How to help your students hit their goals with Atomi

Want to engage your students more deeply in their learning? Here’s why goal setting can be a powerful tool to boost motivation, increase focus and drive stronger academic performance across entire classrooms, cohorts and departments. 

Students are navigating immense amounts of changes during their high school years. Personally, they’re learning more about themselves, their values and what they care about. Academically, they’re exploring their passions and interests and setting themselves up for life after school.

One of the best ways to help students see the connection between their lessons and the real world is to encourage goal setting. Educators are familiar with taking a goal-focused approach to lessons.

But goal setting isn’t just helpful when planning lessons as an educator. In fact, goal setting is a skill every teacher should be helping their students to foster. From subject-specific goals to holistic academic goals, it’s time to discover the benefits of goal setting and practical ways to support your learners to set goals they’ll reach. 

In this article, we’ll explore:

• The benefits of goal setting 
• 5 practical ways to help students set effective goals
  

- Follow the SMART Goals framework
- Encourage students to engage in the goal setting process
- Provide timely feedback, encouragement and support 
- Acknowledge and celebrate the wins
- Leverage Atomi’s goal-focused teaching and learning platform

What are the benefits of goal setting?

Academic success comes from strategic, consistent action. Staying engaged in the classroom and regularly revising coursework is a lot easier if students know what they’re working toward. And that’s where goal setting comes in.

With clear learning intentions and academic goals mapped out, students are more likely to push through challenges, overcome learning obstacles and engage with content until they achieve mastery. Plus, it makes things like classroom management a whole lot easier for educators, too.

For students, goal setting can be a hard concept to understand. But bringing goal setting back to something they’re interested in, such as the goals set by their favourite sports players or actors, can help learners understand why they’d set a goal and the benefits of being held accountable to it.
- Sarah-Eleni Zaferis, Teacher and School Enablement Leader at Atomi

For educators, helping students to set goals has a raft of benefits, including:

• Increased motivation: Goals provide students with a sense of purpose and direction in their learning. When encountering difficult concepts or learning challenges, students can return to their big-picture goals to find renewed motivation and perseverance.
  
• Improved focus: Beating distractions and figuring out what to prioritise is a lot easier when students have clear learning goals mapped out. Plus, the act of goal setting helps learners foster important metacognitive skills, such as learning how to self-reflect on their efforts and monitor their progress towards their goals.
  
• Enhanced learning outcomes: With clear goals guiding students’ actions, it’s not hard to see why the process of goal setting can lead to a boost in academic achievement as well as a deeper understanding of concepts and topics covered in the classroom.
  
• Increased self-efficacy: Plus, goal setting helps students to build confidence in their own abilities. With a more positive outlook on their potential, students are more likely to push themselves further in their learning and see the rewards of their efforts. 

But the key to effective goal setting is ensuring students are setting achievable goals. This means ensuring students are using their past marks to inform the targets they’re setting themselves, ensuring any improvement goals are realistic and attainable within the timeframe they’ve set themselves. 

5 practical ways to help students set effective goals

As an educator, you have a big role to play in enabling your students to set and reach their goals. Below, we break down five practical strategies you can draw on to help your students achieve their learning and academic goals. 

Tip 1. Follow the SMART Goals framework

You’ll likely already be well-versed in the SMART Goals framework. It’s a goal-setting strategy designed to help your students create Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Time-Bound goals. 

No matter what department or year group you teach, setting SMART goals ensures your learners are putting themselves in the best position to improve their academic performance. 

Ready to help your students set SMART goals? Here’s an example of a SMART goal in action:

• Learning Objective: To boost reading comprehension
• SMART goal:
  

- Specific: To read moderately complex texts with accuracy and confidence 
- Measurable: Read 12 moderately complex texts in Term One
- Achievable: Read at least one text per week
- Relevant: Ensure these texts are on my assigned reading list for Term One
- Time-bound: Complete all 12 texts by the last week of Term One 

Atomi Tip: Use our free SMART Goals worksheet in conjunction with the Atomi Setting Goals video series to set your students up for success in the term or year ahead. 

