Enhancing your skills is important in any career path but setting professional goals for teachers is particularly important.
Education
Professional Goals for Teachers
Enhancing your skills is important in any career path but setting professional goals for teachers is particularly important.
Teaching is fast-paced, and you may often work in a chaotic environment. With so many demands on your time, it’s easy to get caught up in the day-to-day requirements of your job.
While everyday tasks often seem overwhelming, keeping your eye on the bigger picture is important. Professional development can take a back seat when you’re constantly under pressure to complete your regular tasks.
When you focus on setting teaching goals, however, you’ll find that your abilities and confidence grow enormously. As a result, you’ll feel infinitely more capable in the classroom and your role as an educator. If you’re unsure where to start, take a look at these examples of professional goals for teachers:
- Incorporating tech into the classroom
- Involving parents in school life more often
- Connecting with colleagues
- Familiarizing yourself with new differentiated learning techniques
- Enrolling in formal development courses
- Applying for National Board Certification
- Practicing student-lead learning
- Learning to be more imaginative
- Being more mindful
- Create active learning opportunities
Attend more educational seminars and events
Whatever your teacher’s goals, there are various ways to achieve them. Once you know your objectives, you’ll be able to determine the most effective way to attain them.
Education resources
Setting realistic professional goals for teachers
Everyone in the education sector wants to be a better teacher, advisor, or counselor. To enhance your performance, however, you’ll need to set professional goals for teaching. Focusing on ‘being better’ is too vague to be achievable.
Rather than identifying broad topics with sweeping statements, set clear, achievable goals for yourself. Although there are plenty of professional development options, you don’t need to focus on them all at once. You’d be dooming yourself to failure if you tried!
When you identify one area you want to focus on, you can list teaching goals and devise strategies to realize them. While you might be keen to improve your teaching skills as quickly as possible, it’s important to take a realistic approach to professional development. In some cases, external forces may impact the speed at which you can achieve your aims, so you’ll need to consider this.
If you want to incorporate more technology into the classroom, for example, this may be dependent on your school’s budget for new equipment. Even if you’re keen for every student to have their laptop or tablet, this may not be possible due to a lack of funding. Instead, you may want to focus on collaborative learning through tech or exploring how technology can enhance learning experiences with your students.
Similarly, involving parents in school life can take time. Although many parents are happy to get more involved in the school community, their work or family life might prevent them from doing so. If you want to foster a more community-based approach to school events, start small and set a timeline for increased participation. This will allow parents and guardians to adjust to new schedules and play an active role in school life.
While it’s admirable to want to achieve your objectives quickly, don’t get disheartened if things take longer than you expect. By setting realistic professional goals for teaching, you’ll stay motivated throughout the school year and pace yourself for what the year ahead may bring.
Achieving your teaching goals
Once you’ve identified your professional teacher goals, it’s time to devise a workable strategy. Knowing how you’ll meet your objectives will give you the confidence to get things moving. With a variety of resources available to you, professional development needn’t be an additional burden. Instead, look at how these examples of educational goals can be integrated into your daily routine…
Connecting with colleagues
Teachers don’t get much time to socialize – with colleagues, family, or friends – but making minor tweaks to your day can enable you to connect with your colleagues more effectively. If your schedule allows, you may want to organize an after-work event every month, for example. Alternatively, arriving at work 10 minutes earlier once a week gives people a chance to grab a cup of coffee together.
Incorporating tech into the classroom
If a lack of tech knowledge prevents you from introducing technology into the classroom, focusing on your skills will give you the foundation you need. Obtaining the Google Educator certification will give you a grounding in the most useful tools for teachers, for example, and ensure you feel more confident working with tech in a classroom environment.
Involve parents in school life more often
If you want to create a community feels within your school, try to facilitate parental involvement at various times of the day. Hosting events before, during, and after school, as well as later in the evening, will give parents a chance to get involved, even if other demands prevent them from attending other events.
Remember – parental involvement doesn’t always have to be face-to-face. Launching an online parent-teacher group will enable parents and guardians to get more involved, even if they can’t be present at school as much as they’d like.
Familiarizing yourself with new learning techniques
The best teachers are lifelong learners, so don’t hesitate to ask for help. You can learn new teaching skills throughout the year with numerous online resources. As well as information-based websites, plenty of online courses help you learn new teaching methods and classroom practices, such as differentiated learning.
Practicing student-led learning
Although student-led learning can be great for teachers and students, it might be something you never seem to get around to. Despite the benefits of student-led learning environments, teachers can be wary of allowing students to take the reins.
If you’re concerned that the lesson will get off-track, try incorporating student-led portions at the end of every lesson. As you grow in confidence, you’ll be more willing to adopt student-led learning for longer.
Enrolling in formal development courses
Formalizing your professional development can give you an extra dose of motivation and additional recognized qualifications. Take the time to research the most relevant courses for your current role and your career plan before you make any decisions. For example, more intensive courses may be best suited to the holidays, whereas shorter courses can be completed during term time.
Make sure that potential courses are validated or accredited by a recognized body and determine what they’ll offer you before you decide how valuable they are. If a certification enables you to go for a promotion or the course content will impact your classroom teaching methods, enrolling in a formal development course can be worthwhile.
Measuring your development
As well as creating a ‘professional goals for teachers list’ and identifying your top priorities, it’s essential to examine what ‘achievement’ looks like. If you want to familiarize yourself with new learning techniques, how will you know when you’ve successfully achieved this goal?
Is it when you understand the concepts and theories behind a new learning method? Or is it when you’ve successfully implemented the technique in your classroom? Alternatively, is it when you’ve obtained an independent certification in a new learning method?
Setting measurable professional teacher goals means you can monitor your progress effectively. Again, this involves being specific about your objectives. For example, if you want to practice more student-led learning, you’ll need to specify what ‘more’ means in this context.
Looking at your goals in detail doesn’t just make them easier to achieve; it helps you create a realistic strategy. For example, you may want to aim for two 10-minute student-led learning per week during the first six weeks of the semester. From there, you can aim to increase it to three 15-minute sessions per week and so on.
Suppose you want to use technology in the classroom more often. In that case, you could enhance your skills by using a new tech teaching tool every week, connecting with other educators on social media, practicing downloading podcasts, preparing PowerPoint presentations, or recording webinars. With clearly identified goals and a timeline to achieve them, you’ll find that the measurability of your objectives makes it easier to succeed.
Making sure your professional teaching goals are measurable will enable you to determine whether you’re progressing toward them. What’s more, you’ll know when you’ve successfully achieved the goals you set for yourself – and celebrate accordingly!
