If there’s no goal, it’s just a nice conversation.
—John Campbell, Growth Coaching International
I am still grappling with this quote. It hit me hard. Was I just having nice conversations? What percentage of the teachers I am currently working with have clearly defined goals with me? What percentage of the teachers I’ve worked with over my 13 years as an instructional coach had clearly defined goals for our time together?
Once I got out of my head, I went to my coaching tools and made it my goal to make sure that I moved away from nice conversations with perhaps little effect on students’ lives and worked toward more meaningful conversations with colleagues and getting clear on the goal-setting process.
We all have some familiarity with goal-setting, whether it’s setting SMART goals or writing out our goals in a notebook. There are many benefits to setting goals; setting high-quality goals can significantly enhance our motivation, intentions, and actions toward a change we seek to make as it relates to our current reality.
An instructional coach partners with teachers to identify their current reality, set student-centered goals, and learn and explain strategies that address the goal, and then supports those teachers until the students hit the goal.
Therefore, the goal is the most essential element within the coaching partnership. Otherwise, we, as instructional coaches, are just having nice conversations. The good news is that there is plenty of support for getting comfortable with getting those meaningful goals out into the world for the people you are supporting. Here are three ways to jump-start your goal-setting conversations.
Frameworks First
As I began the rethinking and redesigning phase of my coaching practice, I turned to the PEERS framework for setting goals with teachers designed by Jim Knight and the Instructional Coaching Group. Having a framework almost instantly provided the air coverage I needed to justify and clarify the essential elements and need for goals in my coaching relationships. The PEERS framework has become an integral part of my work with my colleagues. The elements of the framework below highlight the importance of goal-setting with a purpose.
- Powerful: The goal has to be powerful enough to have a significant effect on students.
- Easy: You can have a powerful goal. However, if it is difficult to communicate, it will be challenging to implement and unlikely to have a significant effect on students.
- Emotionally Compelling: The goal has to matter to the person setting the goal. A goal that doesn’t matter to the person is unlikely to move them to action.
- Reachable: The goal has to be reachable. It has to be something we can achieve.
- Student-focused: The goal needs to make a difference in the lives of students. A student-focused goal helps us understand whether the innovations we are implementing are actually making a difference for our students.
Checking Boxes
Now that you have a framework for goal-setting, you can hold yourself accountable by using a checklist to support yourself and your colleague in the moment.
I am very up front with my colleagues about how we spend our time and reassure them that checklists are a great strategy for making sure we are on track, focused, and actually progressing toward meaningful work that they are choosing.
To make sure we are designing high-quality goals together, I show them the checklist and use the stems included on it throughout this stage in the form of questions such as “On a scale of 1 to 5 (5 being all in and 1 being not all that interested), how committed to this goal are you?” A question like this helps me understand just how emotionally compelled they are to pursue this goal.
This checklist helps us articulate our goals in such a way that we have a clear understanding of the work ahead, and helps us visualize student outcomes.
Write It Down
This phase of goal-setting can be tricky territory. It can feel awkward, and you’ll be tempted to take over your partner’s thinking or perhaps even do the work for them. You have to resist this temptation.
Encouraging someone to write their goal down is nothing new, and I’m sure we’ve all done this work ourselves at some point.
Once you’ve shared the checklist and are deep into the goal-setting conversation and your partner has named a potential goal, it’s important to capture it in writing, either by hand or digitally.
One thing that has worked for me is to encourage my partner to write the goal. This typically still involves conversation and reminders of what we just discussed. However, by having your partner write it out, you are encouraging them to further clarify and refine what they shared as it relates to the checklist.
Now that we’ve captured it, I typically have my partner read it aloud to make sure we captured it exactly as they wanted to, and ask them how that sounds.
So, we have a goal. Now what?
Once we have a goal—such as increasing participation in our grand conversations to include 80 percent of our students sharing or adding to the conversation—we can explore, learn, and implement new strategies and ideas to meet the goal.
At this point, having some sort of time element to the goal can be helpful. The sentence stem that I’ve found helpful for supporting when we might expect to hit the goal is
I will ____ by ____ so that ____.
So, in the above example, it might sound like this:
I will increase participation in our grand conversations to include 80 percent of students by October 22 so that the ideas shared reflect all voices in our classroom and my students learn how to understand multiple perspectives.
This sentence frame can be helpful for three reasons.
- We are again clarifying and revising our goal in the moment.
- We are placing some time-bound elements on our goal for the purposes of learning and implementing new strategies and innovations.
- We are solidifying our purpose and why for the goal.
We’ve all had that feeling of just having nice conversations. However, many would argue that for the coaching partnership to have a significant effect on the lives of students, designing, pursuing, and reflecting on goals is crucial to our growth.
