Including Others in Your New Year Goal Setting

By Heidi Reed, Director, Professional Learning

This time of year is typically focused on goals and resolutions. School leaders are in a unique position because they are often not only setting goals for themselves, but they are also setting goals for others in the form of end-of-year targets, performance improvement plans, and strategic priorities for the next school year.

While setting and communicating goals is certainly part of a school leader’s responsibilities, it can be all too easy to do that goal setting work in isolation. Without an explicit commitment to being more equitable and inclusive in all processes, including goal setting processes, diverse perspectives get left behind. School leaders can end up reproducing inequitable systems or perpetuating inequitable outcomes for students, families, communities, and teachers.

Turnaround for Children has developed some resources to support school leaders in thinking about how they can make more inclusive moves in their schools, especially around leadership behaviors, skills and mindsets in the new year.

1. Making More Inclusive Moves – An anchor visual that highlights examples of how leaders can become more inclusive in the way they team, share responsibility, communicate, and make decisions.
2. Including Others in Continuous Improvement – A re-design tool that prompts leaders to identify ways they can be more inclusive throughout continuous improvement efforts, specifically in how they analyze data, identify and define problems, and design and implement solutions.
3. Inclusive Leadership Shadow Assessment – A three-part reflection tool that can be used to gain insight into how others are experiencing your inclusive efforts as leader.