GOAL Program
The Going for the Goal Program (GOAL) is the Center's largest and best-known program. GOAL is the 1996 winner of the Lela Rowland Prevention Award given by the National Mental Health Association. It has also been honored by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services as part of its Freedom from Fear Campaign and received an honorable mention by the Points of Light Foundation.
GOAL is designed to teach adolescents a sense of personal control and confidence about their future so that they can make better decisions and ultimately become better citizens. To be successful in life it is not enough to know what to avoid; one must also know how to succeed. For this reason our focus is on teaching "what to say yes to" as opposed to "just say no."
GOAL is a ten-session, ten-hour program taught by well-trained high school students to middle school students, generally during school. The life skills taught in GOAL are how to: (1) identify positive life goals; (2) focus on the process (not the outcome) of attaining these goals; (3) use a general problem-solving model; (4) identify health-compromising behaviors that can impede goal attainment; (5) identify health-promoting behaviors that can facilitate goal attainment; (6) seek and create social support; and (7) transfer these skills from one domain to another. A complete listing of the skills taught is in the Table of Contents of the GOAL sample.
There are several unique aspects in the design of the GOAL. First, we chose skills as our focus because they are concrete, easily taught and learned, and when directed toward areas of our everyday lives, empower us. Teaching facts such as the danger of using drugs has not proven to be effective. Teaching skills requires learning "how to"; in this way it is very similar to learning to play sports or to drive a car. Second, the teachers of GOAL are high school student-leaders (occasionally college students) chosen by their schools for their academic performance, leadership qualities and extracurricular involvement. They receive special training on how to teach the program. Following the training, the student-leaders teach the skills during middle/junior high school (usually as part of the health curriculum). The ratio is approximately two to three high school student-leaders to 15 middle/junior high school students. Successful high school students serve as concrete images of what early adolescents can become. Because these high school students have grown up in the same neighborhoods, attended the same schools, and confronted similar roadblocks, they serve as important role models and thus are in an ideal position to be effective teachers. Third, there is a printed Leader Manual given to each high school student and a Student Activity Guide given to each junior high/middle school participant.
GOAL has been taught in 28 sites in the U.S. and internationally to over 20,000 youth. The Program has been translated into Spanish, Portuguese, Greek and Hungarian.
A formal process has been developed for schools and/or communities who wish to adopt GOAL. As part of this process, we try to identify and involve a higher education institution to participate in the training and implementation of the program. An Operations Manual has also been written detailing the planning and implementation process.
Information about the GOAL Program, including costs, is available from the Center.
Workshop samples
Life
Skills Center
Virginia Commonwealth University
800 W. Franklin Street | Richmond, VA 23284-2018
1-888-572-1572 | lifeskills@vcu.edu
Copyright © 2002 Life Skills Center. All rights reserved.
