At the beginning of every school year, teachers create Professional Development Plans (PDP). A PDP starts with a goal which includes action steps, a desired outcome, and the timeline. Teachers can align their PDP with their Professional Learning Community (PLC) or they can be independent. Before a PDP is finalized, an initial PDP meeting between the teacher and an administrator takes place. One common mistake that administrators find during these conversations is that teachers confuse action steps with goals.
When determining whether your statement is an action step or goal, ask yourself the question, “why.”
If you need to give a reason to further explain your statement, then your statement is an action step. If the statement itself provides the why, then your statement is a goal.
Actions Steps – Not Goals
- Enrolling in an Orton-Gillingham reading program
- Becoming Google Certified
- Incorporating an exit ticket at the end of each math lesson
- Adding state style multiple choice questions to common formative assessments
- Having students track their assessment data over the year
These are all wonderful action steps that lead to goal accomplishment, but are not goals.
Goals
- Develop abilities to teach students how to access, use, and evaluate digital resources to meet the learning objective in non-fiction writing.
- Differentiate learning objective and formative feedback to support students’ learning needs in mathematics.
- Unpack the reading standards with my PLC and utilize backwards design so that the “I can” statements created for students connect directly to the concept knowledge and skills necessary for students to successfully understand and master the reading standards.
As you can read with these goal statements, the purpose (why) is clear.
Interestingly, individual’s New Year’s Resolutions have similar pitfalls.
New Year’s Action Steps – Not Goals
- Read 15 minutes a day
- Wake up at 6am
- Exercise 2 hours per week
- Drink a gallon of water a day
- Write in a gratitude journal every morning
Again, these are all great actions, and can lead to the accomplishment of a variety of different goals, but they are not goals.
New Year’s Goals
- Completing my first marathon.
- Learning enough conversational Spanish to navigate day to day activities during my Colombian vacation.
- Reducing my blood pressure by X points and lowering my overall cholesterol by X percent.
Action steps are not bad, but they must lead to something. One reason why so many resolutions fizzle is because without a purpose (your why), action steps aren’t good at sustaining motivation.
For Example
“It’s okay for me to skip my Babbel Spanish lesson today, because I have my whole life to learn Spanish.”
VERSUS
“My Columbian AirBnB is right next to a bakery, and it is imperative that I know how to order the roscón, so as tired as I am, I’m completing today’s Spanish lesson.”
People are more likely to create new habits and participate in beneficial daily routines when there is a clear goal that they are working towards.