13 Nov 2019
“The trouble with not having a goal is that you can spend your life running up and down the field and never score.”
—Bill Copeland
Like any aspect of life, you need to train your muscles and practice with regularity to succeed, preferably before the big game kicks off. Practiced goal setting, means you understand that long term success is accomplished through setting and attaining smaller, enabling goals that support your long term goals. To that end, Quakers Hill High School embarked upon a coordinated goal-setting program for our students in 2018, with a school wide roll-out of Goalhub in 2019. Our mission, is to equip our students with the capacity to think critically about what they want to accomplish in their lives; be it a career in competitive gaming, becoming a special needs child care worker, mastering a triple pirouette on demi-point, or speaking to a family member overseas in Spanish for 2 full minutes!
The core of this seemingly simple task, is the self-reflection and awareness that it demands. Students need to understand what they value, the need to envision the person they want to become and the life they want to lead. They need to understand their talents and unique skill sets and perhaps identify areas of potential development. They also need to learn that goals change, as they change, that so long as they’re heading somewhere with purpose, they have a meaningful trajectory. All weighty considerations for relatively young people, sometimes addressed on a drawn out Friday afternoon, with the promise of the weekend in the air. (Oh the challenges!)
Goalhub, our vehicle to accomplish this objective, enables our staff to better understand their students, and ultimately connect them to relevant experiences which enrich, inspire and motivate them in their lives. We endeavour to provide students with ongoing coaching, challenging them to qualify an idea, to flesh out a process, to think in a more measurable and concrete manner or push themselves to imagine the bigger picture, with them front and centre. This is a program that we intend to be a catalyst for pastoral care initiatives and will be engaging with for years to come.
On a practical level, students will reconnect with the program during school time each term, to set new goals and reflect on their previous objectives. They also have the ability, and are encouraged, to look at it and address their goals in their own time; all students have a unique login and password. If students are having trouble remembering their password, there is an ‘I forgot my password’ option on the Goalhub website. Password reset details are sent to your school email.
We encourage you take this opportunity to talk your children and see where they are on their goal setting journey. You may just find that you’ll have a new pet being added to the family just in time for Christmas (just giving you the heads up there), or that you’ve been recruited to proof read their resume, transport them to a driving test or asked to support a burgeoning babysitting, lawn mowing or photography business for an up and coming entrepreneur. The diversity of endeavours is truly inspiring.
Melissa Lachevre
Goalhub Facilitator
