Developing Competency Based SMART Professional Development Goals

Video Transcription

In this tutorial, I'll walk you through the process of developing competency based smart professional development goals. We'll begin with an overview of SMART goals and then I'll show you a sample from start to finish. Let's get started.

Let's begin with a review of SMART goals. In order to develop SMART goals that are connected to the outcomes of your professional development or growth plan, there are some simple steps that you can follow. You need to begin by determining the desired outcome. What do you want to accomplish or what goal do you want to reach within your collaborative team?

Each of the letters in the SMART acronym is going to help you to further define what you are going to need to do as a team in order to reach that outcome and these pieces will all be put together to create your SMART goal. The S in the acronym SMART stands for Specific.

So to refine your goal, ask yourself what specifically do we want to accomplish as a team? What specific actions are going to be needed in order to get us there? For the letter M, which stands for Measurable, ask yourself how are we going to measure whether or not we have achieved our goal?

The letter A stands for attainable. Is this goal really truly attainable? Is this something that we can actually accomplish? R stands for relevant. Ask yourself first of all, is this goal relevant? If yes, why? How do you know that it's relevant? You may also consider here who is going to be responsible for carrying out the actions outlined in the SMART goal.

Finally, T stands for time bound. A goal is not considered to be a SMART goal if it doesn't contain that element of time. There needs to be a specific timeline or a specific end date when the goal is supposed to be accomplished. So for this part of the acronym, ask yourself how long are we going to work on this goal before we stop to measure our progress and potentially adjust our actions, if that is needed?

So let's take a look at an example from start to finish. Let's say that the desired outcome for my professional development team is to implement cooperative learning. Perhaps this is connected to a school or district initiative asking us to incorporate Marzano's high yield instructional strategies.

Cooperative learning is one of Marzano's 9 high yield instructional strategies. And so, we have determined as a team in our collaborative professional development environment that we want to implement cooperative learning into our classrooms. Let's begin with S for specific.

What are the specifics here? Specifically, we want each teacher on our collaborative team to use the cooperative learning strategy at least three times. We feel that this will give us enough of a handle on this strategy to determine whether it's working well for us or to determine that maybe we need to make some changes in our implementation.

Next, how are we going to measure whether we have achieved this goal? There are a variety of metrics that we can use, from simple observations to a review of the lesson plans that contain the cooperative learning strategy to individual reflections on how the implementation of the strategy went.

We could also include some student reflections here, as well. We could gather feedback from the students who participated in the cooperative learning to see how they felt about it. Next, is this goal attainable? Our team feels that yes, it seems reasonable to expect each teacher to use this cooperative learning strategy at least three times.

Next, how is this relevant? As I stated a minute ago, this is part of a school initiative and all teachers are expected to be implementing Marzano's high yield strategies. So this is definitely relevant, not only to each individual teacher in terms of it being a strategy that is proven to increase student achievement, but it's also relevant in the school and district community as this is part of this initiative that we are all expected to take part in.

And finally, we are setting a timeline of six weeks for completion of this goal. We feel that it's reasonable to implement this strategy three times over the course of six weeks. Obviously, that would average out to once every two weeks. You want to carefully consider your timeline so that you are not asking people to rush through the action steps.

But also, you don't want it to be too wide of a window which can result in people putting off the action steps or even potentially forgetting that they are supposed to be following through on these specific steps. So we feel that six weeks is a reasonable time period. Here's what the finished SMART goal might look like.

Assuming we're writing this goal around the end of January, the goal might read by March 15th, each teacher will have implemented Marzano's cooperative learning strategy at least three separate times, gathering feedback and reflecting each time to evaluate effectiveness and impact.

Now, it's your turn. Select a goal that is already present in your professional development plan and try your hand at rewriting that goal as a SMART goal by following the process that I outlined for you in this tutorial. For more information on how to apply what you learned in this video, please view the additional resources section that accompanies this video presentation.

The additional resources section includes hyperlinks useful for applications of the course material, including a brief description of each resource. Thanks for watching. Have a great day.