The increase in conversations about how to serve the overall needs of students, including their social and emotional needs, is one of the silver linings of education during the pandemic.

While the energy around what’s often called “social-emotional learning” has been growing in education circles for some time, the pandemic has required us to think more deeply and more comprehensively about how the outside world can impact all students’ ability to learn.

With this added focus, however, comes a different danger: the danger of painting all students with a broad brush, assuming one single curriculum or set of supports can meet a variety of different learning needs.

Educators will need to bring a whole toolbox to bear to support students who come out of this pandemic with a variety of hardships, needs, and abilities.

One tool in that toolbox is student goal setting.

In goal setting, students and teachers work together to set meaningful short-term targets for learning, monitor students’ progress toward those targets, and adjust students’ learning strategies to better meet those goals. While goals can provide many well-documented academic benefits, they can also serve a critical role in student wellbeing: providing the sense of meaning and belonging students need to fully engage.

Finding the energy and focus necessary to learn can be hard during any period, but is harder now for many students who are experiencing irregular school schedules, struggling with economic problems at home or worrying about their own health or the health of their families.

Academic resilience — our ability to see ourselves as capable of learning after hardships like these — is not a fixed quality. Instead, it depends on what we’re being asked to learn and the attitudes we’re being encouraged to have about that learning. Goal setting gives teachers a framework that lets them communicate what students are focused on, how they’ll achieve that objective and why that objective should matter.

Read the full article about student goal-setting by Chase Nordengren at EdSource.