Professional Learning Goals for Teachers (Why They're Important)

Headlines about teaching as a career have taken on an urgent tone of late. The RAND Corporation proclaims that “Education Turnover Has Markedly Increased,” while Chalkbeat counters with “Teacher Turnover Hits New Highs.” McKinsey and Company asks: “K-12 educators are quitting. What would make them stay?”

How can we retain high-performing educators? Finding an answer requires understanding what’s driving stress and professional disengagement in teaching to unprecedented levels. Teachers and administrators today are being asked to do more with less, at a time of sweeping post-pandemic regulatory and cultural change.

The team at MobileMind, a provider of professional development solutions for school districts, believes that technology can play a role in helping reorient teachers and their districts toward the sense of purpose that drew them to the field in the first place.

The key to leveraging PD for teacher retention and student outcomes is rallying around professional learning goals. This provides a pathway to career advancement and teacher satisfaction, influencing their decisions to stay in the classroom.

Here’s why goals are essential and how MobileMind can help by providing self-paced, personalized, competency-based learning for teachers.

Personal Learning Goals for Building New Classroom Skills

The best teachers encourage students to take control of their learning by encouraging them to set clear and achievable personal learning goals. These help provide connections to the material and motivation to achieve.

They also work the same way for teachers. With clear professional learning goals, teachers can focus on improving their skills, both in the classroom and out, and position themselves for career advancement.

Ever-evolving technology, curricula, and state and federal regulations mean an endless supply of new topics for learning. One of the main areas of focus for most teachers is staying on top of new and different technology tools, both for staying organized and for engaging with students. Developing new technology skills also helps teachers toward their future career goals. Studies have shown that goal setting has other positive impacts, such as greater resilience to burnout and creating an environment where it’s okay to ask for help.

MobileMind enables teachers and districts to work together to develop learning experiences that will bring these benefits to bear. These goals will help districts better understand what teachers want from professional development.

The MobileMind professional learning hub delivers personalized professional development opportunities that teachers can leverage anytime, anywhere. Personalized learning goals represent one of the main inputs that can help set districts and their teachers on the road to professional development success.

Gaining Direction and Purpose through Goal Setting

Keeping up with day-to-day challenges can make it difficult for teachers to see into tomorrow’s lesson plan, much less something five and ten years in the future.

Professional learning goals serve as a forcing function, focusing teachers on the specific knowledge and skills that they believe will help them grow. This can take on myriad forms. For example, educators in the Alabaster City Schools in Alabama use MobileMind to help their teachers learn a new student information system at their own time and pace.

Effective goal-setting across teaching and administrative staff enables your district to align development priorities and activities to target areas. It steers your teams away from guesswork and emphasizes areas that need more focus.

Managing goal-setting and the development of learning opportunities is a crucial part of the MobileMind application. It enables PD coordinators to develop and administer competency-based micro-courses and personalized activity-based learning based on those learning goals.

The hub’s interface for learners simplifies the process of districts building content customized to their users. The topics are as varied as your staff, covering areas like instructional technology or curricular subjects.

The learning hub also enables districts to create tools for recognizing learning accomplishments that drive further motivation and stoke teachers’ competitive fires.

Having Professional Learning Goals as a Foundation for Measuring Success

If you don’t know the destination for professional development initiatives, you may not know when you arrive. Personal learning goals give districts and teachers logical targets for their PD efforts. The MobileMind system includes tools for analyzing which activities are working, and that helps provide insights for making them better.

With MobileMind’s digital badging and leaderboards, districts can quickly learn who has skill competencies and identify when levels of mastery emerge for their districts. These metrics can help you adjust goals based on what your teacher’s results are telling you.

As teachers become more advanced users, districts can focus on the needs of intermediate users. For those who struggle, courses can also be customized to help focus on areas for improvement.

MobileMind includes a digital badge studio that enables professional development coordinators to design badges in seconds and award them automatically as teachers complete designated learning activities.

Partner with MobileMind for Professional Development Success

Establishing professional learning goals empowers teachers to shape their futures while helping provide motivation, opportunities for recognition, and a baseline for measuring progress. Effective goal-setting reinforces for teachers why they got into the field in the first place and reassures them that they have agency in shaping their futures to the benefit of students and society.

Implementing a professional learning hub helps move teachers along the achievement curve. Let MobileMind provide the technology backbone that you need.

The MobileMind system helps replace disparate professional development tools while putting your teachers, staff, and leadership in charge of their learning journeys. Better still, they can access the offerings on the technology of their choice, whether it be a desktop, mobile phone, or tablet.

This easy access to job-relevant training, including access to micro-courses, can boost retention strategies while adding the potential for enhanced career satisfaction.

MobileMind’s micro courses offer bite-sized learning opportunities that take minutes to complete without leaving the classroom and offer better time management. Schedule a call with MobileMind or request a demo to help ease teacher workflow and retain top talent with improved professional learning opportunities!