Letter

Affirmation for Pre-Goal Setting

Anne Marie DeMartino
Westfield State College

I would like to thank Don Robishaw for his insights presented in “The
Case for Pre-Goal Setting” article in Volume 5 of Adventures in Assessment. More specifically, I appreciated the reminder about not assuming our learners will proceed and succeed through schooling as we did. I also valued the placement of goal-setting strategies within the context of the greater philosophy of self-directed learning. Seeing it within its larger context helps me to reaffirm its value as an empowering tool within my classrooms.

I would like to admit that this article led me to think about goal-setting as a “middle class phenomena” in ways I had not previously. As an ESL teacher, I have had many experiences where my more “middle-class”, “linear, future-oriented, individualistic” approach has not facilitated true communication and understanding between me and my students. I have not looked at my goal-setting activities from this perspective, and I valued the opportunity presented in this article.

I have learned a great deal about angles of learning, learning as circles and waves, and assumptions behind “knowledge” in working with multicultural students. For years I have felt the struggles between offering my students a learning environment in the forms they are used to versus the forms I am used to. There has become a place in me where being discriminatory about learning situations feels appropriate. Teaching using a strict lecture format doesn’t work for me, even though it may be what my students are accustomed to. Negotiating both the form and content of classes with the students is always the cutting edge of my learning as a teacher.

I like your suggestion of channelling students’ former resistance to schooling into the persistence needed to become self-directed learners. I’d like to know more about how to assist students in overcoming their resistance. The pre-goal setting strategy of dialogical processes with their peers seems like a very helpful first step. I’d like to know what comes next. Self-reflective processes help all of us as learners, and I believe introducing them more formally into our teaching structure is very helpful.

“It is very important that the facilitator has had similar life and schooling experiences as the learners, to develop solidarity with them.” Although I see this as an ideal scenario, it seems to presume that we cannot develop solidarity with learners if we are not from the same background. I’d like to strongly disagree with this, and offer other areas where we can form bonds with our students. First of all, the issues of struggle are not new to any (or most) of us. Of course, there is a range of levels of struggle — yet I believe it is a common thread of the human experience that we can easily draw upon to form webs of connection with our students.

Furthermore, I play many similar life-roles as my students do: mother, daughter, bread-winner, partner, etc., each of them offering the food for building connections. But far more important than these is acknowledging the learning environment as a place where collaboration presides, where “professors and students actively and mutually engage in the learning process. Together, they define and create a body of knowledge that informs and transforms our world (N.E.A., p.8). This is where we primarily develop solidarity with the learners. We are paired in a co-creative process, as both learners and teachers. When we bring this level of equality and respect to our classrooms, acknowledging our role as life-time learners, we create an environment that supports us all in taking risks, advocating for our needs and being the “experts”.

In my workplace, we use the term “communities of scholars” to denote this philosophical and pedagogical belief/structure. It is my experience that when allowed to see ourselves as an integral piece within the structure of a whole unit (class), we synergize in creating a dynamic whole which is defined by our needs and personal differences, and whose goals are to work together to serve our collective and individual needs.Thus, far more important than having the same background as our students, is having the same leverage and power in our present learning situations. This truly facilitates respect and solidarity.

This article was published in Adventures in Assessment, Volume 6 (Spring 1994), SABES/World Education, Boston, MA, Copyright 1994.

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.