The Importance of Goal Setting

This past week, I learned SO much! I held my first IEP meeting on Tuesday, had a full day of professional development on Wednesday, and had four crucial meetings with my colleagues between Thursday and Friday. Holy Cow!

I'm going to mainly focus on the successes of those four crucial meetings with my colleagues for this post. I met with four of my general education co-teachers to strategize and set solid goals with deadlines. These were extremely beneficial and rewarding. I am already starting to feel greater successes within those classrooms.

Something about sitting down with a team member and laying everything out is extremely satisfying. It was so great having the opportunity to work on developing our dream environment to implement inclusion in. Each individual meeting had different things on the agenda.. however, the main focuses revolved around what we wanted to implement in that specific classroom, and what it would look like to implement said things. We also developed specific goals and deadlines in order to keep each other accountable and to push ourselves to move forward to create the best learning environment possible.

It was so exciting to end the week having a sound plan of implementation in 4 of my 7 inclusion-model classrooms. The plan is to tackle the other 3 classrooms this next week prior to leaving for fall break.

I feel like each of those meetings were crucial for the development of each professional relationship. Coming in with a game plan allowed for us to discuss some concerns that we had and almost forced us to problem solve and work through those concerns to develop clear and measurable goals.

I definitely feel that those were positive discussions and experiences and I encourage all of you to take the time to map out clear and measurable goals. Each meeting ended with us agreeing on one success we wanted for this upcoming week and how we were planning on achieving that success.

Do you have any ways that you work on goal setting with your team members or within your own classroom?