High School 17/6/22: An easy way to increase success

As we approach the end of Term 2, students in Pastoral Care will be reviewing and evaluating their personal goals they made at the start of the year.

There are many benefits and advantages to having a set of goals to work towards. Setting goals helps trigger new behaviours, helps guides focus and provides a sense of purpose. Goal setting can lead to greater success and performance. Setting goals not only motivates, but can also improve mental health and level of personal success.

Goals power efforts and give a sense of purpose to achieve them. They:

  • are the road map to follow to grow the brain’s abilities,
  • enable you to use your strengths to do the hard things to overcome challenges. This is called resilience,
  • connect you with yourself to show what you stand for and what you want your best possible self to be.

Students create SMART goals —Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, Timely.

We want to adopt a growth mindset when writing goal and focus on the process. It’s about improving, believing that you can grow your brain’s abilities to achieve what you set out to do through hard work and a sustained effort to learn new approaches to learn what you don’t know. It’s about believing that you can change your ability and the outcome through your persistence to learn new things.

An example of a growth mindset goal: Is to use a number of different thinking tools to improve my understanding, or I will tackle the harder questions to stretch myself by trying new things each week.

Students can set as many goals as they like, but the goals must be related to the Carey Attributes; one goal to build knowledge and think creatively and the other can be directed towards an attribute of their choosing. These goals can be found on the student profile on Edumate.

Towards the end of each semester, students will evaluate their goals and reflect on the extent to which they have achieved these personal goals. The following questions help guide students in their reflections.

  • What have I done this semester which contributed towards achieving this goal?
  • Have you achieved this goal?
  • How do you know you succeeded or failed in achieving this goal? What evidence is there?
  • What hindered me from achieving this goal?
  • What would I do differently if I had another opportunity?

These reflections are then used to help create the next set of goals for semester 2. Parents may also like to use these questions as a prompt when discussing student reports.

God Bless, 

Mr Anthony Hudson

High School Deputy Principal