Sean Tibor: Hello, and welcome to Teaching Python. This is episode 127, and today is a quick bite about setting goals. My name is Sean Tibor. I'm a coder who teaches. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: And my name is Kelly Schuster Perez, and I'm a teacher who codes. Sean Tibor: It's great to see you today, Kelly. It's a nice, quiet Saturday morning, or. No, actually, nothing is quiet about Saturday morning. It's all busy and chaotic, and there's a lot of stuff going on. How are you doing? Kelly Schuster-Paredes: I'm doing great, actually. Mine's very quiet. My kids are all gone. Son's taking a boating class, other kids go into play practice. I mean, perfect Saturday alone. Sean Tibor: Nice. All right, well, then, why don't we knock out this quick bite? I've been thinking about this a lot as the start of the year is coming around and we're doing performance planning for the year, like, what are we going to tackle? What are our goals? How are we going to accomplish things? And I thought it would be a great topic to consider here. Now that we've gotten through that initial New Year's resolution splash, where everyone tries to make changes happen quickly, I thought it would be great to spend 15 minutes or so just talking about setting real goals that can help achieve true accomplishment or transformation. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: It's a great topic for any educator out there. New quarter, new semester for a lot of us out there, so a great time to just talk about goals with kids, and it works for everyone. So it's something that we do as educators all the time and as adults, we tend to slack off sometimes, I think, but in a business, you like to get in there and get some goals for sure. Sean Tibor: I think goals are for everyone. It just helps you focus your energy and feel like you're moving towards something bigger and longer lasting. I know that when I don't have a goal for something, I'm floundering about and my actions and my energies are just going in multiple directions and it doesn't have any focus and coherence to it. So I love setting goals. I know this in various aspects of my life, whether it's my health and fitness, whether it's my professional development, personal development, personal goals, my relationships with my family and friends, what goals do I set for myself? How am I going to show up for them? I love talking about goals because I think it's beneficial to everyone and in a lot of different ways, 100%. The first thing I wanted to talk about in terms of setting goals is that there's two basic types of goals that I have found most useful. One is an accomplishment goal. Something needs to be done. I need to get there. So it's something that once you accomplish it, that goal is complete. There's nothing more to be doing. Like, maybe you set a new goal based on what you accomplished in that goal, but it's really about getting to a destination. We'll talk a little bit about those kinds of goals. The other goal is sometimes harder to tackle and harder for people to frame, which is more of a transformative goal, which is, I want to be different at the end of this process. I want to change behaviors, change mindsets, change habits, and all of those things require constant, diligent effort. Then you also have to maintain it once you reach it. So there's these two basic kind of goals that I try to think about as I'm structuring what I'm doing. What are the goals I have to transform myself versus what are the goals that I have to accomplish? Kelly Schuster-Paredes: Yeah, and I think it's an interesting take on that, because both those goals, one is, I think, a little bit more short term, where the other one is long, and you need to break it into short term goals that are constantly renewed in order to get to the long. Those are good points. Sean Tibor: Right. And then the other thing that I also think about as well is that we talk a lot about computational thinking, taking a big problem and breaking it down into smaller, achievable parts. The same approach is applicable here to goal setting as well. I might have a very large goal in mind that I'm trying to reach, like I want to run a marathon in order to get there. I break that down into smaller goals. Step one, hire someone who actually knows what they're doing to coach me along the way. Step two, build a plan. So it's breaking it down into smaller chunks that are achievable and having those goals and deliverables along the way that lead to the bigger, more complex goal that might take months, years, or even decades to accomplish. