Monitoring Goals

How can a team monitor progress on end-of-year goals?

See if this scenario sounds familiar: a team writes a SMART goal and turns it in to the principal, who dutifully checks it o the list and les it away on the shelf. Using this kind of “share and shelve” approach to goal setting dramatically reduces the likelihood of meaningful progress on the goal. Goals have little e ect on improving teaching and learning unless leaders monitor and measure progress toward the goal on an ongoing basis.

e most e ective way to monitor progress on end-of-year goals is to turn them into during-the-year goals and monitor them on a regular and routine basis throughout the school year. Too many times, districts, schools, or teams write SMART goals but fail to look at them again until the end of the year. At that point, it’s too late to do anything about them.

A good time to check on progress toward a goal is right after a team reviews the results of a common assessment. Teams in Kildeer Countryside School District 96 followed a simple process to create a short-term SMART goal for each unit that was linked to their yearlong SMART goal. e short-term SMART goal created milestones along the way to measure and monitor progress toward the goal.

Have a question about PLCs? Check out Solution Tree’s e ort to collect and answer all of your questions in one great book: Concise Answers to Frequently Asked Questions About Professional Learning Communities at Work™ by Mike Mattos, Richard DuFour, Rebecca DuFour, Robert Eaker, and Thomas W. Many. This question and answer are in chapter 1, “Laying the Foundation: Mission, Vision, Values, and Goals.”