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Against “Goals”
Rethinking the role of an outcome focus in teacher development
Every year, I’m required to set goals for myself as a teacher, and every year, I hate the exercise. It’s hard for me to say exactly why this is, but try as I might, I do not understand the obsession that organizations have with highly prescribed goal-setting. I suspect that the way most schools handle goal-setting is actually counterproductive to the project of education, at least if that project is one focused on getting educators to do their best work for their students. Here are some thoughts, offered solely as a reflection of me, and my motivational frame. Apologies in advance if your own way of being an educator/person gives you value in the kind of goal-setting process that I’m reacting to.
Declarative goals are an empty gesture
I have plenty of things that I am trying to work on over the course of the year. But something vital gets lost for me in the process of taking some subset of them and enshrining them as my goals, to be passed up to my supervisors for their consideration. Given that I have a half-dozen things that I could easily point to that might fit the definition of what is being requested when I am asked to set my formal goals, the two or three that I actually write down and send up the line are really just an exercise in meeting what has been asked of me. They’re not actually more important to me than the other things that I’m working on, and it’s not obvious to me that there’s any real value in putting them down on the page. They are a box that is checked¹.
At the end of the year, I’ll either have met the criteria that I’ve determined for my goals, or I won’t. But I’m not at all sure that means much of anything, either way. Are the metrics that I wind up meeting any more or less meaningful than the ones that I don’t? Does “meeting a goal” make me more or less successful than not doing so? It’s hard for me to see how that would be the case, at least if the goals in question are actually worthwhile pursuits. This isn’t just me talking. There’s a host of literature around goal-setting that deals with the inherent tension between having worthwhile goals, and having measurable ones. I’d like to think that I know enough about this concern that I’m not low-balling the indicators…
