I appreciate students' goals at the beginning of each semester. We all feel some new starting is also a chance of new being -- think the New Year, a new relationship, a new semester. Of course, we are being all the time, but a semester's start is a fine beginning to reconsider who we are as scholars, reflect who were have been, and who we want to become.
I come back to a short blog I wrote back in 2018 -- way before the new normal of 2020 pandemic and our lives' upsetting of so many former rituals. And in that blog, I wrote:
Importantly, most professors know about goal theory because they practiced goals in their undergraduate and graduate work. You should share your goals with your professor, personally, in your regular meetings with your professor. Discuss your short- and long-term goals, write your resources and needs, and work together for the semester. Then, do it again in next semester.
But here's a secret: professor make it is easy to be "success" because they've already obtaining some stability and comfort with less of the anxiety. Their status is a culmination of rituals and trials and failures, and they often forget that every success had started with obstacles, struggles, and sometimes even loneliness and alienation. Professors often say, "Just do the work" but they've forgotten the work. They've forgotten their freshman years were just as chaotic for them as my students experience right now. And especially in 2020/2021, all of us have stumbled in our goals as we've tried to adjust to reductions of resources while similar demands, especially academic demands, of N courses, looking ahead for graduation.
Having said that, it may be useful to be aware of Locke's Goal Theory
Locke's research shows that goals just don't happen. They require context and measurement. Specifically, Locke shows that to make a goal a reality, we need:
- Clarity
- Challenge
- Commitment
- Feedback
- Task complexity
Notice that meeting goals should not be done alone. Notice that so many of these needs require some socialization. We often need to articulate commitment with someone else, for example; or, we need others' clarity of our goals to ensure how it might be modeled. Obviously, feedback is a social act.
What's important, here, is that especially maturing adults such as many college students, they should turn to others as they articulate and advance their goals. They can look to a sibling or parent; friend or mentor. Most professors would be willing to help with these goals. But I also find that many students lack the confident to turn to siblings or friends or professors for these goal stages, too often having hidden and never verbalized (and written!) stages, and therefore lack accountability. Then before they know it, the goal is lost.
Norman Vincent Peale*
“Plan your work for today and every day, then work your plan.”
* Norman Vincent Peale was a quack, by they way, but it's easy to throw in a pseudo-inspirational quotation, right?
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