Mapping Goals to Actions: A Goal Setting Lesson for Elementary Students

Do your students having difficulty setting goals and action steps to accomplish those goals? This post outlines a lesson I did with my second grade students to help them brainstorm and discover the connection between goals and action steps. From brainstorming goals as a whole group to listing specific action steps, this lesson connects specific goals with specific actions and gives students a bank of ideas to get started on their own goal setting.

Do you ever have those light bulb moments when teaching and you realize that you NEED to do a lesson about a topic at the moment? It’s messy but necessary. It also becomes one of the best lessons you’ve ever done! That is what happened with this goal-setting lesson, that I’m calling goal-setting in the moment.

When Goal Setting Lessons Don’t go as Planned

I’m keeping it real with this post, people.  You know when things just either come together really well or when they completely fall apart?  This is kinda in between.

My student teacher was supposed to teach a lesson, but she got sick, so I pulled from my “resources” – think mental bank of sponge activities – and did some impromptu goal-setting.

Goal setting is not new to my students.  We have been goal-setting since the beginning of the year, but I haven’t been too consistent about it.  We’ll go in spurts of it for a few weeks and then something else takes center stage and the goal-setting goes away for a while.  

I also haven’t been doing a good job of giving students stickers for improvements on our Super Improver Wall.  I have a hard time noticing the small improvements.  I really need to do more of that, it’s just so hard to be consistent!  I calculated that to move up 10 colors, students would need to change colors once a month, which means that I’m giving 3-4 stickers per student per week.  That’s a lot!  Way more than I’m doing.

Anyway, this lesson started with both the need to fill some time and wanting to reestablish goal setting in our classroom.

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As a side note – would you like some goal setting forms that we use in the classroom? Get them by clicking on the image below.

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Brainstorm Goals as a Whole Group

We started with a group brainstorm of goals that we can set.  It was easy to come up with behavior goals (the purple ones and a few others).  If I had planned this ahead of time, I might have done a two-column chart and sorted behavior and academic goals.

Once I prompted students to start brainstorming academic goals, they got stuck.  The first four in blue are their first attempt at coming up with academic goals.  You can see how general they are.  

This is a great start for second graders, but I don’t want them to stop there!  We talked a bit about being specific and adding some more details to our goals.

If this hadn’t been so spontaneous, I also might have just focused on one content area and the behavior and academic goals for that content area.

List Specific Actions to Accomplish Each Goal

I then had students choose a goal.  I listed each students’ goal that was specific enough and appropriate to work on.  Some students chose the same goal, so it was a shorter list.  Listing the goals also gave students who weren’t able to come up with a goal a good list from which to choose one.

After listing the goals, we went back and as a class, gave suggestions to each person on how they could meet their goal.  It was very powerful hearing the whole class give suggestions to one student on how he / she could meet the goal.  I love the camaraderie and teamwork it established.

At the beginning of the year, I gave students a list of behavior goals and asked them to choose one to work on over the week.  I realized that I need to do the same with academic goals.  

I need to give students a list of potential goals.  I also need to give them lists of possible actions that they can do to meet their goals.  This list also needs to be written for each content area.

My Reflections on this Goal Setting Lesson

It was a spontaneous lesson on goal setting, but in the moment, I realized two things:

• I needed to connect my students’ goals with concrete actions
• I need to give them lots of ideas and then provide them with choices

The first bullet point above is VERY important. Students can tell me what they want to do, but have trouble identifying what they need to do to get there. What actions do they need to start doing to accomplish their goals?

This is a great opportunity to brainstorm and create class lists of common goals and actions to get there. The upward arrow is a fantastic tool to use for this process.

The upward arrow also fits in with the second bullet point above. Students need to be given the information before being asked to work with it. Giving students MANY ideas for both goals and action steps helps them make a plan to move forward.

Do you want to help me generate a list?  What kinds of goals would you like your students to set?  And, what actions can they take to meet their goal?  Comment below and I’ll compile a list for us to use!

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Would you like some FREE goal setting forms? Click the image below to download them.