Group Goal Setting Activities:
An Approach from Youth Service Corps

PECE Resources and Planning Guide, Philadelphia

This article is excerpted from Chapter 3 of the PECE Resource and Planning Guide. PECE, Practical Education for Citizenship and Employment, is the name of the education component developed for the Urban Corps Expansion Project (UCEP), a three-year demonstration project designed by Public/Private Ventures, Inc. of Philadelphia.

UCEP is a combination community service/education model now operating at 11 sites nationwide. Each autonomous program serves 50-100 youths, aged 17-23, who are unemployed and out of school. Approximately seventy-five percent do not have diplomas or GEDs.

Corpsmembers (as program participants are referred to) are given paid employment in human services and community service projects, such as rehabbing buildings for non-profit developers, in addition to the program’s educational component.

The manual from which this chapter is taken has been written to be useful outside the urban youth service corps, such as in summer jobs programs. It is written for trainers and educators.

Chapter 3 focuses on setting goals and creating learning plans. In this volume of Adventures in Assessment, we focus on group goal-setting. In the next volume, we will continue the part of the chapter which discusses individual goal setting.

The process of setting goals and planning steps to achieve them is ongoing throughout each corpsmem-ber’s experience in the program. The way you begin this process with new corpsmembers has a special importance. Many of the young adults who enter the corps are burdened with a history of failure in school and a sense of education as something that has been imposed on them.

But most also enter with the motivation to change their lives. Your early goal-setting activities are an opportunity to build on this motivation and help corpsmembers begin to redraw their image of themselves as learners and to rethink what learning is all about. Through these activities, corpsmembers should discover that they are responsible for defining where they want to go and what they have to do to get there — and that you are going to support them.

Setting Goals
Goal setting is really an exercise in problem solving. Corpsmembers have to learn to ask — and try to answer — a series of questions that enable them to define their choices and decide how to get where they want to go. Most simply the questions are: What are my goals? What must I do to reach my goals? To answer these, corpsmembers must work through a series of more precise questions:

• Where do I want to be in five years (or four weeks, or six months, or ten years)?
• What must I know to get there?
• What steps must I take in order to know and be able to do these things?
• What abilities and experience do I already have that are going to help me take these steps?
• What obstacles might be in my way?
• How can I deal with those obstacles?
• What should I do first, second and so on?
  

These are tough questions for anyone to answer: adults, young adults, college students, at-risk youth. But they are also essential questions to the goal-setting process, which involves defining needs, evaluating one’s own strengths and weaknesses, and planning and carrying out strategies.

Group Activities
Goal setting activities that take place in groups during orientation or in the beginning of a program should help corpsmembers identify broad, long-term needs and begin to see them in relation to what they can accomplish in the corps. In almost every case, corps-members will end up with a product — a questionnaire, a story, a timeline, a goal chart — that should be placed in their portfolio, where it can be used as a starting point for developing personal learning plans during your one-on-one meetings.

The group activities lay the foundation for the next step in the process, when corpsmembers more precisely define their goals in the corps: in life skills (employment, community participation, personal development), work, and personal academics.

The group activities are:

Option #1: Thinking about Learning. Corpsmembers explore their past experiences with education and start to define their learning needs.

Option #2: Guest Speaker. A speaker from outside the corps discusses his or her experiences overcoming obstacles and achieving goals.

Option #3: Goals Questionnaire. Corpsmembers identify reasons they joined the corps and, in the process, think about potential goals they might not have previously considered.

Option #4: Creating a Future. Corps-members make a collage or write a story that describes a potential future for themselves.

Option #5: A Timeline. Corpsmembers create a timeline in order to be more specific about their goals and begin to see the relationship between short- and long-term goals.

Option #6: Goal-Setting Chart. In this follow-up activity to the timeline, corpsmembers look at the relationship between what they can accomplish in the corps and their longer-term goals.

Option #7: Returning to the Corps 10 Years Later. In another way of looking at their long-term goals, corpsmembers imagine themselves 10 years in the future, returning to the Corps either for a reunion or as a guest speaker.
[Editor’s note: this excerpt includes Activities 1, 2, 5 & 7.]

Group Goal Setting Activities
Option #1:
Thinking About Learning

This activity allows corpsmembers to explore their past experiences with education: what they remember as positive and negative learning experiences and how they learn best. Corpsmembers also explore their own learning needs: what makes learning comfortable and what makes learning uncomfortable (and, therefore, difficult).

Materials: Photographs and illustrations, readings, newsprint.

1. Start by having corpsmembers look at a variety of pictures of people learning something in school and in other settings (especially work). Include people who are happy, miserable, young and old. Have corpsmembers describe the pictures, then talk about the memories they evoke.

2. Read aloud a few excerpts from descriptions that people have written about their experiences learning and in school. After each excerpt, let corpsmembers discuss what they have heard: How does it connect with their own experiences? Encourage corpsmember to tell their own stories.

3. Divide the corpsmembers into two groups, and ask one group to make a list of phrases that could complete the fragment “It’s easy to learn when.....” Ask the other group to complete “It’s hard to learn when....” When both groups are done, have volunteers copy the groups responses onto newsprint. Here are some possible responses:

It’s easy to learn when:
The teacher is good.
We pay attention.
People aren’t making fun of each other.
We know why we are learning something.
We understand what’s going on.

