Journal #8
Smell the Coffee
Don Hall

Don hall discusses the need and importance of setting benchmarks in the public school system to continually see productive growth. In our personal lives, setting goals and accomplishing them gives us satisafaction knowing that we are growing as individuals. Hall sees the public school system in need of those same goal setting strategies to get past certain problems that have been nagging educators like a sore elbow. In order to get past those problems, the first thing that needs to be accomplished is identification. By indentifying a problem, you are able to sort it out and begin to troubleshoot solutions. Use data as a driving point to determine the severity of the problem. Numbers don't lie. Once the troubleshooting stage has been completed, you can begin to narrow down solutions to resolve the problem. Of course, not all your aches and pains are going to be solved in one year, but by isolating all of them, you can begin to focus on the major problems and begin to knock them out one at a time. Hall reccommends that by focusing on two or three at a time, you will be able to start achieving goals and focus on new ones. You will still have other problems lurking in the background, but you will be able to tackle them at a later date.

1. As an educator, why is setting goals important?

Setting goals for students, parents, and yourself is a great way to achieve goals and give everyone something to shoot for. Whether it be setting homework goals for parents to achieve with their kids, or personal goals for teachers to attain with their pupils. The governance over the attainment of those goals is equally shared by all three players involved. Sole responsibility should not be left on the teacher, but they should be responsible in seeing that everyone is doing their part to contribute to the team's goal. In reading for example, teachers should focus on their students' current reading level and try to improve it by one or two levels. If a student is at a third grade reading level at the beginning of the year, then the focus for that student should be a fourth grade reading level by the end of the year. Of course this is easier said than done, but the idea is to push to attain those goals.

2. Is it better to correct a problem completely or temporarily resolve it?

In all cases, problems are better resolved if they can be completely taken care the first time around. However, there will be times when even though the proper data has been collected, small unforseen fissures may evolve from a problem that has been identified and resolved. In those cases, it is best not to look at those fissures as a failure, but rather as a learning experience. Some problems may spring leeks that you are unaware of, and instead of letting it bring you down, use it as food for thought in the future. Many times most problems start off rather small and they don't become an issue until they directly affect large numbers of people. Working the problem may be something new, and with most new cases comes new research. The ability to foresee everything that went wrong and can continually go wrong with anything new is quite a feat. Work out each new challenge as best as possible and go from there. The more research and data collected will enable you to see every problem from different perspectives and will help provide better solutions for long term attainment.