How to Deal with Not Meeting Your Goals as a Teacher
Episode 58: Not Meeting Your Goals
[00:00:00]
Welcome to the Teacher Burnout Podcast, where we explore the challenges of burnout for teachers and share practical strategies to support teacher well being. I'm your host Barb Flowers. If you're a teacher looking for ways to prevent burnout or an educational leader searching for strategies to support your team, this podcast is for you.
Let's dive in.
Today, we're going to be talking about how to deal with not meeting your goals as a teacher.
In teaching, we should always be setting goals. That's how we grow. That's how we learn. In Ohio, our teachers set goals as part of their evaluation system, and they create a professional growth plan, and they create goals that are based on, either student achievement or just something that they want to accomplish as a teacher or a way that they want to grow and then they actually have to make progress towards that goal and making progress doesn't mean that students have to achieve a certain thing, but they [00:01:00] have to have taken the action steps that they had said they were going to do towards meeting that goal to be considered making growth on that goal.
And then a lot of times we have building goals that are related to student achievement, and then teachers have a certain amount of growth they might need to make for their evaluation. Again, in Ohio, not related to their actual professional growth plan, but we do have a small area on the rubric that we look to see how much progress students made on their assessments that they do.
It has to be some type of high quality student Data. So we use Akkadians, map data, things like that, that are universal screeners to see if students are making progress. And so today what I really wanted to get at is what do you do as a teacher when you set a goal and you don't make it, especially with academic achievement, that can be so frustrating.
And so I wanted to talk about that today. And I wanted to really talk about why we set goals. So let's start with why [00:02:00] we set goals. Well, we set goals so that we can decide what we're going to do to make progress in an area. Really what happens is goals hold us accountable. If you never set a goal, you're never going to achieve something.
So the purpose of setting that goal is to determine if the effort that you put in was effective. And if you should do that again, or change the goal. the actions that you took towards achieving that goal. You don't know if it's successful until you've actually implemented it and seen if you met your goal
I always think of this as PLCs as a perfect example. If our goal on an assessment is for 80 percent of our students to meet mastery, I'm just throwing out 80%, That's our goal. And if we don't meet that goal, and we use instructional strategies to get to that goal, whether it's a curriculum we're already using, we're trying new strategies, but we use instructional strategies to meet that goal to help kids get to 80%.
And we don't know if students are going to get to that [00:03:00] 80 percent until we assess them. And so I just want to remind you that you have to keep trying strategies. And of course, if they don't get to 80%, we don't give up on kids. We reteach them. We reteach them until they get 80%. We try a new strategy. We try a new way for students to meet that goal.
And so when you're creating goals, I just want you to think about there is a possibility that you're not going to meet that goal, whether it's a personal goal or a professional goal. I always like to think about personal health goals. I think about weight loss and exercise a lot because for most people, they want to be healthy.
And so most people have tried that, and it's a good way to think about a goal. But if we're trying to lose 10 pounds, I know there's so many different ways that have worked for people to lose weight. And so I'm going to try a strategy to lose weight. I'm going to try a meal plan or exercise plan so that I can lose weight.
And I won't know if I'm going to meet that goal until I try it. When we're making a goal, we just have to [00:04:00] understand that there's going to be setbacks and we have to try multiple things to reach that goal. It's important that we also consider different things that could impact our goal as we're trying to meet it.
For example, we are implementing a new math series this year, and Our goal on the state test is for 80 percent of students to be proficient. And I have told teachers that, this year that might not happen.
That's still always going to be the goal. We don't want to lower the goal, but we have a new math series. They didn't get as far in the math series because it's new because they weren't sure, because it was a huge jump in the amount of expectation that they're asking students. And so teachers are spending longer on lessons than they had to in the past.
And so all of these things are just making it more challenging to teach math. There's more than likely going to be an implementation dip because we are doing this new math series. And so we have to expect that even though we have this goal, we have this standard [00:05:00] that we're trying to achieve, we have to know that there could be a dip based on implementation.