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: Yeah, I think in schools we like to call them the smart goals. Specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and timely. So breaking that down into all those. Sean Tibor: Things, I usually think of those, and I've used those throughout my career in a variety of different settings. Those criteria help you improve the quality of the goal itself. It doesn't necessarily change what you're trying to accomplish, but it changes how you frame that goal. So being able to say, I want to do exactly this makes it really clear what you're trying to accomplish and how you're going to get there. If that goal is not specific. If it's not something that you can track and say, how will I know if I even got there? And when do I need to do it by then? Is it really a goal? So there's a quality scale for goals. Like a really well defined goal is something that is something you can do, or at least if you can't do it, you know why you may be falling off track and what you can do to correct it and get back to it. So I love that smart model for being able to make sure that the quality of your goals is really high. I also think that goals can be anything. You can make anything a goal that you want to achieve. It's the old adage of, you can achieve anything if you put your mind to it. This is literally what goal setting is all about, is I'm putting my mind to something that is a goal. And for some people, it's better health and fitness, better relationships with their families, better professional skills, or maybe a new role instead of responsibilities. How are you going to work to that? So in my world, professionally, what I do is set my own goals. And those goals have to align with the larger organizational goals. So I have goals. Those goals contribute to larger goals, and then those goals also can be broken down or delegated or redefined for other people on my team so that they're contributing to the larger organizational goals as well. This is where, depending on your manager's style, they may have different ways of thinking about that. For me, I really try to get my ego out of the equation. Right? It's not about accomplishing my goals, it's about how do I help organize the goals that are set for my team in a way that they have what they need to accomplish it and that contributes to the overall goal. So I end up being like a pass through for the goals. I am helping to make sure that those bigger goals get tackled by me doing my job of helping to get everybody empowered and headed in the right direction. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: Yeah. And I love this is what makes, I think our mutation of our podcast now, because hearing about the real world and how we're breaking it down into the classroom is really exciting for me. It's been an exciting twist and turn for our podcast, but this is all things that we do in school. So we try to talk about holistic learning, developing the whole child and that cultivating this mastery of these silos and how they look like in a larger picture. Sean Tibor: Right. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: And so when we're encouraging kids to set their goals, we really are talking about stuff that reflects their own interest. It could be something for academics, something for hobbies, social life, because everything that we're doing in schools, obviously, is the small pinpoints that help to develop that whole child. So talking about getting the ego out of there and really looking ahead and long term, where do they want to go? What do they want to be? Who do they want to be? Is that mastery orientation? So it fits, so aligned with an adult and how the educators are really. Sean Tibor: Focusing to push the child, it connects in both directions. That's the fascinating part for me, is that a lot of adults have forgotten how to do this, or forgotten the joy of setting a Kelly well defined goal and then working towards and achieving that. Because sometimes in the adult world of working in business or working as a teacher or whatever, things get muddled and they get confused. You get conflicting priorities. You get someone telling you to do one thing, another person telling you to do another. Maybe you're just exhausted because your personal life is very demanding at that moment and it's affecting your professional life or vice versa. So a lot of adults that I've talked to feel like they're not performing, they're not achieving, they're not doing everything well the way they want to, because honestly, they feel like they're failing in so many areas of their lives. Maybe their relationships with their mom and dad aren't as good as they want them to be, or maybe they're stressed out with the work that they have to do, or maybe there's health issues that are causing them to feel worn down and run down, and they just feel like they're failing everywhere. But if you can set goals, even if they're small, modest goals that just say, I'm going to work on this one thing and I'm going to try to make it better, you have something that you can latch on to that's a point of improvement. It's holding your tongue and calming yourself before your kids piss you off and taking a moment to just make that relationship better, or setting aside ten extra minutes to put them to bed and make sure that they're happy and healthy and everything. If your kids are older, sending them a text message saying, hey, I love you, no strings attached, just those sorts of things that make your life more enriched. Those goals of saying, I want to have a better relationship, or I want to achieve this skill at work, achieve competency in this skill, or I want to knock it out of the park with this presentation that I have to do those small, tangible, specific, measurable, actionable, relevant and timely goals help you start to get out of those doldrums of feeling like you're failing everywhere. You might be failing in seven other areas of your life, but if you've got two of them, that you're moving forward, that you feel like you can clearly set goals, that you have ownership and agency over achieving that goal, and then the satisfaction