Goal Setting in the Elementary Classroom

It’s the week before Spring Break, and to say my classroom is full of March MADNESS is an understatement! It’s such a busy week between Parent/Teacher Conferences, test prep, and data chats! It’s also prime basketball season and for those of you who have been following along for the past few years, you know I’m a *huge* college basketball fan! My grad school is still going strong in the tournament and I love showing my students pictures of when I went to the NCAA tournament back in undergrad! It really gets them thinking about college without me forcing a conversation. It’s my second year with most of these students, so they already know how excited I get and they LOVED last year’s read aloud/data chats. However, since we already read my go-to book last year, it was time to change it up a bit!

We still followed the same timeline and format as I always have when introducing the book and conference forms. The entire process takes about two weeks, but really ensures that both the students and parents are involved in the goal setting process to gear up for end-of-year testing:

1. Whole class read aloud (Week 1, Day 1)

2. Individual conference with students (Week 1)

3. Parent-teacher conference (Week 2)

For the past few years, I’ve used this goal setting template and the read aloud Salt in His Shoes by Deloris Jordan. It’s a great introduction to growth mindset, so I wanted to find something similar for this year! Since we moved from lower to upper elementary, I wanted to create a data template/read aloud combination that’s a little more geared towards more advanced readers and writers. However, if you teach younger children and would like to read about K-2 goal setting, you can do that here.

The book Dream Big is the sequel and allowed us to continue the conversation. The kids were so excited and a lot of them remembered our read aloud from last year! It’s about Michael Jordan’s Olympic dreams. Although he was dreaming big, his mother taught him that dreams are only attainable with actionable steps. I read this whole group before conducting individual conferences.

 

During data conferences, each student and I filled out the section about what students can do at school to meet their testing goals that are pre-determined from prior district assessment data. I do this during my planning time so it doesn’t disrupt core instruction. During parent/teacher conferences, parents fill out the “home” section with their child so we are on the same page about their learning goals. Since I only teach math this year, we used the Math template!

Click here to download the template for FREE from my Teachers Pay Teachers store!