Helping Your Students Set Healthy Goals

January 08, 2022

At the start of the new year, most people set goals or make resolutions for themselves so why not help or encourage your students to do so as well? Setting goals helps students get in the habit of striving for self-improvement and planning to create the future they imagine for themselves.

Below you will find various healthy new year’s goal-setting activities (for January or the new school year) that will help get your students planning and growing!
 

Vision Boards will Promote a Growth Mindset and Goal Setting all Year
As you try to teach your students to never give up, to keep going despite the many hardships and setbacks they may face - creating a vision board and encouraging them to display it somewhere that they can see it daily is an excellent reminder to help them stay focused on what they want to work toward in life. They will be constantly reminded of why they are doing the things they do every day and the pride and happiness that will come as a result.

There are tons of free Vision Boards available online for printing at no cost but feel free to use this one to help you get started. 
 

Help Students Self-Reflect 
With all of the excitement of the holiday season, it’s easy for students to forget all of the good habits they worked hard to develop. So when class resumes back after the holiday break, take time to review class expectations, routines, procedures, and help students set goals for the new year. It’s so important for students to see the value of goal setting and reflection.

Check out this New Year’s Goal Setting Worksheet to help you get started.

Remind Students to Think Positively
As students return from break, instructors/coaches/teachers often hope their students come back refreshed, revived, and excited. Because it is a new year and a fresh start for some, it’s important to review positive mindset and positive decision-making. Sometimes as the year progresses, our students begin to lose their positive thinking, and this is a perfect time of year to review this! 

A great way to cultivate a positive mindset in your classroom is by displaying inspiring and motivational posters. Having the posters on display makes it easy to refer to these posters when your students are hard on themselves or have negative thoughts about their abilities.

Motivational posters are certainly easy to come by online but feel free to use these if you’d like.

Overall, goal setting is a really great way to encourage and help motivate students to be successful throughout the year, and we hope these goal-setting activities will help you help your students achieve what they set out to accomplish.