of tackling it, that feeling of accomplishment, starts to spread everywhere else. There's a fascinating talk by William McRaven, who's a famous Navy SEAL admiral. He was giving a talk at a university, and he told the graduates about the importance of making your bed every morning. It was brilliant because he said, look, you may say, why does that matter? Why does it matter to make your bed every morning? He said, but if you think about it, it's one of the first things you do in the morning. You make your bed, you do it well. It's something you have complete control over. It doesn't take you a huge amount of time, but most importantly, it sets the tone for the rest of the day. You have set a goal of, I will make my bed every morning. You have already accomplished something in the first 5 minutes that you're awake and out of bed that sets the tone for the rest of your day so that you can move on and accomplish other goals throughout your day. So sometimes these small, sometimes surface level changes and goal setting can roll or cascade into much larger, more transformative, or more effective changes and goals in the rest of your life. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: Totally. As an educator, you're looking at trying to find a way to establish this culture in kids, this culture of continuous improvement, continuous personal growth, really establishing how you want the student to have this growth mindset constantly. And by having that small thing of making your bed or packing your backpack before you leave, or getting into habits of having things always prepared, like your computer charged or something, even silly little things that we think are insignificant. It's really helping to build that goal setting process for kids as they grow into young adults and out into the workforce. So that culture of continuous improvement. Sean Tibor: And that brings us to another point, which is that there are goals that you keep very private and very personal. There are things that are only for you, maybe one or two people that you trust that know that you're working on that goal. Maybe I want to be in better management of my emotional state. That might be something you only talk about with a few people, but if you're in front of people, if you're visible to people as a teacher, as a leader, or as a coworker, and you want to instill that culture of goal setting and goal achieving in others. You have to make your goals transparent, and it makes you more accountable to the goal as well, which means you're more likely to accomplish it. So if you put a goal up on the whiteboard or the chalkboard in your classroom and you say, I am going to do this, maybe my goal is I'm going to say hello every morning to every student who walks in my classroom. And you put that up on a goal, it is in public, where other people can see it and you are now accountable to it. Then you can track it and you can say, okay, I'm going to make a mark there. Every day that I do this, they will see that. They will see that you're making progress. And after a while, they're going to start rooting for you. They're going to look at all of those marks on the board and all the misses. When you miss it, you own it. And you say, I missed this goal. They will start rooting for you, they'll start cheering for you, and they'll start setting goals of their own. And that starts that culture of goal setting and achievement that you really want to create within your classroom, within your school, within your workplace, those are the ways to make real, lasting change happen. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: 100%. And then things like in computer science, making a goal to code at least 10 minutes a day for 6th graders, having these regular check in with the kids on their progress. Did you achieved your goals? Or if you made this version of rock, paper, scissors, what is it going to be at the end of nine weeks? What can you do to add it? So some things that we do in an advisory program, social emotional learning, is implement journaling. I love the tick method because kids don't really like to write, so being able to tick the days or put a calendar in front of them. But journaling is a really good way to record and track and reflect. When I was working in the IB system with the NYP middle years program, with the International Baccalaureate IB, there was a lot of reflection, and I love this. During design technology, when we were going through iterations of a product, whether it was a website, an app, or even just building out a logo for ourselves or something, we would have this goal of where we wanted to be at the end of the unit, the six week unit, and we would constantly reflect on where we got and that journaling is that tangible piece that we have in order to say, yeah, this is where we are. Whether it's turning into a teacher or just for ourselves. And it's just that regular check in, regular encouragement, regular place where we can say, oh, we're not meeting that goal, or we need to tweak it, or we might need to adjust our time frame. And it's that frequent monitoring that really helps us to accomplish goals. Sean Tibor: Yeah, that's critical, because when you set a goal, if it's a big goal, not just making your bed every day for 90 days or six months, or I'm going to go run a marathon, you need to have something, checkpoints, regular