Building Teacher Agency and Resilience by Aligning Growth Goals with Values

By Sarah Dugan and Meredith Monk Ford

Beginning of year faculty meetings, done. Meet and greets for incoming students, done. First day of school, done. Back to school night, done. All of the important gears that make up the machine that is your school year are in motion once again after their summer slumber. After a week or two allowing those moving parts to settle into their cadence, it will be time to begin another important process: goals meetings with teachers. 

It’s a unique privilege: helping teachers harness their hopeful energy for their students this year and distill it into a goal. The challenge is to allow the goals to draw out the best of each educator you support. You want to empower teachers to own and buy into their goals for the year, to live their goals, rather than letting them languish in a Google doc deep in the ether, and then pulling some “evidence of progress” out of the air during their planning period before the next progress meeting.

What if we think of each teacher we lead as one who is living by a set of core values and beliefs, their own personal manifesto? Admittedly, this is a “coach” approach to leading your teachers. The idea is to partner with the teacher and build their agency, rather than acting as their fix-it person or advice-giver. 

Let’s talk for a moment about your beliefs as the facilitator of this goals discussion. What you believe about the teacher in front of you has a significant impact on the likelihood they’ll meet their goal. What competencies do you believe this teacher possesses? What gifts does this teacher bring to the classroom and to your school community? Center these attributes as you enter the conversation… because the narrative in our minds (our beliefs) will impact how we show up in our conversations (our behaviors). 

One way of viewing goal conversations is that we want to help teachers live in close alignment to the values and beliefs they hold that make them a good teacher, the ones that benefit students the most. So how do we draw out teachers’ beliefs and values in a 45-minute goals-setting meeting? Why not ask them? Set aside about 15 minutes for this part of the meeting. 

1. Have a printed list of values ready, and invite the teacher to choose some words from the list that resonate. With genuine curiosity, settle into a listening role.  
2. Ask the teacher to describe a time when–ideally in their work–they were living out these values. Explore how it felt for them. 
3. Then ask them to envision this upcoming year. What would it look like to live out their values between now and June? Invite them to think big and to get ambitious. 
4. From here, a new goal might take shape with your help. Maybe some tweaking is needed for the goal to align not only with the teacher’s values but also the school’s mission and vision. 

Make it collaborative; prioritize the teacher’s voice; check in with them to see what they think as you co-draft or update their goal. From there, the teacher herself should be ready to identify concrete steps toward making this goal a reality.  Hopefully, the teacher will leave feeling energized by their articulation of their beliefs and values and ready to put it all in action, starting in their classroom at your school! 

Next, you can help them prepare for the arc of the school year. Fast-forward to November, when you want to avoid this same teacher skulking into your office, beleaguered and demoralized. Push the conversation to identify what challenges might get in the way of this goal as the year progresses. This can be followed with an exploration of how the teacher sees themselves surmounting the hurdles she will encounter. Check out this resource with more goal-setting questions to help guide this conversation.

The ideal goals meeting ends with the teacher feeling optimistic and hopeful about their own agency in reaching this goal and they embrace a genuine growth mindset toward their own learning and development as an educator. When we invite folks to name their values and beliefs, their actions are much more likely to align with those beliefs and values. 

The naming- and acting-upon values pattern can become a cycle that feeds itself. Here’s why: it feels satisfying to act out your values. It’s why most of us teach and keep doing it year after year, even when it’s hard. It also builds our resilience. When we live aligned with who we are at our core, it adds fuel to the gas tank of our resilience. And that fuel comes in handy when we hit bumps in the road, on the days when teaching doesn’t feel so enjoyable or satisfying, or when we falter on the path toward our goals and feel discouraged. 

This is a whole-self approach to goal-setting meetings, and one that pays dividends in building lasting connections with the teachers you support. It also cultivates agency, resulting in higher success rates for teachers and in turn, students.