Merriam-Webster defines a goal simply as “the end toward which effort is directed.” But in education, we spend an enormous amount of energy debating what that “end” should actually be and ultimately who should decide.
Most of the discussion about learning goals has focused on students. In 1962, Mager defined a learning goal as a good instructional objective specified observable behavior, the conditions under which it occurs, and the criteria for acceptable performance. A mathematical learning goal has been defined as describing the specific mathematics understanding you want students to walk away with from a lesson — not just what they’ll do, but what they’ll understand.
Decades of careful thought have gone into defining learning goals for students. But in our work with coaches and school systems, we’ve come to believe an equally important question has gotten far less attention: what does it mean to have a learning goal for a teacher — and who decides what it is?
Two Different Answers to “Who Decides?”
The answer depends on what kind of coaching is happening.
When coaching is organized for individual change, the teacher’s learning goal is usually identified by the teacher. A coach might ask, “What would you like me to focus on when I observe you?” The teacher names something (e.g., wait time, transitions, questioning technique) and the coaching cycle is built around that self-selected goal. We’ve written about this distinction before in our post on coaching for individual versus systemic change, and it’s worth revisiting here because the contrast matters enormously for what coaching can ultimately produce.
When coaching is organized for systemic change, the goal isn’t generated teacher by teacher. It’s identified collectively by educators in the system, for the system. This means that every teacher in a school or department is working toward the same thing, regardless of where their individual instincts or preferences might otherwise have taken them.
At first glance, the individual-goal approach seems more respectful of teacher expertise. But it comes with a structural cost that is easy to miss: when every teacher is working on a different goal, nothing any one teacher learns can transfer to anyone else. There’s no common target for that knowledge to accumulate.
Why Shared Goals Matter for a System
This isn’t just a hunch. It’s a pattern with deep roots in why instructional improvement in the U.S. has been so hard to sustain. Without a common curriculum, teachers historically couldn’t learn how to teach it well, because there was no “it” to begin with, no shared target that knowledge about effective practice could accumulate around. The same logic applies directly to teacher learning. If every teacher is pursuing a different goal, insights about “what works” stay locked in individual classrooms. They don’t transfer. They don’t build on each other. They often die with the teacher who discovered them.
Any system that wants to genuinely improve, rather than simply change, needs a stable reference point for three reasons:
- To judge whether a change is actually progress. Without a fixed target, you can’t tell improvement from mere difference.
- To compare alternatives on the same approach. Two teachers trying two different approaches to the same goal can be meaningfully compared. Two teachers working on two unrelated goals cannot.
- To let separate efforts build on each other instead of duplicating work, they can work together toward more innovative practices.
Without a shared target, a school can generate enormous amounts of professional development activity and still have no clear sense of whether it’s collectively moving anywhere. Lots of movement, but no accumulation.
Where Teacher Agency Still Fits
None of this means individual teacher agency disappears once a system adopts shared goals. It just operates at a different level, within the shared goal rather than instead of it.
Take a concrete example. One school we’re working with has identified two instructional priorities for the year: creating classroom environments that support student talk and the practice of eliciting student thinking. Every teacher in the building is working toward these two things. But within that shared frame, individual teachers can bring their own, more specific goals to coaching conversations: how do I get reticent students to share publicly? How do I model a turn-and-talk for the first time? How do I use a talk move like “can anyone revoice what they said?” without taking the authorship away from the original student?
These are real, individualized goals, chosen by the teacher, that a coach can work on directly with them. The crucial difference is that each sub-goal is in service of the larger, shared goal and not disconnected from it. A teacher’s personal breakthrough on revoicing without marginalizing students becomes something the whole school can learn from, because it’s contributing to a goal everyone is already working toward. Agency and coherence aren’t in tension here; the system-level goal gives the individual work somewhere to land.
That combination, system-wide direction with room for teacher-specific entry points, is what lets coaching support both individual growth and collective, lasting improvement.
In a future post, we’ll get into the harder question this raises: how do you actually go about identifying the right learning goals for a system in the first place?
The ideas in this post are influenced by the following scholars: Victoria Bill, Jim Hiebert, Anne Morris, Laurie Speranzo
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