reviews of your progress, what's working well, what's not working well, what are you going to start doing to help you reach that goal? What are you going to stop doing? What are you going to continue doing? So those sorts of regular check ins are really important. I wanted to bring up two other things. I know we're a little bit long, but what I wanted to say was this. I love the idea of setting a goal and a stretch goal. So sometimes the stretch goal is where you start. Sometimes it's the regular goal. But the idea is that I've got something that if I accomplish my goal, I will have satisfied the requirements, whatever they are, for myself. That's my goal. If I get there, I will be very happy and very pleased with myself. My stretch goal is two steps. Beyond that. It's the next level. It's the, wow, I really knocked it out of the park. So your goal might be, I'm going to finish this marathon. Your stretch goal might be, I'm going to finish it in under 4 hours. So if you finish the marathon, you've achieved a goal and you can feel really good about accomplishing that. If you finish it under 4 hours, you feel fantastic. But you also aren't going to be disappointed in yourself if you go in at 405 because you still finished the marathon, that was still your goal. So I love this idea of a regular goal and a stretch goal and making sure that they're both realistic and achievable. So they're still smart goals, but you're not going to beat yourself up if you don't hit that stretch goal. The second thing that I wanted to bring up was setting real, meaningful change. Those transformative goals, the ones that change yourself or change others or change a culture, require a tremendous amount of patience and persistence and perseverance, like the three p's of getting it done right. Big changes happen slowly. They require time and patience and effort and initiative. You see this all the time in health and fitness. People are like, I'm on the cabbage soup diet. I don't even know what that is, but it sounds like you're going to fail at it because you're going to do it, you're going to lose a lot of weight, you're going to feel great about yourself. And then the second you stop eating cabbage soup, you're going to lose all of that progress that you made. Real change. Change happens slowly. It takes time, it takes patience, it takes perseverance. And when you set goals like that are transformative, be realistic about how long it's going to take and be patient with yourself to get there over time. Right now I'm trying to get myself into better shape and be healthier and be more active over time. My goal is going to take me years, and that's okay because the process of getting there is what makes the change and the transformation last and stay. So if you're making a big change and making a big goal, make it happen slowly, don't try to make it happen fast. And that way you'll be able to hold on to it and maintain it more permanently than you ever have before. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: Yeah. Just to maybe sum it up a little bit, just about the benefits. I know as educators, it's one more thing to do in the class, one more thing. But to be honest, this is a huge part for me in my classroom for 6th graders, my goal for them, I have two goals, is as a growth mindset. It's always about the mind. And so we do a lot of focusing on how in nine weeks I can change their mindset. And again, this is my goal for them and we talk about their own goal setting. And then the other thing that I like to talk about with them is the idea of, you won't be necessarily a coder, a developer, if you don't want to be, but I do want you to understand coding. So I set two goals for them and we talk about how my goals are going to be different than their goals and just these added benefits. And I just want to go over the five just to review why it's so important. It really has improved outcomes for education, it's academic outcomes. There are some studies out there. One place I saw it was said 41% points, percentage points higher for improved learning. I don't know exactly if that's true, but there is an improved student learning when they have goals. There is an increased motivation. If you have them set a goal for themselves or even track their goals as a teacher, it's just getting them to get motivated a little bit more engagement it's almost like a gamification. Sean talked about it earlier about these critical life skills. These are skills that are transformative and go into the adulthood. It's working towards something. It's time management, it's resilience, it's problem solving. It's being able to have this self discipline, and that's something that we want for every child. And obviously, as adults, we need to be more disciplined, too. The ability to advocate and have self efficacy, it's setting their own goals, tackling challenges, growth mindset, which is funny because that's my goal, but it also has the benefit of adding to this growth mindset when they come into a new classroom every nine weeks, the wheel, I want them to have this direction, this purpose for when they're coming into my classroom. So helping them do a goal for that short nine weeks is really a positive benefit for our new coders. Sean Tibor: This all leads to probably the best benefit of goal setting, which is that if you've been listening to this and you're having that sense of, oh, man, one more thing. I have to do more stuff. I have to do more and more and more. Goal setting is about doing less. When you truly master it, goal setting is about doing less because it gives you the empowerment, the confidence and the discipline and the focus of what you're trying to accomplish, to be able to say no to things that don't help you achieve that goal. So if you have these goals well set and they are well defined and clear, that empowers you to be able to say, no, I'm not going to do that. That sounds like a great idea and it sounds like a lot of fun, but it doesn't get me to my goal, so I'm not going to do it. So if you set goals well, it means that you can do less and achieve more. