After going through the sheet point-by-point on the overhead and helping students complete it, they then converted their sheet into posters.

Afterwards, we had time for many, though not all, of them to record some of their goals using the Shadow Puppet app. Here’s a sample:

We’ll be putting the goal posters on the class window for everyone to see, and students will glue their goal-sheets in a notebook we use twice-a-week. Once a week, students will reflect on how they are doing meeting their goals and make future plans, using one of the goal-tracking sheets at The Best Posts On Students Setting Goals.

Of course, we’ll be showing all the videos tomorrow and students will also share their posters “speed-dating” style.

The lesson went well today and, with luck, it will pay-off during the rest of the year, too!

Here’s what the form looks like:

End-Of-School-Year Goals

 

ATTITUDE

Goal: I want to be ___________________________________  (more positive, more respectful, more eager to learn, eager to help others, etc.)

Action: I will ________________________________ (remind myself each day that what I’m learning today will help me achieve my life dreams, offer to help another student each day, offer to help the teacher each day, etc.)

 

ENGLISH

Goal: I want to become a better ____________________  (writer, reader, speaker) in English.

Action: I will _____________________________ (do Duolingo or another computer site one half hour a day at home, ask the teacher for more challenging work, attend seventh period, etc.).

 

BEHAVIOR

Goal: I want to be _______________________________ (more focused, less talkative in class, more prepared, more respectful, etc. )

Action: I will ____________________________________ (change my seat away from a person I talk with too much, help other students more when I’m done with my work, ask the teacher how I can help, apologize when I do something wrong, etc.)

 

ACADEMIC

Goal: I want to get a(n) _______________________ (A, B, C) in class.

Action: I will __________________________________ (do my best work all the time, do harder projects on the computer, ask for extra credit work, etc.)