Learning at the Heart

100 Posts in 100 Days

I’ve been thinking about goals a lot lately, in a variety of different contexts.  (Notice the big watermelon returning from Post 12:  Making Goals Work? 😆)  It’s May and near the end of the school year.  The concept of mastery goals and performance goals has been on my mind this entire school year.  I can’t shake it.

I first read the distinction between goals with a mastery orientation and goals with a performance orientation in Quality Implementation:  Leveraging Collective Efficacy to Make “What Works” Actually Work by Jenni Donohoo and Steven Katz.  In essence, mastery oriented goals focus on learning and developing the requisite knowledge and skill.  These kinds of goals are about developing proficiency and expertise.  Performance oriented goals, by contrast, are exactly what the name implies:  accomplishing a task.

Here are a couple examples related to my 100 Posts in 100 Days Challenge and what I’ve written about so far:

Notice the difference between the goals.  Also notice that in the quest to achieve the mastery goal, the performance goals are met.  

In their discussion of goals, Donohoo and Katz reference multiple research studies that show setting mastery goals leads to better results in the form of deeper thinking & learning and greater commitment to the goal.  

Here are some of the things I have been thinking about all year long and can’t quite shake:

1.  If this is true and if the research bears it out, why do we have such a focus on performance goals in schools?  I think about the type of goal setting that teachers are asked to do, both for themselves and for their students.  More often than not, in the schools where I have worked, the guidance has been to write a SMART goal.  Smart goals are Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-Bound.  They are performance oriented goals.  And now that I know about mastery oriented goals, they feel very limiting and short sighted to me.
2. Not only do we ask teachers and students to have performance oriented goals, a school’s strategic plan is often predicated on performance oriented goals.  Sometimes they are also called SMART goals.  Sometimes they are called KPI’s for Key Performance Indicators.  (See, “performance” is right there in the name!)  Again, they feel very limiting and short sighted to me.
3. Despite what it might sound like in my first two comments, I don’t think mastery oriented goals and performance oriented goals are binary.  Rather, I think they need to be complementary.  I think the performance orientation is in service of the mastery orientation.  Work toward the mastery goal will necessitate progress on the correlating performance goals. 
4. The skill I’m trying to develop:  The ability to help teachers and teams of teachers write mastery goals that guide them to engage in meaningful, challenging work that develops skills and knowledge along the way.  We have been working on this through developing inquiry questions.  Finding the right grain size and the right focus has been hard at times.  Some goals/inquiries have been way too broad, making it difficult to develop a specific action plan.  Other goals/inquiries have been way too narrow, making it difficult to think of the goal/inquiry as more than something to accomplish and check off as complete.  

Ha!  Look at that.  I truly didn’t intend to do this, but I think I may have just written my mastery goal about mastery goals:

I want to ensure that teachers and teams of teachers develop mastery oriented goals
that guide students to develop proficiency and expertise. 

Writing it out in this way has revealed some language that has been absent for me until now:  the concepts of student proficiency and expertise.  Those concepts feel like first steps in shaking my persistent wonderings.  New ideas are percolating in my mind right now…stay tuned.  I sense there will be more to come on this topic.