Examining Professional Practice
The ultimate context for all education-related goals, individual and collective, should be to improve learning. Goals that exist in the service of anything other than improving learning essentially have no place inside a process that exists to accomplish just that. In order to be certain that distractors of the moment are not redirecting the attention to - or somehow coopting the intention of - the goal, it is critical to check the alignment between the goals being set and the greater context of improving learning.
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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? (read more) |
Goal-Setting References
Berkman, E. and Grant, H. (2009). The Psychology of Goals. The Guilford Press, New York.
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.
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