How To Make New Year’s Resolutions For Students Stick
With 2023 right around the corner, students are gearing up for Christmas, their favorite time of the year. However, these days are not only about rest and relaxation. The new year signifies a fresh start and an opportunity to reassess our goals so far and set new ones. Considering that it is sometimes hard for students to figure out their goals for the new year and, most importantly, stick with them, it’s essential to give them a helping hand. In this article, we share a few tips to help you create motivating New Year’s resolutions for students.
5 Tips To Accomplish Your New Year’s Resolutions
Setting a goal is much easier than keeping it, especially for students teeming with excitement over the holiday season. Let’s see some of the steps you can take to ensure your students set realistic goals for the new year.
1. Manage Your Expectations
When students make their New Year’s resolutions, they often get excited and end up getting carried away. As a result, they might set an unrealistic number of goals that can not be accomplished during the span of a year. To avoid unwanted feelings of disappointment, it’s better to start your goal-setting process with realistic expectations. Encourage your students to set a maximum of five goals that are within their scope of abilities and resources. This way, they won’t get overwhelmed and discouraged early on in the process.
2. Be SMART About It
For a goal to be successful and motivating, it must be SMART. This acronym doesn’t refer to intelligence but rather stands for “specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-specific.” This way, students put their goals into a specific framework which will then help them be consistent with their progress. For example, “doing better at school” is a vague goal that will hardly motivate a student. Instead, you can try this: “scoring over 80% at x subjects by the end of the first semester.” This level of detail helps students remain aligned with their goals and take measures to ensure their achievement.
3. Take It One Step At A Time
Another useful tip for creating realistic New Year’s resolutions for students is breaking goals into smaller, more manageable chunks. Seeing a resolution through can be very challenging, especially for busy students with many activities on their plates. For this reason, it is advisable to create short-term objectives that will bring results in the long run. For example, instead of putting all their effort into that very important test at the end of the year, advise them to direct their focus on practicing a little every day. These individual steps will make all the difference when it’s time to achieve their ultimate goal, whatever that is.
4. Figure Out How To Track Progress
Expressing the desire to fulfill a certain New Year’s resolution usually doesn’t guarantee that it will come true. Progress comes from putting your intentions into writing and establishing a way to keep track of it. There are many ways for students to visualize their New Year’s resolutions, from notebooks and boards to spreadsheets and applications. Invite them to try at least a couple of the choices to identify the one that suits them best. But, most of all, urge them to update them consistently so that they’re able to celebrate small achievements and stay motivated. What’s more, using one of these tracking systems can alert them when they’re falling behind on their schedule so that they can make the necessary adjustments and get back on track.
5. Embrace Mistakes
Even when you have the most well-designed and thought-out plan, setbacks can always happen. What’s important is that you don’t become discouraged by the first difficulty and abandon your goals. Support your students through the process of accomplishing their New Year’s resolutions by reinforcing that mistakes are not only expected but can also become opportunities to learn and improve. For example, if they fail to achieve a milestone, this could indicate that a certain hobby is taking up too much of their time or that they need to readjust their studying technique.
Conclusion
Christmas is a time of joy and relaxation but also a time when we get to think about what we have accomplished so far and what we can work towards in the future. A well-designed list of New Year’s resolutions can truly set the tone for the year. Use the tips we shared in this article to easily create motivating New Year’s resolutions for your students and help them become the best version of themselves the following year.
Download our eBook Remote Classroom Essentials: How K-12 Educators Can Improve Student-Driven Engagement for tips that will help you to prevent and combat student-driven engagement obstacles and realize what you need to make the most of online learning.
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