Five Goal Setting Ideas for School Counselors

Goal setting is an important part of motivating and inspiring others for positive change. Learn five ideas to get started today!

1: Personal Goal Setting

First and foremost, you should be setting goals for yourself. Whether they are on paper or in your mind, personal goals can help you have something to work towards. It’s a way of motivating yourself to make positive change. Through this you inspire others to do the same. That’s why sharing your goals with others is so important. Not only for accountability, but for inspiration!

In our building one year, we all set goals and posted them outside our doors. One was a personal goal and one was an academic or professional goal. This was really fun to see everyone’s interests and allowed us to be super motivated to achieving these goals.

One way to get a jump start on your goal is to chunk it up into small pieces and start tracking your progress. This allows you to see your goal in manageable pieces and not be overwhelmed every time you think about the big picture.

2: Program Goal Setting

School counseling program goals are just as important as personal goals. As school counselors, we want to grow our programs and show others the outcomes of our hard work.

Where do you see your school counseling program in one year… three years… five years?

Every summer I think about this to prepare for the next year. I think about what things went well and what things need improvement. Also, I look at where I spent my time and where I could make adjustments. Then I map out a plan to get from A to B. Making small adjustments throughout your day can make a big difference when it comes to tackling the goals you set.

Accountability is huge here, so think of someone who could talk you through your progress. We have one counselor in each building at our district and they are so great to run through ideas with me. I enjoy seeing each of us accomplish things on our list for the year and watch our programs grow district-wide.

3: Student Goal Setting

Setting goals with students can be very fun! School counselors usually focus on these three goal topics with students… academic, personal and career.

These are great to go over each year and keep them in a special folder or online document that follows the student to each grade. This way they can track progress over long-term goals and see what they’ve accomplished and see things that no longer interest them. The advantage of doing these each year is  students see their progress being broken down into yearly chunks and start to see that sometimes things take time. Especially if they have been taught to work backwards and take large long-term goals and separate them into two or three short-term goals.

Student friendly goal setting charts are an awesome way for students to visually see their progress. They are able to get into a routine of self-assessing their goal progress and taking note of where it lays each day or week. These are great to set up in the counseling office, classroom or even home.

To read more about goal setting with students in your counseling office, check out Using a Rating Scale to Set School Counseling Goals.

4: Community Goal Setting

Where does your school counseling program fit into the community? Are you a huge part of it? Or maybe off to the side?

Start thinking about how your school counseling program can become more involved and ways to showcase what your program is about within your community. This process sheds positive light on your school district and starts to create a partnership between your counseling program and the community stakeholders. This is key when it comes to sharing news, fundraising and community support.

So… I’m getting at setting community goals!

Start wherever your program is now and set some goals to become more involved and helpful in your community. When you start setting goals for this, think about these three questions…

• How can you help support your community?
• Who can you form partnerships with and complete service projects?
• What can you do to share your program and build community relationships?

4: Long-Term Goal Setting

In Missouri, we do an Internal Improvement Review (IIR) each year to see where we need improvement. We sit down together as a district counseling team and fill these out. It really helps talking about our program individually and then looking at the big picture. Review your yearly IIR’s to see if there is a common goal you keep missing from your program. If there is, make that your yearly focus and break it down into manageable pieces throughout the year.

Here is a link to the one Missouri uses, you may want to look at your state school counseling program manual to see if they have their own version. Internal Improvement Review for Missouri School Counselors

Another key idea to long-term program goal setting is to be intentional and have a strategy. One way I become intentional is by writing it down! I once had a professor say “if it’s on paper… it’s on purpose” and that meant it was intentional and important for me to remember.

That’s why I created my Simply Perfect Planner to help counselors become more intentional with their time. To read more about that and decide where your going to spend your time… check out School Counseling Planner – Save Time & Energy.

Those are my five goal setting ideas to get you thinking about what you want your next steps to be, personally and professionally. Use this time to make it happen…. focus on those goals that always get overlooked. Happy Goal Setting!