Maybe you’re a “one word” person, or a classic resolution-setter, or a jaded New Years apathist. Regardless, here’s all I have to say: without clarity of purpose, resolutions, goals and words are destined to disappoint. Importantly, this principle extends way beyond efforts at personal improvement; clarity of purpose is critical with things like school improvement initiatives and literacy frameworks. In Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit […]
goal-setting
A Simple “Back from Winter Break” Classroom Activity
If our aim is long-term flourishing for our students, then we all care about helping kids discover their aspirations, build goals backward from those aspirations, and remain committed to those goals on a regular basis. And yet, the further you get down the list of those skills, the greater the challenge becomes for our kids: Defining the big […]
An Exemplary Exercise for Building Goal-Keeping Kids (includes Downloadable Document)
In “The Kind of Science that Teaching Needs,” I shared an “experiment” I whipped up last year to help my students set and stay committed to their goals. If you read that article, you’ll know that I have to put “experiment” in quotation marks because it was missing a few important pieces of experimentation (like, you know, […]