Goals - Beyond Great Grades: How to Set Real Goals With Your Middle Schooler
Willia Barber, MBA
The word goal is a societal buzz word these days to help people with professions, fitness, finances and general life direction. Many parents are well connected to these types of goals in their everyday affairs, and many have specific goals for their family’s direction as well. Every organization these days takes time to communicate and work through the development of short term and long-term goals and push these to every level of the team. This creates supporting goals for each employee’s individual performance to the overall organization goals.
These concepts of communication and downstream integration are helpful for family goals as it helps children understand the overall objective of the things they are asked to do. It gives credence to how their daily choices impact themselves and their families. When children understand how they fit in with the family team, it helps guide them in decision making.
Parents are great with goals for their children when they are participants in competitive arenas. Goals for education; however, can sometimes be, “You’d better bring home all A’s”. While this is often considered a goal, it lacks the components that make it actionable and decrease the likelihood of consistent attainment. It is vague and is perceived more as a threat than a positive behavior and response pattern. It is more helpful to a child to hear that his education is part of the plan for the family to achieve success and doing his best offers long term benefits that support the family through scholarships, better opportunities for the middle learner and the most important, pride and personal satisfaction.
Most goals today follow the SMART format created in 1981 to make them easy to understand, measure and monitor to completion. SMART stands for specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and timely. This methodology is great and widespread. It has proven success in many areas. For middle learners, PACT goal setting may be more powerful to support their developing mindsets. PACT is an acronym for Purposeful, Actionable, Continuous, and Trackable and was developed by Anne-Laure Le Cunff in 2019. Benefits from this technique are:
PACT goals help focus on controllable outputs
They help create a clear plan of action
They help foster a sense of ownership and shared responsibility
They help achieve goals through collaboration and mutual accountability
As introduced by Tammy Salmon-Stephens, Meet PACT: A Goal Setting Technique , Purposeful is a goal’s foundation that is the value of what is to be achieved in the long term. It is the ‘why’ or the feeling or perceived value that successful performance brings. Actionable is about the controllable actions or tasks needed today and Continuous supports a goals repeatability or routine and the opportunity to get 1% better through experimentation. Goals need to be Trackable rather than time bound as SMART suggests, to allow for the development of habits by incremental improvement.
This is more suited to young learners as it draws upon the sense of family and personal passion to define the objectives and the key results. Since it is developed with the family team, alignment and commitment are easier to receive from the child. Regular feedback at family meetings and forums demonstrates the value for the child and his performance whether it is maintaining at the baseline or progressing in a positive direction toward the final goal. It celebrates achievements and gathers learning points from any setbacks.
Consider writing family goals for every school year to include parental visits to school, learner’s attendance, citizenship and timeliness, sports and educational extracurricular activities, and expected performance outcomes based on skills and interests. Examples of PACT goals for education for middle learners might look at these:
Studying at least fifteen minutes for every subject
Completing all home practice assignments on time for every class
Reviewing my assignments online every week with my parents
Making my bed every morning before breakfast (not an educational goal but does eliminate stress in a mom!)
These goals represent the continuum in the action verb and can easily be tracked and discussed either daily or weekly.
Whether the SMART or PACT technique is used, it is a solid choice to set goals for your middle schooler and move the needle to the “great” that resides in every child. Start your family’s goal-setting journey today—try writing your first PACT goal together tonight and tell us how it goes!
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