At the beginning of each school year, it is critical to set instructional goals and objectives for our classes. These goals need to work for ourselves, for our students, for our departments, and for our administration-no easy task.

I know I often tend to be idealistic and overly optimistic at the beginning of each year, and this often does not work well when it comes time to evaluate the progress I’ve made. Here are a few pointers I have learned that hopefully can help you as you set your instructional goals and objectives for the new year.

1. Use state/national content standards.

This idea may seem obvious, but too often I want to teach everything. By narrowing my teaching focus to criteria that has already been determined, I don’t spend time spinning my wheels thinking about all of the things I could teach..

The standards can also be scattered - try to link your standards cohesively together into one word, phrase or theme for you and your students. Post this word, phrase or theme in your classroom and remind students of the overall focus when they ask “why are we doing this”, or your feel your instruction is getting “off track”.

This word or phrase is great to come back to when you are planning late on Sunday nights – does the daily lesson match up with the overall theme/goal/vision for the year?

2. Align your goals to your district, school, department and/or grade level team goals.

My second point is important to helping me work with the system rather than against the system. The more that I align my teaching to my district, school and department and/or grade level team goals, the easier it is for me to be granted opportunities for professional development and support for classroom initiatives, because I can justify that I need them. Furthermore, gaining new educational philosophies and teaching methods helps me to stay current and flexible.

3. Work with your colleagues.

In the first ten years of teaching I felt like I was constantly working too hard to create all my own goals and content. I eventually learned to work with the other AP Literature teacher. This was awesome because it taught me the fine art of compromise and, especially for the sake of students, it also allowed me to divide the workload in half.

The more I learned to work with colleagues and share ideas, the more our students benefited from a shared vision of a strong English course.

4. Be realistic about yourself as a teacher.

I so often get caught up in my ideal reality of what should happen in my classroom, that I lose sense of what I realistically should expect from myself. Know yourself, your strengths and your target standards that will drive instruction. Focus on those as you plan your year.

I also must give the caveat that when planning with a colleague, or by yourself, you cannot do it all. I wish I was like a teacher who has a complex student reward system or the teacher who makes his copies in September for the entire year.

However, when I really contemplate my goals and who I am as a teacher, I know that I am not either of those educators, and what works well for them won’t necessarily work well for me. Celebrating what I do well as a teacher and concentrating on pre-established goals helps me narrow my focus, so that I can succeed.

5. Be able to collect real data to evaluate your progress.

In August, it is easy for me to say that I will grade an essay a week and track each student’s progress on fifteen different benchmarks. This goal is harder to keep when I am drowning in essays on week four and cannot find the time to log one set of errors, let alone fifteen.

Make sure you can easily and efficiently measure your students’ progress – whether it be having a chart where you have a limited set of responses you can make about a student’s progress that you check off at set times, or a series of quick tests written with a consistent format that you can administer quickly throughout the year.

6. Be Happy

We will never be able to teach all of the standards and we will never be able to truly exceed our own expectations (or maybe that’s just me). Work hard, plan hard, and then don’t forget to celebrate the little successes, however little or unexpected.

Overall, the whole idea is to remain focused on instructional goals and objectives that have already been established, and not feel overwhelmed by all the options and possibilities. Be realistic in your expectations of yourself and your students and you will have a successful year.

Good luck and happy writing!