As you design your Future Goals Essay, please use the following standards to guide your work. These represent the particular criteria that your instructors will use to evaluate your essay.
- Title – Does your essay have an expressive title?
- Introductory Paragraph – Do the introductory paragraphs outline future learning goals for you? Avoid career and professional goals, and instead focus on the learning you need to do to reach career, professional or personal goals. Spend some time explaining why these learning goals are important and why they are a focus for you.
- Compelling Narrative – Does the essay tell a coherent and compelling story about the knowledge you need to excel in the future? Does it effectively use text (and possibly other media) to do so?
- Topics and Resources – Do you include three distinct learning goals with fully-functioning links to corresponding resources?
- Word Count Word Count – Is your essay about 750 words? Remember, this is both an upper and lower limit (try to be within 10% of the goal)
Common issues
- Pick Helpful Resources – Please remember that the resources you link to shouldn’t just be about your learning goal — they should be resources that you can use to accomplish your goal.
- Future Learning – Focus on new things you can learn (and new resources), not on what you’ve done in the past.
- Advance Organizers – Think about adding an “advance organizer”— a sentence or two to introduce and summarize these goals—before writing about them in more detail.
- Add Context – Your learning goals are your own, but they fit into a larger context—try to relate these learning goals to the school where you teach or the world that you live in.
- Add a Link to a PDF – Think about adding a link to a PDF copy on this page so that viewers have the opportunity to read your essay in an alternative format (this also makes for easier printing if someone wanted to print your essay).
- Avoid PDF-only Access – An additional link to a PDF is great, but it cannot replace a webpage version of your essay. If you’re going to do one format, put your essay on a webpage. If you want to go that extra step, add an additional option for a PDF.