This is the first post in my series Nurturing the Rising Marketer. This blog series supports educators, managers, and people leaders as they set up our next generation for success. In my life, I’ve been lucky enough to be a people leader, a manager AND an educator! All roles include the responsibility of nurturing learners. Having recently completed my spring semester at Endicott College, teaching is still top of mind. And when you reflect upon your teaching, you can’t help but remember your own days as a student. The academic calendar truly shapes the lives of teachers and of our young people. With each season, another peak. In fall, it’s Back to School, in winter it’s Holiday Breaks, in Spring it’s Final Exams, and in Summer it’s School’s Out!
Growing up, I spent ten years in Catholic schools. (Yes, really!) All Catholic school kids have lots of stories about their experiences and I love sharing mine. I learned from nuns of various orders, but mostly our teachers were “lay people” (not ordained in a religious order). My fellow students were a rowdy lot of North Shore kids here in Massachusetts. We were ready for fun and, with guidance from our teachers, ready to shape our own individual approaches to learning.
Agency fosters self-directed learning
The memories of grammar school that really stand out to me were the ones where we shaped our own learning. Obsessed with horseback riding and collecting plastic horse figures, my best friend and I selected “Horses” for an oral report in second grade. We dug deep into the horse breeds around the world and proudly spoke about them while showing examples from our toy figure collections. We selected “Shells and Shell Creatures” for a science fair in third grade. I also remember us choosing “Lewis, Clark, and Sacagawea” for a social studies fair in sixth grade.
We had the chance to direct our own learning towards areas we wanted to explore. And because of this, the assignments brought deeper commitment and meaning. And when we were able to deliver that content in a medium that motivated us (for me, oral reports), there was even deeper engagement! These are outcomes we are all hoping for — self-directed, engaged learners focused on achieving goals that are relevant to them, to their organizations, and to their broader careers. So let’s fast forward to my role years later as an adjunct professor. I sat for a professional development session on helping students direct their own learning. And I committed to bringing goal setting to life in all of my courses.
The goal setting workshop that inspired me
In the winter of 2023, Endicott College brought in Linda B. Nilson, Director Emerita of Clemson’s Office of Teaching Effectiveness & Innovation (OTEI), as a guest speaker. Based upon my notes from that workshop on what Nilson calls “self-regulated learning”, I developed a goal-setting tool I now use in all of my courses. The key to this teaching strategy is fostering a person’s active participation in owning their own learning. The template includes three stages.
The first stage is setting SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Time-bound) goals. It also includes documenting what success in achieving those goals will look like. The second stage is for checking in on those goals and it includes three steps.
- Examining the ongoing relevancy of each goal and the approach(es) the person is taking to achieve each one.
- Assessing the environment the person is putting themselves in when working on each goal, and the progress the learner is making towards each goal.
- Identifying challenges in achieving the goal and whether the person is asking for help, when it’s needed, to overcome those challenges.
And the final stage in the template is reflecting on each goal they’ve set. We circle back to what we documented success would look like and ask ourselves – “Did I achieve what I set out to achieve?”. If so, how was the goal accomplished? Which strategies or environments supported the work? If not, which challenges stood in the way? What environment(s) hindered goal achievement? And the final piece of the goal reflection is to think about how one would approach the same goal in the future.
Goal setting and active learning
Goal setting shifts the people you are nurturing from a passive to an active learning mode. They focus on gaining more knowledge that will help them make progress in their academic OR professional careers or BOTH. Yes, our organizations have strategic goals to achieve each quarter and year. Within those, our people should have goals of their own that they develop, check in on, and then, at the end of the quarter, semester, or year, reflect upon. And we — the educators, managers, people leaders — should support them along the way while fostering agency. THIS is the work of nurturing the rising marketer, the rising student, the rising professional in the working world. Why is this important, you may ask? Well, it is important because learning is growth. A love of and dedication to learning allows you to continue growing throughout your life. This is healthy! And learning can be powerful when it’s done in groups too. That’s the focus of the next post in this series so stay tuned for that!
Send me a note if you’d like a copy of the goal setting worksheet I developed that my students complete each semester! In the meantime, if you’d like to read more about Linda B. Nilson’s work on self-regulated learning, check out this Faculty Focus article.