Take Action: Making Goals Happen
Description. Goal attainment represents the keystone self-determination behavior. Educators use the Take Action lessons to teach students both with and without disabilities the crucial skills for attaining their goals. The lesson package consists of a student video, teacher manual, and student worksheets. Students learn to break their long-term goals into short-term goals that can be accomplished in a short time period. The lessons can be applied to any goal or project, including students’ IEP goals.
Take Action overview. The Take Action lesson package provides a tool for educators to teach students a simple and effective goal attainment process. The Take Action lessons begin with a 10-minute video that demonstrates the Take Action process. Once learned, students can apply the Take Action process to any goal.
Sample lesson description. The following bullets briefly describe a couple of the Take Action lessons. At the end of the lessons, students demonstrate mastery through a variety of activities, including brief exams.
Lesson 1. Introduces the Take Action process. In this first lesson, students learn the four major parts of the Take Action process: plan, act, evaluate, and adjust. Students complete a brief quiz at the end of this lesson to demonstrate their knowledge of the four Take Action steps. Students also begin the process of breaking down a goal into into basic parts.
Lesson 2. This lesson introduces students to the plan parts. The lesson begins with students watching a 10-minute video entitled Take Action, which shows students developing plans and working on attaining their own goals. Next, students learn four plan parts: standard, motivation, strategy, and schedule. Numerous exercises teach students the meaning of each of the plan parts. Once again, students complete a brief quiz to demonstrate mastery.
Need for teaching students goal attainment skills. Mithaug, Mithaug, Agran, Martin, and Wehmeyer (2007) consider goal attainment as the most important self-determination component. Yet, youth who receive special education services possess far fewer goal attainment and other self-determination skills than do secondary general education students who are not disabled. Goal-oriented performance involves a two-step process where students first set goals based upon their interests, skills, and limits. Second, individuals develop plans, then take action on the plans to achieve their goals (Martin, Huber Marshall, & DePry, 2008). Active involvement in goal setting may add purposefulness to life, and self-directed goal setting often facilitates improved performance (Bandura, 1997; Mithaug, Mithaug, Agran, Martin, & Wehmeyer, 2003). Goal setting facilitates performance increases because goals specify the requirements for success and prompt self-monitoring toward the desired outcome (Wehmeyer, Palmer, Agran, Mithaug, & Martin, 2000).
To download additional information about Take Action, click on the link below. Take Action info sheet (pdf)
To access the Take Action lesson package, click on ChoiceMaker Lesson Packages in the left side menu.