So what do we do when we don't meet The goals that we set out to, whether it's academic goals for our students or something that we are trying to accomplish professionally or personally, I really want you to take that time. If you don't meet the goal that you want to meet to reflect on why you didn't meet the goal.
That's the number one thing you can do. That's the only thing really that you can control because we can control the actions that we take towards a goal, but we can't control the outcome. Again, we can control the actions. We can't control the outcome. So you need to be reflecting on your actions and what exactly you were doing to meet the goal.
Did you actually do the action steps that you had put in place? A lot of times with our professional growth plans, I see that teachers will say, Oh, can you remind me what my goal is again? If you don't know what your goal is, you're probably not working that hard towards the goal. You know, we've [00:06:00] all done that.
So I'm not judging people for that because I know that sometimes when we have to do a professional growth plan, it's kind of, it feels like you're jumping through a hoop, but any goal that you have, you really want it on the forefront of your mind. You want to know exactly what you're trying to accomplish.
There's actually a lot of research that really successful people write their goals down every single day. And I'm not saying if you're a teacher, write your goal, I want my students to achieve 80 percent achievement in math.
I'm not saying that at all. You're not going to want to write that goal down. But, if you want to keep at the forefront of what actions you want to take, maybe it's, I want to be a better teacher. Maybe it's really even just having better work life balance, having more time for yourself. You feel like when you go to school, you are going to be a better teacher.
So having some personal goals in place that are going to make you better. Maybe it's that you are actually going to set boundaries and stop working at four o'clock. You'll have one day where you could stay later and get some things done, but other than that, you're setting boundaries. Those could be the goals that you're trying to achieve, [00:07:00] and those things you have control over.
So, I really want you to go back, reflect on why you didn't meet that goal. If your kids didn't make an academic goal, why do you think that is? Was it that you implemented something new? Was it the instructional strategies that you're using? Was there something you could have done differently in your instruction?
This is where you want to find different resources. You want to find. Different things that can help you get better at your profession. If you're a newer teacher, sometimes it's just, you didn't know the curriculum. You didn't know the expectation that you were supposed to teach. I think that that happens sometimes that we don't know the standard that we're supposed to teach to.
And so we don't have a great idea of what that expectation actually looks like.
Another thing I want you to think about as you're reflecting and you're trying to get better is who can you use to help you? Do you have a mentor? Do you have a coach? Do you have colleagues that you collaborate with? Do you have a PLC that you meet with, that professional [00:08:00] learning community?
Because When you're reflecting, you really want people to talk through this with, it maybe is an administrator in your school, depends on the relationships that you have, but you really want to think about what support you have, what colleagues or mentors can help you navigate those setbacks and find different solutions so that you can, gain different perspectives and get better in the future.
That's the whole point of a goal is to grow and get better. And I just want to emphasize again, the importance of using setbacks as a learning opportunity to improve future goal setting and future implementation of goals. Failure is how we grow. If we never push ourselves out of our comfort zone, we don't grow.
And again, that's another thing I see with teachers is sometimes they pick these goals that are things that they already know they're going to achieve. And that does not help us grow. You know, you want to push yourself in a way that's going to be something that's hard, the harder the goal is. the more you'll grow from the [00:09:00] goal.
I want you to also think as you're reflecting, what could you do differently? Do you need more time to meet the goal? Maybe you just needed more action steps and more strategies. So really reflect on that and see where you could have improved.
Maybe you needed to check in with yourself more throughout the year. You know, you want to make sure that you're assessing yourself more than one time. You don't just want, here's where my beginning goal is. Here's my end goal, because you're not going to know until the end if the strategies you're using towards that goal is working.
So be flexible, be willing to adjust your strategies, use different data points. If it's with kids, use different assessments throughout the year so that you know, How they're doing, you know, how they're progressing, use that formative data. If you choose a goal, that's a personal goal, have other ways to assess throughout the year, and the more you're checking on that goal throughout the year, the more successful you're going to be. Because if we just create a goal, put it away for the rest of the year, more than likely, you're not going to meet that goal at the end [00:10:00] of the year.
