Growing with Goals
“This is the most productive I’ve ever seen our studio work!” “It feels really good to have accomplished so much!” These were the words of two different learners in two separate studios this week at Acton Main. What’s most amazing is their words were echoed by many learners with ripples of variety. So, what’s different at Acton? Sure, the new space and the rays of sunshine has helped inspire learners however the one thing that has changed this session is our school’s approach to goal setting. Learners are making plans and their plans are truly SMART (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, Timely)!
At Acton, goal setting has been a regular occurrence however over the years we’ve noticed that building the habit of setting attainable goals is hard! It’s been a bit like Goldilocks and the three bears. A goal sometimes is too general: I’m going to get 5 things done today. Sometimes a goal is too large to complete in a week: I’m going to hustle to finish 50% of the badge by Friday! Other times, the goal is too small: I’m going to do 1 page of handwriting. Sometimes the goal that was set was laborious to plan, time consuming to complete, confusing, and then the learner loses their planning paper and everything crumbles! This is all to say that setting goals is tough and we haven’t even started on the difficulty of sticking to the plan, staying focused, or meeting deadlines!
Truth time: It has been hard for learners to find the just right Goldilocks goal and it has been equally challenging for the Acton Guide team to find the just right Goldilocks goal setting process. Since Fall our team has been busy observing, researching, testing, and refining our tools. The beauty of our school is we are one of many in the Acton network and so we’ve been connecting and pooling goal setting resources from our Acton school friends across the globe. This session we launched a plan, a clear SMART plan for learners to have greater tools to set larger milestone goals for their Core Skill badges broken down into bite size daily pieces. At the week 2 mark we feel hopeful!
Naturally, you are probably wondering about the process, here’s a slice…Step 1: Guides meet with each learner to define their top Core Skill badges. Step 2: each badge is broken down based on a learner’s experience of work (average of how many days it takes to complete certain topic areas of work in reading, writing, math) Step 3: Milestones of baseline deadlines are created. Step 4: Daily goals of bite sized pieces are decided with specific work that is attainable.
The best part of all of this is that learners have multiple ways to track! Some learners prefer to use online tools on Journey Tracker, others find joy in writing down and checking off a paper plan, and soon we are thrilled to gift each learner with an Acton planner! I am a nerd for planning, stamping, and color coding, and creating a planner for our learners has been a bit of a just right Goldilocks dream come true!
Acton Main has been our test subject for our goal setting experiment however Spark Land has been buzzing with goal setting growth too! Spark Land learners are making lists and planning their days to practice materials and work towards mastery. The proof is the many pictures in our school’s shared photo album of badges earned, studio maintenance habits gained, and smiles galore!
We’ve noticed that our school tends to ripple. Ideas, mindset, and energy regularly ripple from one studio to the next in either direction. Will you feel the ripple and get planning? I invite you to grow with us and set a SMART plan, just don’t forget to balance your efforts with joyful breaks!