The Road Ahead is Paved with SMARTer Goals

Good goals help school districts improve. As part of the ongoing training that administrators have been receiving in preparation for a new statewide educator evaluation system, principals and central office administrators recently attended a workshop that centered around what it means to create “SMART” goals.

Not all goals are created equally and this understanding is so important and pivotal to progress that the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education has taken it on as a statewide initiative.

As we reviewed during the workshop, SMART goals are Specific and Strategic, Measurable, Action oriented, Rigorous, Realistic and Results driven; Timed and Tracked.

Karla Baehr, our facilitator, emphasized the unique opportunity that the new educator evaluation system represents as Springfield Public Schools continues the hard work of improving our district. The creation of new goals to help improve teaching and learning in the classroom is an integral part of the new teacher evaluation system. These goals are to be arrived at jointly through conversation and reflection by both the principal and teacher. SMARTer goals will include action plans and benchmarks and will be aligned with district goals and priorities.

The workshop offered administrators an opportunity to “turn and talk” to their colleagues about how SMART goals relate specifically to the work they do daily and how they can best incorporate this new system into their daily work routine. The session ended with Karla Baehr asking us all to recollect a time in our lives when we achieved a personal or professional goal and reflect on the pride we felt in our accomplishment.

Her challenge to all of us was to remember and fully understand the important role that our personal commitment played in our goal attainment and how we didn’t allow “perfection to be the enemy of action.” The exercise modeled how important it is for our teachers and staff to be personally vested in their goals. The new educator evaluation system will help us achieve those results through the creation of goals that are aligned to district objectives yet customized and personal to the educator.

As Karla Baehr pointed out for us, no one highlighted a goal that they felt was an easy achievement. They were all accomplishments that we had worked hard to achieve.

Good goals are not easy to achieve but there is no way forward without them.