You have to be looking at it. You have to be intentional about what you're trying to accomplish. And just stay resilient. Always make sure that you're not beating yourself up when you don't meet a goal that you That you want to achieve, you know, take care of yourself mentally being here, getting coaching.
I have the group, the resilient educator Academy, where we focus specifically on resilience in that you get coaching, you get access to a private Facebook group. You want to get coaching to work on your thoughts about. Reaching a goal if your students don't do well on an assessment and you start beating yourself up about that, or you don't meet the goal that you want to reach and you start beating yourself up, it's not going to help you get better.
It's actually going to do the opposite so that you have to build yourself up. You have to do things to take care of yourself mentally so that when you don't meet a goal, It's not the end of the world. So the more you build up that resilience, the more you do things like exercise, rest, set boundaries.[00:11:00]
I know you might be thinking, how does that have to do with my goal? The more you do those things that help you mentally, when you don't reach a goal, it's not going to be that big of a deal. You'll have the mental capacity to go back, reflect, and see what you can do better, where if you're so stressed and overwhelmed, you're going to take that personally, and you might have a meltdown, you know, that might cause burnout for you.
That might cause you to. Just have a huge setback and not be able to move forward from that. So you really need to have that resilience built in and things that you're doing for yourself to build that mental resilience. So as we end today, I just want to end with some encouraging quotes about not reaching your goals.
I love this quote by Zig Ziglar. He said what you get by achieving your goals is not as important as what you become by achieving your goals. So think about it. It's more about who you're becoming. And I love Charles Swindle says life is 10 percent what happens to you and 90 percent how you react to it.
So if your students aren't meeting that academic [00:12:00] goal or you're not meeting a personal goal, it's all about how you react. It goes back to that mental resilience. How are you going to react to not meeting that goal? Are you going to reflect? Are you going to collaborate with others?
Are you going to get feedback? You know, how are you going to continue to get better? Because life is 10 percent what happens to you and 90 percent how you react to it. And then by John Carmack, focused hard work is the real key to success. Keep your eyes on the goal and just keep taking the next steps towards completing it.
If you aren't sure which way to do something, do it both ways and see which works better. And I love that quote because you can always try multiple strategies to get to a goal. We see that with kids and education all the time. We're always trying new things. We don't necessarily know the one thing that's helping, If we're seeing success and we're making it to a goal, that is the main goal.
Just remember that hard work is the real key. You need to react to things properly, and you just have to [00:13:00] enjoy the process of getting better, of reflecting, and and collaborating with others and using others to help you get better as you attempt to meet goals throughout the school year. So teachers, if you're ready to get rid of overwhelm and lose the stress of teaching and learn to balance your personal life and professional life, then join me in the Resilient Educator Academy.
This academy is going to help you beat burnout for good. Help you build mental resilience so that you're able to move forward when you do have setbacks. And if you're not feeling burnout yet, it's going to help you prevent burnout because you have to put systems in place to help you prevent burnout so that you don't get to the place where you want to quit teaching.
And as a member of the Academy, you'll benefit from two live coaching calls a month that will provide you with personalized support. We'll do a Q& A session and cover topics that you specifically need. And there's also a supportive community through the private Facebook group, and you get access to all the courses I've designed.
I have a course on overwhelm setting boundaries, [00:14:00] resetting for the summer. Toxic Work Week. Those are just a few, but those courses are designed to enhance teacher skills and well being. And every month, I'm going to be adding a new workshop or course to the membership. And you also get a Monday motivation message to kickstart your week on a positive note.
So don't miss the opportunity. Invest in your own well being and professional growth. You can click the link in the show notes to get access to the, to the Resilient Educator Academy. And teachers, if you love the show, if you're listening on Apple, scroll down in your app and leave a review.
Keep in mind, you have the power to shape your life according to the mindset you choose. So I hope you have a great week and I'll see you back here next time.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. [00:15:00] Yeah.