It’s hard to learn when:
The teacher talks too much.
People laugh at you.
We don’t understand.
We have other things on our mind.
The teacher thinks we’re stupid.

4. Follow up these lists by having the whole group discuss some items more specifically. With the items here, for example, you can ask what makes a good teacher, what makes it hard to understand something, or what they can do to have a group where people aren't making fun of each other. If the corpsmembers have begun keeping journals, suggest possible journal topics. For example:

• An experience (in school or on the job) where they felt good about learning something: What did they learn? Why did it make them feel so good?
• A description of someone from whom they learned (a teacher, an employer, a coworker, anyone).
• A description of a time when someone learned something from them.
• An experience at school or work that made it hard for them to learn.

You might want to allow time for corpsmembers to write during the activity. Then those who want to can read their pieces aloud.
[Adapted from Andy Nash in Elsa Auerbach, Making Meaning, Making Change: A Guide to Participatory Curriculum Development for Adult ESL and Family Literacy. University of Massachusetts English Family Literacy Project, Boston, 1990]

Group Goal-Setting Activities
Option #2:
Guest Speaker

This activity helps corpsmembers think about the process of setting and achieving goals by listening to someone else speak about his or her experience. The speaker should be someone the corpsmembers can see as a role model.

1. Invite a guest speaker from the community who has “made it”: who has set and achieved goals for herself or himself. Prepare the guest speaker by giving him/her some background about the corps’s goals, and some idea where the corpsmembers are in their own goal setting process. Ask the speaker to talk about his or her own goal setting process and strategies: the goals that he or she has set (and why), the steps needed to achieve those goals, the difficulties encountered and how he or she overcame the difficulties. The speaker may be able to include comments on values, self esteem, sex-role stereotypes, and decision making as well as goal setting.

2. Let corpsmembers know in advance that there will be a speaker and what he/she will be talking about. Corpsmembers should have a sense of what to listen for and how the topic relates to their own lives. They should also think about questions they might want to ask.

3. After the presentation, allow time for discussion and questions from corpsmembers.

Group Goal-Setting Activities
Option #5:
A Timeline

This activity encourages corpsmembers to become more specific about their goals and begin to see the relationship between short-term and long-term goals.

Materials: Newsprint (for you to draw your timeline on as you model the steps in this activity), paper, pens or pencils.

1. Have corpsmembers draw the first part of their timelines: from birth to present. They should write in dates and major events that have happened in their lives (you will want to model this and the next two steps on newsprint).

2. Now have the corpsmember extend their timelines two years into the future and write in events they want to make happen in those years (this will include in and beyond the corps, such as earning their GED, graduating from the corps, joining the Army, getting married, starting college, getting job training, buying a car, etc.).

3. Finally, have them extend their timelines to reach about ten more years into the future. Ask them to add the events they would like to experience during this period (they might include such goals as living in a place of their own, getting promoted, earning a college degree, taking a trip, getting married, etc.).

4. Corpsmembers may want to display their timelines in the room or hold them up to share with the group. Stimulate discussion by asking questions like the following:

How much control do people have over what happens in the early years of their lives —up to age 10 for example? What about during the second ten years: do we get to set goals for ourselves and work toward them in our teen years? What about when we’re in our 20s or 30s?

What connections do you see between your goals in the next two years and your goals for the ten years after that?

Group Goal-Setting Activities
Option #7:
Returning to the Corps Ten Years Later

This activity provides another way for corpsmembers to think about their long-term goals: by imagining themselves ten years in the future, returning to the corps either for a reunion or as a guest speaker. In the first scenario, corpsmembers fill out a questionnaire; in the second scenario, they prepare a short speech, which they can present to the rest of the group. Allow corpsmembers to select the choice they feel more comfortable with.

A. Corps Reunion: It’s been ten years since you were in the corps, and now you’ve been invited back for a reunion. The corps has sent you a questionnaire to fill out about what you’re doing now. They are going to make all of the questionnaires into a booklet, which they will give to everyone that comes to the reunion.
1. I am years old. (Remember, this is ten years into the future.)
2. My job is:
3. My responsibilities at work include:
4. After I left the corps, I prepared for this job by:
5. My family responsibilities are:
6. My most important personal possessions are:
7. Of my experiences in the last ten years, these have been the best ones:

B. Returning to the corps as a guest speaker: You’ve worked hard and been a big success since you graduated from the corps ten years ago. Now the corps director has invited you back to speak to corpsmembers about how you set and achieved your goals.

She/he asks you to talk about what you have done in the ten years since you graduated.
You want to write down notes to prepare your talk and this is how you organize them:

• The goals I set for myself and the work I'm doing now:
• The steps I took to achieve my goals:
• Difficulties I encountered:
• Things I did to overcome those difficulties:
• My goals for the future and how I plan to achieve them:

Write down the notes for your talk. Then, if you wish, give the talk to other people in your group.

Originally published in Adventures in Assessment, Volume 4 (April 1993),
SABES/World Education, Boston, MA, Copyright 2003.

Funding support for the publication of this document on the Web provided in part by the Ohio State Literacy Resource Center as part of the LINCS Assessment Special Collection.