by Rebecca J. Morris, June 2016

Once you’ve merged your vision for the community of learners with the needs and interests of your potential participants, you’re ready to shape your goals or objectives from these sets of details, priorities, and perspectives. You may consider an approach with broad goals, and then more specific, measurable objectives. In school library literature, both designs for program planning are represented.

Some ideas for goals are the following:

• Introduce parents/caregivers to the school library makerspace
• Invite teachers and school leaders to collaborate on school library events, projects, or programs
• Build community of “family experts and learners” to participate in makerspace learning
• Cultivate service learning opportunities with community members and organizations
• Earn grant(s) to fund learning programs or special initiatives
• Build a community reading culture in the school; with students’ families
• Offer a range of opportunities for parent volunteers
• Invite and host community or global subject area experts
• Model lifelong learning through…(hosting learning experiences for parents, facilitating professional development, offering teacher book discussions, etc.)
• Foster opportunities for teachers to grow as learners
• Use social media to share learning/service/school and library news/student learning activities
• Collaborate with the public library to plan events or outreach

To build evaluation tools from your goals, integrate components that are measureable, observable, or both, similar to how you would construct an instructional objective. To support the assessment of your goals and objectives, you might add such details as target participation or attendance numbers, volunteer opportunities offered and filled, views/comments/traffic to a website or curated digital collection, circulation of materials, or grant funding applied for and/or awarded.

A measurable, observable objective from the first goal above (about parents and makerspaces) might be the following:

Parents and caregivers of (x percentage of) primary grade students will identify and practice concepts and skills afforded by the makerspace by participating in a learning experience on site.