Zak's Weekly Musings (March 27, 2022)

Last week, I opened with an anecdote about an advisor who called our collective attention to his advisees’ reluctance to engage in the goal-setting process. In this same conversation with this advisor back in February, I introduced him to Achievement Goal Theory (AGT) and encouraged him to identify inroads to integrate his students’ individual goals into his instruction. 

He thought about this suggestion, and replied by saying that there was no way he could possibly keep track of 65 different goals. And, in this, he’s absolutely right. 

I do not expect any of you to keep track of each of your student’s individual goals. Not only would these efforts be futile, but even if we were successful in tracking and monitoring 65 different goals, we’d be robbing students of becoming assessment-capable learners who are empowered to monitor and evaluate their own progress. 

In Hattie’s meta-analysis, he found that the skills that undergird the development of assessment-capable learners have a 1.44 effect size, which is the equivalent of roughly 3 ½ years of additional learning in one year’s time. This is an eye-popping statistic, and obviously one that we want our students to be able to tap into. At the end of the day, our efforts have to be focused on creating the conditions for students to take ownership for their goals, rather than our doing it for them. 

So, how can we do this in a way that doesn’t add something more to our plates? 

One simple way for us to do this is by leveraging our daily learning targets. Daily learning targets are something that we are all already doing. All we have to do now is use them as a vehicle to guide students in discovering the intersection between our task-related goals and their ego-related goals. 

Take a look at this template for a daily Do Now that you can use. 

In this version of a Do Now, students are being made to think about how your daily learning target will help inch them closer to meeting their own ego-related goal. In doing so, without changing anything at all about your planned instruction – and in just a few questions – the learning of your class suddenly becomes more relevant and more personalized. 

Think about how student engagement will increase when students understand not just what they’re learning, but why today’s learning is relevant to them. 

The hyperlinked resources above can also be found in the Resources Archive.