There’s More to Goals than Setting Them

by Joanne Picone-Zocchia

The potential for thoughtful examination of professional practice to have a positive influence on the quality of those practices increases dramatically when it is paired with a process for establishing, monitoring and achieving goals for improvement and growth. While it has become fairly common rhetoric to speak of “goal setting,” the act of establishing a goal does not, in and of itself, ensure improved practice, nor does meticulously delineating the steps or strategies to be implemented. In fact, these two components of the goal setting process are fairly well accepted and commonplace in education. Why, then, don’t we see the degree of changes in practice that the facility and frequency with which we speak of goal setting might lead us to expect?

Perhaps part of the reason lies in the language that we use to name the process we encourage our profession to engage in, calling it “goal setting process,” which implies that it is the setting of the goal that is the ultimate end. It is true that setting a goal raises one’s awareness about what the goal encompasses. However, the mere act of setting the goal is hardly enough on which to pin the improvement of a profession, or of its members. While it may seem simplistic, what we call things has a serious effect on how we engage with them. The work of Lera Boroditsky (2010, 2011), speaks to how the words that we use shape the way that we think. What might happen if we renamed our commitment as goal attainment rather than goal setting, engaging instead in a “goal attainment process”? How might that shape and shift our thinking?

First and foremost, “goal attainment” includes goal setting, so the existing focus and strategies for establishing an aspired state are not lost. Even the “action plan” is subsumed inside goal attainment. There are, however, other components to attainment that may be beneficial to tackle. The process of successfully attaining a goal includes monitoring and adjusting actions, strategies and decisions to ensure that the goals identified can indeed move from identification to realization. There is also a reflective component to attainment that considers the learning and work related to the goal itself and how it can best be shared.

Action research and other professional inquiry models can provide a structure to support this shift to “goal attainment,” as can some key understandings about how we humans view, approach and address goals.

Defining and refining goals

Most goals fall into one of three improvement-related categories:

• goals designed to increase, improve or augment what exists

• goals designed to decrease, eliminate or thwart what exists

• goals designed to innovate or invent what does not yet exist

None of these categories is actually “better” than its counterparts, but considering the overall intent or focus of the goal can help articulate it in a way that is more likely to

promote commitment and attainment. If there is a sense of urgency around improvement, but no passion to innovate, then a goal that is worded as a commitment to innovation is probably inappropriate. Likewise, if there is a perceived need to limit or eliminate, then a goal stated from the perspective of increasing may feel contrived. The specific improvement needs, as well as our commitment and intention, should guide the language that we use in identifying our goals.

This leads to considerations of origin, ownership and context. It is important to differentiate between individual professional goals and the goals that one has for others or for a place. Goals for a school or class may be supported by an individual’s professional goals – and, though a case should always be made for examining the alignment, the goals that relate to a school or classroom may actually not be identical to an individual’s professional goals. In fact, individual goals may sit inside the action plan for school’s goals, or vice versa. A teacher’s goal to improve the use of questions in the classroom might sit inside a school goal for improving students’ critical thinking. Likewise, a principal’s school-wide goal to increase collaboration and reflection on professional practice could be supported by his/her own professional goal of deepening understanding of and facility in leading collegial inquiry experiences. Just as our language shapes how we perceive our goals, so does the degree to which we “own” them.

It is important to negotiate the relationship between and among our goals and the goals of others in our system. Only when we are aware of the others whose goals we are necessary to attaining – or who are part of the attainment of our own goals – can we purposefully build in and account for the kinds of participation that these relationships entail.

Inspiration and entry points

Our brains, by nature, situate all goals along a continuum that runs from How to Why (Berkman and Grant, 2009). Goals that sit closer to “Why?” are big picture goals that get at vision, values and beliefs. Goals that sit closer to “How?” are much more actionable, and indeed can seem like action steps. The goal attainment process benefits greatly from attending to how our brains categorize a goal. Without related “How” goals, a “Why” goal can seem like an unreachable, pie in the sky aspiration, easier abandoned than accomplished. In a similar way, “How” goals without the context provided by a “Why” goal can seem insignificant, meaningless or disconnected – or even “hoops” - and are equally easy to abandon.

As part of goal identification and refinement, it is a good practice to ask the question “Why?” several times of a goal that is a discreet action step…and “How?” several times of a goal that is a big picture aspiration. In this way, we can provide ourselves – and those others who are necessary to the attainment of our goals - with a frame that includes the importance of the goal as well as the actionable steps to take in achieving it. A visual example of this can be found on the Stanford website at dschool.stanford.edu/wp-content/themes/dschool/method-cards/why-how-laddering.pdf.

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Implementing and Monitoring Our Actions and Strategies

The implementation/monitoring phase of the goal attainment process is supported by two important pieces of planning: identifying and preparing for potential obstacles, and establishing interim and ultimate indicators of success.

