Remember the times when you had promised yourself that you would start exam preparations earlier, but somehow ended up cramming at the last minute. That is probably the reason why most of us do not recall many things that we learned in our school. Wish you had invested more time and effort into making meaningful resolutions that could help you achieve better results. Although you might not still be at school, your child now has the opportunity to do what you couldn’t do earlier.
While everyone understands the importance of setting goals and promises to oneself, especially around the time of New Year, most people find it hard to follow up or stick to them until they are achieved. So, we thought it would be best for us to participate in the resolution-making activity, helping them assess their skills, identify what they want to improve and guide them to discover the extraordinary.
One of the main goals of this kind of activity is to give students a better understanding of things that they have control over in their lives right now. The idea of having meaningful resolutions is to empower the students to take ownership of their choices and start implementing big changes in the particular aspects of life that they want to improve. Students and teachers discussing resolutions in the class would expose them to a broad range of possibilities and help them figure out what they want for themselves.
So, we spent some time looking at the kinds of resolutions everyone wanted to make. It allowed both students to brainstorm a list of possible resolutions and divide them into different categories. Generally, for middle and high school students, the list often includes categories such as academic resolutions, health resolutions, and personal growth resolutions. While some examples of academic resolutions include setting up a homework routine, keeping things organised, and stopping procrastinating, personal growth resolutions are often set for learning a new skill or hobby. Health resolutions are about making healthy lifestyle choices like eating less junk food, getting better sleep, and exercising more.
One of the reasons why resolutions fail is because they are often not specific nor backed by measurable actions. For instance, if a student resolves to “improve a skill” without specifying the goals or how to, that’s hard to measure and track. With a broad resolution, it is easy to drop it soon since there is no clarity. So, as teachers, we can teach them how to turn a vague resolution like “stop procrastinating” into something a more specific or measurable goal like “complete a certain activity within a specific period of time”. Introducing students to the concept of SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound) goals has helped them improve student performance and achievement.
In the case of a resolution that is more complex like, “learn a new skill”, students might not know how to go about them. We encourage them to visualise what the success of that resolution might look like and then have them break down that long-term goal into small, attainable ones. For example, if the long-term goal is to learn drawing, they need to first set a deadline for covering the basics. Here, it is important to have them create a list of particular things which they need to complete by a specific time – basically, a checklist for the year.
Students are then reminded that they have a greater chance of fulfilling their goals if they keep track of their progress in some way. Because they have different goals, there are unique approaches to tracking them as well. While certain goals which need frequent changes require a daily record, a milestone tracker is something that can be used for long-term goals.
At Vishwajyot, we don’t stop at making resolutions. We assign time to check in on the progress of these individual goals as well. During these reflection times, we have the students consider how their plans are going, what factors are getting in their way, and what changes can be implemented to achieve the results. Our goal is to make each student reach the milestone of completing their goal as we know the significant impact of these resolutions on the quality of their lives.