Tip 2. Encourage students to engage in the goal-setting process

One of the best ways to get students to ‘buy-in’ to the goal-setting process is to bring them on the journey. By encouraging learners to set goals that matter to them, they’ll be much more inclined to persevere and push through challenges, too. 

Rather than setting too many daily or weekly goals, start by helping students set a holistic academic goal for the year. From there, you can help them break that goal down into daily actions they need to take to get 1% better or closer to achieving their goal.”
- Sarah-Eleni Zaferis, Teacher and School Enablement Leader at Atomi

So, how do you do it? At a whole class level, running discussions, group activities and brainstorming sessions can help your students understand the importance of goal setting. Plus, giving learners the opportunity to complete individual goal-setting activities ensures these goals are aligned with the learning outcomes students care about. 

Atomi Tip: Use Atomi’s Study Skills lesson on how to write useful goals as a handy starting point to support your students in setting and reaching their goals. 

Tip 3. Provide timely feedback, encouragement and support

Student’s progress isn’t static. Over time, their learning goals and objectives should evolve based on how they’re performing and what new challenges they’re encountering. 

But with regular review checkpoints, students can continually check-in on their progress and make adjustments along the way. As an educator, it’s important to provide feedback on how students are progressing and make constructive suggestions on how they can improve. 

Make sure students are encouraged to meaningfully engage with their goals on a regular basis by asking open-ended questions such as ‘Who has made a decision that’s in line with their goal today?’”
- Sarah-Eleni Zaferis, Teacher and School Enablement Leader at Atomi

Plus, if students are struggling with particular subjects or topics, it’s important to offer tailored revision resources that can keep them progressing towards their academic goals. 

Tip 4. Acknowledge and celebrate the wins 

Positive reinforcement can be a game changer for students, particularly if they’ve just overcome a major learning challenge. No matter how big or small, every win should be celebrated and acknowledged in your classroom. 

Creating a positive, supportive learning environment ensures students feel valued and supported. Plus, praise and acknowledgement can be a motivational tool to keep students engaged in future lessons, too. 

Atomi Tip: Find creative ways to celebrate your student’s goal-setting wins at a whole-class level. Consider using boards to shout out a ‘learner of the week’ or praise learners who have achieved their learning goal during a dedicated goal-setting check-in time. 

Tip 5. Leverage Atomi’s goal-focused teaching and learning platform 

At Atomi, every part of our teaching and learning platform is designed to help students reach their full potential. In fact, goal setting is a core component of our content to ensure learners understand the link between their daily actions and their big-picture learning objectives. 

In practical terms, here are four ways Atomi makes it easier to prioritise goal-setting in your classroom:

• Build personalised learning pathways: Differentiating learning and revision material is easy with Atomi. Not only can you set tailored revision resources for your learners, but students can easily find videos and content about the exact topics that matter to them (and their goals).
  
• Share interactive learning activities: Reading a chapter of a textbook might help some learners grasp a new concept. But for many learners, a short, sharp explainer video will be more likely to keep them engaged with a complex topic. On Atomi, you can help students stay motivated with engaging content tailored to their learning goals.
  
• Access progress tracking: Keeping tabs on how students are progressing has never been easier, thanks to Atomi’s real-time reporting features. At an individual or whole class level, you can easily assess if students are grasping new concepts and hitting their own learning objectives. ‍
• Make data-driven decisions: Speaking on reporting, Atomi’s data can give you the hard facts you need to better support learners. If a student (or even multiple class members) is finding a topic particularly challenging, you can assign tailored revision tasks and adjust your instructions accordingly.

For educators, the ability to set tasks and revision resources that are aligned to a student’s goals is a game changer. From revision reminders to instant feedback, Atomi’s platform ensures students have the support they need to reach their goals, even when educators aren’t in the room.
- Sarah-Eleni Zaferis, Teacher and School Enablement Leader at Atomi

Ready to help your students reach their potential in 2025? 

Goal setting is a powerful tool to help students stay focused, overcome learning challenges and boost their academic performance. 

Want to learn more about how Atomi can support you in delivering tailored, personalised learning experiences? Get in touch with us and request a demo.