SMART Goal Setting

With a new school year starting just a couple of weeks ago, this is the first of many blog posts of different projects and assignments that I’m going to be doing in my grade 10 year (third year in PLP). Being in grade 10 means that one of the required courses is Planning which is a course to help us learn and develop new skills to make good decisions, set and persue personal goals. Our first project of this course was about making S.M.A.R.T. goals.

Smart goals are:

We started this off project by answering the question “What are some things you want to have happen over the course of this year at school?” In ten words or less, my response to this question was ‘I want to get very good grades in every class’. After reading over the instructions for this part of the assignment again, it said show how you would answer this question in under 10 words so this is what I came up with:

The next part of this project took place in class where we talked about virtues. We talked about which virtues were important to us. For me, I said perseverance because it’s how we go on with our daily lives and helps us if we are faced with a challenge. After the discussion on virtues, we then went onto a more in-depth conversation with a partner answering questions about who we admire and why.

The questions were:
1. Who is someone you admire, either in your life or in history, and what is the core virtue that you think they have followed?
2. Find one of your own virtues on the list and share a few words about how you try to live this virtue.
3. What is a virtue that you would like to work on to improve your life?
4. What are some ways that you can show this virtue?
5. How can I help you to do this successfully?

For me, I wanted to talk about the first question and write down the answer for this summary of the entire project. I decided to choose Malala as the person I admire because she is someone who fights for what she thinks is right no matter what anyone says. Also, she has helped girls all over the world get an education and receive equal rights. The virtues that I think would be her core virtues would be perseverance because after everything she has gone through with the Taliban shooting her in the head and people telling her she couldn’t go to school she has never given up and now she has been accepted to Oxford University.

After this discussion, we went on to the main assignment which included making three SMART goals about my learning in school, my character growth and my learning outside of school. At first I thought this was pretty simple to just create a smart goal but after getting started I realized that it’s a lot more than just writing down a goal with minimal detail. To write a SMART goal you have to put in exactly what you plan to accomplish, how to accomplish it and when you plan to accomplish it. This took quite a lot of revision but now I think my goals are more descriptive and informative.

Here are my writing goals:

 

After I finished writing my goals the next step was to record myself saying these goals in three individual recordings. (My house is pretty noisy with renovations and two brothers who play musical instruments so the recording took a couple of tries).

Here are my audio recordings of my smart goals (with the visuals I created):

goal #1:

Goal #2

Goal #3

The next step was to create a visual to explain the goals, it could be anything from a video, collage, photo etc. I decided to do a sort of collage with drawings and images that show my goals in a different way.

Here are my visuals:

In the end this assignment was fun to do and it will be great to see if I achieve my goals by the end of the year. I will definitely use these goal setting strategies in the future for not only goals throughout school but sports and nutrition.