Goal Setting at Holy Rosary

I’m very grateful that Holy Rosary got accepted into classroom champions this year.  Last year I set a goal for myself to find a way to set up the senior students at Holy Rosary for success in the classroom, in the community and during extra curricular events.  I was trying to find a way teach perseverance to the students to help them overcome hard obstacles they faced.   I’m glad to have classroom champions as a resource for the students.    

As the students arrived to the first day of school they were greeted with a giant classroom champions bulletin board outside of their room.  Last year they followed Akeem Haynes but were not actually signed up for classroom champions.  One of the first questions the students asked me in the hallway was, are we doing classroom champions this year?  Some of the senior students were a little apprehensive with this because they felt last year wasn’t personal at all.   I informed them that we got accepted in the program for the year but can’t tell them who their mentor is until two weeks into the school year. 

On September the 13^th , we headed to Dallas Valley for a leadership retreat, which was set in motion last year.  I met with a group of teachers and looked at different ways that we can improve leadership within a school.  It was a full day retreat where the students got to set their expectations for the year and developed some relationships with each other.   This is where we introduced goal setting for the first time.  We got the students to go to a silent area and gave them 15 minutes to write their long-term goal and how they expected to reach this.

By the second week of the school the students were very anxious to find out who there mentor was.  It was a great lead up to this having the Olympics during the summer time.  They were guessing all bunch of Canadian athletes, Andre Da Grasse’s name came up a few times.  I introduced them to their mentor, Brad Bowden.  They were totally engaged when he mentioned a shot out to Mr. Florek and Holy Rosary School.  That in its self got them hooked. 

On the goal-setting day we watched the video from Brad Bowden and set our short and long term goals.   I also reviewed student’s goals they set last year and used it as an exemplar.  We also noticed she reached most of her goals during the year and talked about what she had to do to achieve this.   We created goal-setting balloons to keep it consistent for all grades. I actually did this from kindergarten to grade 8s in our school.  The kindergartens were walking by the bulletin board and really wanted their balloons on there also.