Goal-Setting & Achievement FAQ

Why aren't SMART goals enough for school leaders?

SMART goals are useful for one specific purpose: monitoring progress toward a measurable target. But they're terrible for the two things that matter most — motivation and daily action.

Try setting a SMART goal for improving your most important relationships. Or for becoming a better listener. It's awkward because the most meaningful goals resist clean measurement. That doesn't make them less important — it means you need a different type of goal alongside your SMART goals.

The most effective approach uses multiple levels: a purpose-level goal that provides meaning and direction, milestone goals that mark real progress, and daily practice goals that drive the specific behaviors you can control. SMART goals fit at the monitoring level, but they shouldn't be the whole architecture.

What's the difference between a purpose goal and a progress goal?

A purpose goal is the reason you're doing the work — the big, meaningful outcome you're pursuing. "Every student reads at grade level" is a purpose goal. You can't directly achieve it through a single action, and it may not be fully measurable, but it orients everything else.

A progress goal is a measurable milestone along the way. "Increase the percentage of students reading at grade level from 67% to 80% by May" is a progress goal. It's specific and trackable, but on its own, it doesn't tell you what to do tomorrow morning.

The mistake most schools make is setting progress goals without a compelling purpose goal above them (so the numbers feel arbitrary) or setting purpose goals without progress goals below them (so there's no way to tell if you're making headway). You need both — and ideally a layer of daily practice goals underneath that drives the actual work.

How do I stay on track with goals throughout the school year?

The school year has a natural rhythm that works against sustained goal pursuit. September is full of energy. October brings the first crises. By November, most goals have quietly slipped to the back burner. The problem isn't commitment — it's the absence of a structure that keeps goals active amid the daily chaos.

Two structures help most. First, shorter planning cycles — think in terms of two-week sprints or quarterly milestones rather than a single year-long plan. Shorter cycles create more frequent moments of recommitment and course correction. Second, daily tracking of the specific behaviors that drive your goals. Not outcomes — behaviors. Did you visit three classrooms today? Did you process your inbox? Did you hold the conversation you'd been avoiding? A simple daily scorecard keeps the right actions visible when everything else is competing for your attention. For practice goals tied to instructional coaching, pairing goal-tracking with video evidence from Sibme creates a concrete feedback loop — it's much harder to convince yourself you're meeting a practice goal when you can watch the footage and see whether it's actually happening.

What's wrong with "magic-wand thinking" when it comes to goals?

Magic-wand thinking is when you define a goal by its outcome — "I want my school's test scores to improve by 15%" — without working backward to the specific changes in practice that would produce that result. It skips the messy middle where all the real work happens.

Test scores aren't something you can do. They're a byproduct of thousands of daily decisions by dozens of teachers over the course of a year. If your goal doesn't connect to specific, controllable actions, it's not a goal — it's a wish.

The antidote is to work backward: What teaching practices would produce these results? What would need to change about current practice? What support would teachers need to make those changes? What would I need to do daily to provide that support? Now you have something actionable.

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