Surfacing obstacles is a strategy that, in and of itself, promotes successful goal attainment, especially when it taps the perspectives of members of those stakeholder groups involved in or impacted by the attainment of the goal. Three questions are helpful in determining which stakeholder groups to seek input from:

• Who stands to be most affected by the attainment of this goal?

• Whose help/cooperation is most necessary to the successful attainment of this goal?

• Who is most likely to be skeptical about or resistant to the goal’s attainment?

Members from the stakeholder groups represented in the responses to these three questions can be most helpful in uncovering and defusing potential obstacles.

The next step is to establish associated “implementation intentions” (Gollwitzer and Oettingen (2012); Gollwitzer, 1993). This involves creating if-then statements that pair the now surfaced, potential obstacles with strategies for overcoming them (“If [the obstacle] happens, then I/we will [do what]).

Rather than recognizing potential obstacles early on, but only dealing with them if they arise, this proactive approach brings potential obstacles into sight ahead of time, and creating associated implementation intentions actually seems to eliminate the obstacles as potential stumbling blocks. When creating implementation intentions, involving the stakeholders who helped to articulate the obstacles has a twofold benefit. It reveals actions or strategies that would eliminate the very obstacles they identified, and enlists them into the goal attainment process (and by association, the group they represent).

Having a clear image of success, both in the short and the long term, is another key aspect of attaining goals. Identifying and defining “ultimate” indicators of success provides clear expectations of goal attainment in terms of what the goal will accomplish. Articulating “interim” indicators makes visible those key attributes, benchmarks or changes that are the anticipated evidence of progress, revealing information that supports the assessment of directionality and pace While “summative assessment” of goal attainment and the articulation of insights and next steps rests with accomplishing the ultimate indicators, interim indicators are the “formative assessment moments” of the goal attainment process. Interim indicators enable diversions from the intended path to be recognized and either purposefully dismissed or followed. They hold space for responsive adjustments to timing or intensity of actions and strategies, based on the progress toward the goals that is revealed.

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Goal Attainment

The journey to goal attainment is not likely to be a straight line and is often punctuated by challenges and obstacles that cause those pursuing goals to pause, regroup, rethink actions and redeploy resources. While well-articulated goals are an important first step, other steps help to propel us beyond goal setting to goal attainment. In planning goals, consider the potential benefits of:

• refining goals based on purpose

• reframing goals into rationale and actions using why and how

• identifying obstacles to goals and devising implementation intentions

• monitoring pace and direction toward goals by comparing to interim indicators

• assessing and evaluating goal attainment using ultimate indicators

• considering insights, questions and next steps

Goal Attainment Process and Improved Learning

Classrooms and schools generate a tremendous amount of knowledge. They house the "wisdom of practice" of the educational profession. But education has no history or mechanism that supports profession-wide valuing or sharing of all that is discovered and developed in its schools and classrooms – and so, educators typically do not, as a part of their professional practice, disseminate the knowledge that they generate about learning and learners, limiting the degree to which what is learned about learning in one classroom, grade level, department, school or district actually contributes to and affects our collective, professional knowledge base.

As long as the results of goal attainment processes are kept private, we doom ourselves and our profession to the redundancy of ignorance – to repetitive cycles, to reinventing the wheel, to the inefficiency that is an unintended consequence of keeping our work to ourselves. Without knowing what others have tried or discovered, we can inadvertently repeat what they have already questioned, tested, wondered, learned and accomplished.

And so, though attainment of a goal would seem to be the ultimate and final step, it is critical that the goal attainment process be recursive and not redundant. For this to be the case, participation in this process goes hand in hand with a professional responsibility to share the insights, questions and next steps that emerge as a result. It is the learning and work of goals pursued that, if disseminated, can provide the foundation and seeds for new goals, moving us beyond those already attempted and achieved, connecting and augmenting the combined expertise of diverse groups of educators, establishing the process of continuous improvement and growth - and truly taking on the challenge of “improving learning.”

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References

Berkman, E. and Grant, H. The Psychology of Goals. The Guilford Press, New York, 2009

Boroditsky, L. (2011). How language shapes thought. Scientific American, February 2011.

Boroditsky, L. (2010). Lost in Translation. Wall Street Journal. July 24, 2010.

Gollwitzer, P. M. & Oettingen, G. (2012). Goal pursuit. In R. M. Ryan (Ed.), The Oxford handbook of human motivation (pp. 208-231). New York: Oxford University Press.

Gollwitzer, P. M. (2003). Why we thought that action mind-sets affect illusions of control. Psychological Inquiry, 14, 259-267.

Institute of Design at Stanford. Why and How Laddering. http://dschool.stanford.edu/wp-content/themes/dschool/method-cards/why-how-laddering.pdf

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