5 Creative Ways to Set Your Intentions for the School Year
Setting your intentions for the year — either with tangible, quantifiable goals or through a bigger-picture vision — doesn’t have to be a laborious or disciplined process. Determining what you want to accomplish as an educator for the year and beyond can be a creative experience. It doesn’t have to look exactly like it did for you last year, either. Stretch a bit this year and try a brand new exercise to hone your focus.
Here are a few alternative activities to set your intentions for teaching, this school year or throughout your career:
Keep it Simple: Select a Word of the Year
Creative writing students are often tasked with writing a story using only six words. The idea is that the exercise will encourage students to deeply consider the impact of words and gain a new appreciation for brevity. Apply the same thinking to your vision for the school year. Instead of getting lost in all the individual tasks you need to complete and the incremental improvements you want to make, consider all those things holistically. What do your worries and your hopes for the year have in common? What was lacking in your teaching experience last year? If you could sum up what you want to strive for every morning when you wake up, what would it be? (Break out a thesaurus to have some fun with language!)
Perhaps you want to simplify your daily tasks and your instruction. Or perhaps you want to prioritize connection with students and peers. Maybe you want to take your instruction to the next level and put your energy into refining your practice in a specific way, so you choose differentiate or feedback. There’s no right or wrong way to pick a word of the year.
Think Local: Set Your Goals with Community in Mind
This option is inspired by one of our readers, Alyson Serena Stone, who responded to one of our posts with her insights about the importance of understanding the local community in which you teach. In Alyson’s case, as a teacher in a rural area, understanding the importance of farming in students’ lives is crucial.
When setting goals for the year, try framing them through the lens of the needs of your community. What expectations do parents in your district have for their children? What industry fuels your community? What’s important to your students outside of school? How does your local culture affect the way your students see themselves and their futures?
Perhaps your goal for the year could simply be to dig further into these questions, particularly if you are new to the district. Maybe you could work to tie your instruction to local issues, bring in community leaders as guest speakers, or simply create more opportunities for students to creatively tell their own stories. The opportunities are endless — it’s simply about framing your goals through a uniquely local lens.
Think Big: How Do You Want to Change the World?
It’s no secret that educators have an important hand in shaping the future. So, start with your grandest ambition. What change do you want to see in the world, a generation from now? Trace that back to your students. What skills and knowledge must they acquire to affect change? How can your instruction empower them to master those skills, and take them out into the world?
This is of course not to say that your personal viewpoints about controversial issues should influence your instruction. However, your impact on the future thinkers, doers, and achievers is undeniable, and your ability to help them make the world a kinder, happier, fairer, or even greener place can be a powerful foundation for forming goals.
Experiment: Be a Teacher Researcher
A more complex, fluid approach to intention setting is to select a pedagogical theory, experimental teaching practice, or innovative approach to classroom management and test it out. Select something that addresses an area in which you want to grow as an educator. For example, maybe you’ve been facing challenges with behavior post-COVID, so you decide to try out restorative justice in your classroom this year. Or, if you’ve been feeling like there must be a better way to converse with students about their progress, maybe you decide to test out a mastery learning model.
The key to this approach is to be patient with yourself (and your students). Carve out time to reflect, ask for help from experts, and iterate as you go. Taking on a new approach to instruction, classroom management, or grading likely isn’t going to be the fastest way to set or reach your goals, but it could lead to transformative accomplishments in your practice.
Reflect: How Have You Changed as a Teacher?
Finally, try finding your vision through reflection. Remember your years as a student and the teachers that impacted you. How can you infuse what made them so special into your own practice? If you are a veteran educator, consider the teacher you used to be — your first year, your fifth — and the teacher you are now. In what ways do you want to continue to grow? What do you want to re-capture from your first few years in the profession? If you’re a new teacher, think about your student teaching experiences and your mentors along the way. What feedback have you received that could inform your early goals?
Happy back-to-school, season, educators — good luck along your path to growth this year.
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