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Short-term and Long-term Goals in Education

After stumbling across some articles on short-term and long-term goals in education. Taking into consideration what short really goes into creating a short term goal keeping in mind that short term means there is not much investment early on.  Often people compare this to a quick buck.  Ari Wallach mentions in his TED talk, 3 Ways To Plan for the (Very) Long Term, that many times we use a sandbag strategy where we prepare for problems over and over again like putting up sandbags for a storm but this is a temporary fix.  This can be exhausting.  Consider that long-term fix.

Long-term fixes are a process and need to be revisited often.  One of the Ways Ari Wallach approaches long-term goals that really resonated with me and I felt fit our current educational situation was that in which he called the Transgenerational Approach.  This would equate to not just looking from your birth to your death or the time in which you could "run the play" but more across generations.  What resonated with me the most was the idea that it is not easy to do. It's hard and it's time consuming just like integrating technology.  As well as you can not do this in isolation.  The issue I have with this idea is that technology is changing so often I am not sure how we would tackle a district plan to integrate technology across generations.  I feel that it changes so often and so quickly that this would not be a successful model.

One thing we can do to at least get an idea of the direction we need to go is by doing our "homework".  Collecting the right information from the right people.  Asking the right questions. This would certainly help in moving forward.  Another strategy that I gained from my research was from Robert W. Bradford, the President and CEO of Center for Simplified Strategic Planning, he recommends revising all long term goals every 3-6 months or at least each year.  He also recommended having shorter quarterly meetings with updates rather than lengthy meetings that don't change anything.  Also, he suggested brainstorming and predicted what 2-3 outcomes could come of the plan you have in place.  Than plan scenarios for each of those outcomes so you are best prepared moving forward.

I think all of these strategies are helpful moving forward in my room with the strategic planning committee in my school district as well as I work on some long range projects of my own within the district.

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