August 9, 2013

Someone once told us that goals should be overhead but not out of reach. Goal setting with a student after administering an individual assessment is one of our favorite things to do. Therefore we were extremely interested to read about the amazing potential of goal setting in John Hattie's book Visible Learning: A Synthesis of Over 800 Meta-Analyses Relating to Achievement (2008).

After careful analysis, John Hattie came up with the following conclusion: "There is a direct linear relationship between the degree of goal difficulty and performance" (p. 164)." He quotes Wood and Locke when saying that performance of students who have the most challenging goals is more than 250 percent higher than the performance of students with the easiest goals (as cited in Hattie, 2008).

Hattie (2008) goes further to say that achievement is enhanced to the degree that students and teachers set challenging goals rather than simply requesting that everyone "do their best." He suggests that any school with the motto "do your best" should immediately change it to "face your challenges" or "strive to the highest." "Do your best" type of goals don't typically lead to high achievement as any effort can be defined as their best making limited goals easily achievable.

This is an important piece of learning to keep in mind. We meet with and assess each of our students individually, and then use the results of those assessments to help set their goals. These goals are differentiated, specific, and directly linked to becoming a better reader, writer, mathematician, and so on.

As we begin to prepare for a new school year, we are taking Hattie's words to heart and look forward to helping students set their goals and face their challenges!