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: I like doing less. Sean Tibor: Who doesn't? Because it just filters. It filters out all of the noise and leaves you with this signal that's pure and clean about. I am focused on my goals. I'm going to accomplish them. I'm going to help others accomplish their goals because their goals line up with mine. And that gets you to a place where you are able to feel like you are accomplishing more. You're more successful with the effort that you put into the work that you're doing because it all lines up against something big and important and meaningful to you. And that is the gift of setting goals 100%. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: Do you want to hear my goal? Sean Tibor: Yes. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: It's been very hard, but I feel very accomplished and I'm getting more done. So my goal this year was not to do too much schoolwork at home and spend a little less time socializing for about an hour at school and working really hard to get all my emails and my grading. It is a little stressful because on the weekend I'm like, oh, if I could just do this Sunday work for 2 hours, I would get all my stuff graded. But I know if I take that solid hour at work and I focus only on grading for an hour, I won't have to take it home. It's been a game changer. I get more done on the weekend. I spend a lot more time with the kids. I go to the gym, and I actually do a little bit of coding for my own. I don't even code for the kids. So it's been a great goal for me. Sean Tibor: See? Do less, accomplish more. It really does work. My goal this year, we have a business goal of getting a lot more workloads, computers, servers, computational stuff, storage data onto this beautiful platform that we've built. So my goal I can't share because it's all business confidential crap and everything. But my goal is big. It's ambitious. I've got a team that is excited to do it. I have no idea how we're going to actually get there yet, but we're taking steps. We're breaking that down into the smaller parts and figuring out how we're going to get there. And it is both a little bit stress inducing because you're going through that process of trying to figure it out. But it's also really exciting because I feel like this goal is going to get us to the place where we can see the fruits of all of the hard work we've put in over the last two years, when all of this is working and running smooth and doing well, and we're going to take things to a new and exciting place. And I love that. I'm excited about it, and I'm excited about the fact that I've got this great team that's working together to do it. It's a really nice place to be. We just have to go do the work now. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: Go do the work. Sean Tibor: Exactly. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: Well, that was great. Not 15 minutes, but that was fun. And thanks for sharing your quick tip bites. Sean Tibor: Yeah, this is super important for Everybody. I love being able to do this, and I'm really curious to see what other people think, too. So if you've got ideas, send it to us at our website at teachingpython FM. You can always connect with us on Twitter or on mastodon. Kelly's on LinkedIn all the time. She's doing a great job of our social media over there, so send her a connection request. Follow our pages, go to our Patreon. If you want to contribute to the show, just get involved. Get your voice out there. What goals do you have this year? Make them public. Share them with us. Let's inspire each other to do less and accomplish more. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: 100%. And let's not forget, Pycon is coming up in May. The education summit is on the Thursday, May 16. Is that correct? Sean Tibor: I don't know off the top of my head, but it sounds right. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: Sean and I are co hosting again with the help of everyone at the education summit and PSF. And the website asking for submissions for talks is posted. We're looking forward. I think we're both going to be there this year, which is exciting. Sean Tibor: I'm really excited about that. And it's going to be in Pittsburgh, which will be a lot of fun. Way more than it sounds like on the surface. Just trust me, Pittsburgh is a great city and I'm really excited that Pycon will be there. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: This cool. All right. Sean Tibor: All right. So for teaching Python, this is Sean. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: And this is Kelly signing off. Close.