Goal Getters - Motivating, Student Goal Setting & Metacognition Activity

Help create student buy-in with this goal-setting activity! Goal-setting is a great way to entice students to *want* to succeed without having a need for instant gratification. Even better, it helps develop student metacognition (source: https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ1097619.pdf)

This goal-setting pack is designed (and tested by me and my students!), to keep students working long-term toward their goals. Included in the pack are:

*A "Goal Getters" bulletin board heading

*Editable student name headers for bulletin board display

*Goal slips to go with student names on bulletin board

*A 15-week student progress graph with "3-Things I Can Do to Meet My Goal" Week 1 planning/discussion activity

How I used it:
I introduced the idea to my Elementary students with learning disabilities in our Resource classroom. I explained to them that they all have goals in their specially designed plans that are meant to help them make progress. Based off of their IEP goals, I helped each individual student pick something within Reading or Math (or one of each if they had both goals) that they wanted to concentrate on. We wrote a goal together based off of an all-class goal-end date, then wrote the goals on the slips to display by our names on a bulletin board in the classroom. We also began a countdown to our goal-end date so students could see each day how many days they had left to meet their goals.

At the beginning of each lesson, we would tie our lesson objectives back to our goals, answering the question, "How will what we're about to do help us meet our goals?" It was AMAZING how just knowing *WHY* we were doing something and making that something tie in with a PERSONAL benefit created so much buy-in from even my youngest students! The fact that their goals were displayed and easy to see was motivating as well. As students began meeting their goals, we would hold a mini-celebration for each student (high fives and compliments- my students didn't even MISS the stickers or candy!) as we wrote "GOAL MET!" on top of their goal slips with colorful highlighters.

My students celebrated their rewards with an all-class celebration (a movie afternoon) at the end of the semester- over 100 days after we started our goal-setting project. Who says "kids these days" need instant gratification!?

I'm confident this will work as successfully for you as it did for me!

Happy Teaching!