The life of a teacher has many starts and stops but the end of the year is a great point to revisit my goals. Here is my account of achieved and missed 2016 goals. Some of these were achieved by design, some simply by accident.

A Point On Goal Tracking

I have trouble keeping focused if I don’t have ready access to my goals and to-do lists.  used to keep track of my goals in Evernote but now track them in Google Keep. I tag notes either “My Goals” or “My Goals (Achieved)”. It is easy to track them that way and pull them up when I need to.

My 2016 Goals (Achieved)

  1. Start a Student Help Desk at my school
  2. Present at a Professional Conference (Leading Future Learning Conference | Topic: Social Media Policies)
  3. Present At MassCUE (Massachusetts technology conference | Topics: Games & Learning, GSuite Productivity, Student Technology Help Desks, Snapchat)
  4. Get published in a book (Wrote chapter for Gamify Literacy)
  5. Design Google Drive course on Guildway.com
  6. Design Google Drive (Advanced) course on Guildway.com
  7. Design SEI MTEL Test Prep course on Guildway.com
  8. Make $100 a month offering courses to teachers
  9. Achieve 30 daily average visitors to Guildway.com
  10. Write a total of 50 blog posts

My 2016 Goals (Missed)

  1. Write a post 2 times a week
  2. Complete course on badges and leaderboards
  3. Receive Google Teacher Certification

Many of last year’s goals were simply about achieving certain benchmarks that were important to me. Largely, I wanted to prove to myself that these benchmarks could actually be reached. But they lacked something for me. Direction.

I wrote many posts because it was what I “thought” I should write. I had trouble sharing more knowledge because I had a lot of knowledge I wanted to share but simply couldn’t prioritize what I wanted to do with my time outside of work.

As I design my goals for 2017 One thing I would like to do moving forward is achieve greater clarity and focus about what I like to do. I have many passions and I struggle with narrowing them down to achieve real results. I suspect this will be one of my life-long battles but awareness helps, right?

Question: What goals of yours did you achieve this year? Which ones did you miss?

 

2016 goals