To me, the most interesting thing that arose from the School-based Dyslexia Remediation 2.0 workshop was that students would be guided to do goal setting every week. Even if these low-progress students made incremental progress every week, the instructors recommended that goal-setting be done so that students would be reminded of their goal.
Student goal-setting will come in handy when SDR teachers do progress monitoring with their students at the end of each term. Progress monitoring is done on a 4-point Likert scale and comprises two aspects: oral reading fluency and comprehension strategies. A good benchmark to attain for Primary 4 students is to read 100 words per minute, so it’s easy for them to craft a SMART goal based on oral reading fluency.
As for comprehension strategies, let’s take *Click and Clunk* for example. If the teacher determines that his student has mastered it, he will give him a 4. However, when the teacher feels that the student has not mastered it adequately and needs to award him a 1 or 2, he can give a rating to each of the steps that make up Click and Clunk. If the student only garners 1 for *look for smaller words and prefixes/suffixes in the word*, the teacher can guide him to formulate a SMART goal: I aim to learn six prefixes/suffixes by the end of Term 2.
Students are encouraged to craft their SMART goals independently when they are up to it.
Besides progress monitoring, goal setting plays a part in helping the teacher plan a Differentiated Instruction lesson for his group of four students. During a DI lesson, he gives each student one-on-one time so that his charge can work towards achieving his SMART goal. As for the remaining three students, they can work on revising word cards or similar tasks on their own or in pairs.
To sum up, goal setting aims to help dyslexic students be more aware of their metacognitive processes and achieve more ownership of their learning.
Personally, I have always had trouble filling in the first criterion *I set targets/goals so that I know what I want to achieve* for the Habits of Mind assessment. Perhaps we could get students to formulate a SMART goal at the start of every unit as well as review it in the middle and at the end of a unit so that they can gain more agency. The SMART goal setting form at the end of the unit can be paired with the Visible Thinking Routine “I used to think…Now I think…” to see if students notice a discernible improvement in themselves in terms of knowledge, perception and attitude.
