Your weekly source of learner-centered inspiration
January 4, 2024
Dear Educator,
Happy New Year! 🎉 I hope this finds you refreshed, focused and ready to take on 2024. No doubt your inbox is filled with ideas for resolutions and goal-setting tips. Creating clear goals is a great way to start the year focused, but we can’t stop there. I am a firm believer in James Clear’s message:
“You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.”
To kick off the year, I want to highlight a system that we use at Learner-Centered Collaborative to track our own goals and support our partners to use as well to not just ensure the vision and goals are in place but that there are systems to monitor progress.
With Gratitude,
We want to hear from you! Share your Learner-Centered Bright Spot with us here.
BRIGHT SPOT OF THE WEEK
Give your goals a scorecard
Before the winter break, I had the opportunity to work with superintendents in Kentucky at their annual conference. The theme was Measuring What Matters and I shared my own personal goals, how I track success over time using a scorecard, how the process supports more holistic goal-setting, and how we can apply it to create systems to track and measure progress over time. As I watched groups of 5-7 superintendents circle up to identify what mattered most, identify their goals, and draft success indicators, I overheard many “ahas” and much excitement over the idea of metrics that could not only tell a better story but could help get everyone focused on meaningful goals and collect data on a regular basis to track progress on what they valued most as district leaders.
As you explore the examples below of goals, success metrics, and data sources, you might agree with some or have others that you would add. The goal is not necessarily to show you an exact way ready to be copied, but to highlight a process to emulate.
Whether you want to create a personal scorecard to track your own goals or create one for your classroom, school, or district, this is a system that goes beyond setting goals by focusing efforts and collecting data to facilitate decision-making that increases goal achievement.
Let’s make 2024 the year we set goals that matter to our students, teachers, community, and ourselves and create accountability systems that raise the bar and help us focus on what matters most in education.
What are some of your goal-setting and accountability systems? Reply to this newsletter to share or tag me @katiemartinedu and #LCBrightSpots on social.
RESOURCE ROUNDUP
Check out these resources for building systems that support setting, tracking, and ultimately achieving the goals that matter most.
1. Scorecard tool (free download). Explore creating a scorecard yourself with Learner-Centered Collaborative’s Scorecard Template.
