Managing long and short term goals for different learners

The standards for our areas of instruction determine what our students should be able to navigate by a certain age. However, we cannot just simply tell a class of student learners: “Our state curriculum states that by the end of this grade, you need to be able to perform this task… because you have to!”. In an age where students feel pressured to make every activity serve a purpose toward their future, they do want to know what they are working towards on a day to day basis. They want to understand the goal: “What’s the point?”. We (educators) understand, from our years of experience beyond what our students have, that the standards help to ensure that they (the students) will be prepared to do what they need or want to do when they leave the building for the last time. Understanding and managing short/long term goals is a crucial skill for the modern teacher.

The average student wants to be challenged. “Another function of standards… is that when we ask students to expect more from themselves, they usually rise to meet our expectations”. (Goodwin & Hubbell, n.d) Generally, a very simple long term goal to set for students is to “Get a passing grade” on the material based on the standards and then you outline how to do that for them with a series of daily short term goals. Most students will go through the process to achieve at the highest level they can with the simple goal of a good grade in mind . For the student who is not intrinsically motivated by the grade, it is likely necessary for the educator to set up a scenario where the subject matter of the day fits into a situation where the student would eventually be employed and making an income. Providing the real world context might help motivate them to step up to the challenge.

In my own classroom, we set up long term goals and short term goals. Long term goals are tasks like: perform this piece in it’s entirety at a concert or memorize this music for the parade we have at the end of the school year. However, we rarely strictly work on rote memorization and it may be a couple months before we can perform at a concert. Our day to day goals are based on improvement of skills, teaching good practice habits, and implementation of new or refined techniques.

An instrumental music teacher must operate under the assumption that once the students learn to read notation and how to produce a sound, they are mostly gaining knowledge about how to refine and define skills. The notation doesn’t change, the vocabulary is cumulative, but essentially remains the same. The instrument itself doesn’t change, generally. It is imperative to have strong short term goal setting because the act can be boring if interest is not piqued consistently. This coupled with the fact that their struggling 6th grade band will be the same group of students with more aggressive standards to meet as 7th graders really starts to stress short term goals to provide a clear path and process.

The students also need to develop those skills together on similar timelines regardless of background. “The inequality of education has been compared with resource inequality that is available to unequal education outcomes on student assessments … and children from impoverished homes are much less likely to have the same kind of supports or enrichment opportunities” (Akkus 2016) Managing goals in instrumental music for a student who has the opportunity for private instruction outside of the school day or better equipment versus a student who does not have these opportunities is another challenge we face. In some districts across the country, schools will have enough enrollment where performance classes can be split into different levels based on the abilities of the students.

This is not the case in most schools though, and finding the common ground between challenging the advanced student and motivating the struggling student becomes the balancing act. Not only do they need to be motivated in the classroom together but they must perform on the same stage. While the long-term goal is the concert for both the high and low performing student, a short term goal for the advanced student may be simply to refine performance, a short term goal for the struggling may be application of the daily classroom practice and finding a creative outlet for the skills learned to help build a connection between the student and the music. As stated, the instrument doesn’t change and it can feel like quite a struggle if the student isn’t meeting their own expectations.

In the end, setting goals for students is something that must be done on a daily basis but we must be artful in our process of creating these goals. Ronnie Dotson wrote in an article for the JSARD: “Set goals that are specific, measureable, attainable, realistic, and time sensitive. In order for students to view goals as meaningful, they must have a clear understanding of what specific target(s) they are aspiring to accomplish”. (Dotson 2016) This is not exactly anything different than what I would have expected to read in a professional development course in 2001, but the words still apply today. How we interpret those words now just needs a new spin for our students that are asking for a point to the process.

References

Akkus, M. (2016). The common core state standards for mathematics. International Journal of Research in Education and Science (IJRES), 2(1), 49-54.

Dotson, R. (2016). Goal setting to increase student academic performance. Journal of School Administration Research and Development.

Goodwin, B., & Hubbell, E. R. (n.d.). The 12 Touchstones of Good Teaching.https://platform.virdocs.com/r/s/0/doc/578098/sp/176919544/mi/566607894?cfi=%2F4%2F4