Aiming High Step 6

Outcomes

To achieve Step 6, learners will be able to think about goals based on wider needs, not just their own personal development. 

In the previous step, the focus was on learners setting goals for themselves. By nature, these were primarily focused on learners’ own personal development. The shift here is to think about the needs of their organisations or their teams too.

Learners need to be able to:

• Identify the needs of others, including their team or community

• Build these needs into the development of goals

Introduction

• When we set goals, we also need to think about what else is going on – not just what is important to us but to others as well.

• These might include:

  • Other individuals – whether relatives, friends, teachers or students in education.

  • Our teams – perhaps we are part of a group which has shared goals. In education, that might be a learning group or a class. 

  • Our organisations – most of us are part of organisations which have goals – although some might be more clearly expressed than others. In education, that probably means a school, college or university. More widely, that might be our town or city, or other groups we are part of like religious groups.

• We are all connected to lots of other people in these ways, and so we should think about what our contribution should be to the goals these other groups might have.

Teach & Apply

• As we think of our part in ever bigger groups of people, we have to be realistic about what part we can play. 

• There are several ways we can build others’ needs into our goals:

  • Create a goal that is directly about helping someone else.

  • Share a goal with someone else. Some goals might need to be shared – for example, in a sports team you might have a shared goal with another defender not to let in more than one goal in each match. You both need each other to achieve this goal.

  • Take on part of a bigger goal. For bigger goals, perhaps of a team, you might need to take part of that goal and focus on that. If each person does this, then the different parts of your efforts might all add up to overall success.

  • Align your goals with a bigger goal. In an organisation, sometimes goals are massive so we want to make sure ours lines up to the goal and aren’t in conflict with the wider mission.

Reflection & Assessment

Embed these strategies across your teaching and coaching to help learners apply what they’ve learnt.

• This step can be reinforced through group work exercises or a shared project. Learners could also be asked to reflect on the learning goals of the team, and how they can align their individual goals with those bigger learning goals.

Use these ideas for ways of assessing this skill step to help you check learners’ understanding and confidence.

• This step can be assessed through a worked exercise, where they can be given different scenarios of groups they belong to and asked to consider how they can contribute to the goals of those groups.

• Ask these reflective questions:

  • How can you identify the needs of other people?

  • How can you create goals based on the needs of others?

  • Can you give any examples of when you have done this?