Good goals as a preschool teacher focus on the parts of the job you control: instruction, behavior guidance, family engagement and your own credentials.
This page gives example professional goals for each, shows how to rewrite a vague intention as a SMART goal, and helps you choose goals that hold up in an evaluation or growth plan.
Why centers ask for professional goals
Professional goals for early childhood educators do two jobs at once.
A written goal gives your director something concrete to support — a training slot, a coaching cycle, coverage while you sit an exam — and it gives you a record that your growth is deliberate rather than something that happened to you between enrollments.
When an evaluation or growth plan asks for goals, the useful ones grow out of the job you actually do.
O*NET's task list for preschool teachers includes teaching basic skills — colors, shapes, numbers, letters, hygiene and social skills — serving meals and snacks per nutritional guidelines, meeting with parents about progress, and maintaining student records.
Pick the task where your own practice is weakest, or the one you want to specialize in, and a goal writes itself.
Scope matters too.
BLS defines preschool teachers as the adults who educate and care for children younger than age 5 who have not yet entered kindergarten, so a goal pitched at standardized test scores belongs to a different job.
Aim the goal at what changes for the children in your room and for the families who count on you.
Goals also travel.
The same written goal that anchors your review is reusable in an interview answer, a promotion conversation or a move to a different age group.
If you are still mapping the role itself, the preschool teacher career guide covers duties, settings, requirements and pay before you commit to a direction.
Example goals: instruction, behavior guidance, family engagement, credentials
The examples below are written the way you would put them in a growth plan: a direction, a practice to change, and something to show for it.
Rewrite the details for your own room.
Instruction
Example: "Plan small-group activities that build the basic skills preschool teachers are responsible for teaching — colors, shapes, numbers, letters, hygiene and social skills — and keep short observation notes on which children need more practice with each."
The measurable part is the notes, not a score.
O*NET counts monitoring, active listening and learning strategies among the essential skills for childcare workers, and those same habits are what make an instruction goal verifiable: you watched, you noted, you adjusted the next activity.
Behavior guidance
Example: "Learn one new behavior-guidance strategy this season, use it during the transitions that go sideways most, and keep a short log of what changed for the children who struggle hardest."
Behavior goals work when they target your own responses rather than the children's personalities.
A log of what you tried, when, and what happened turns a feeling — the afternoons feel harder — into a pattern you and a co-teacher can actually fix.
Family engagement
Example: "Build a routine for sharing each child's progress with their family between scheduled conferences, and prepare one specific observation about each child's learning to bring to every check-in."
Meeting with parents about progress is one of the tasks O*NET lists for preschool teachers, so an engagement goal is not extra credit — it is the core job described more deliberately.
Regular, specific communication is also what turns a difficult spring conference into a familiar conversation.
Credentials
The credential goal is the one with fixed numbers.
The Council for Professional Recognition requires a high school diploma or GED — or, for a high-school student, enrollment as a junior or senior in a high school career and technical program in early childhood education — then 120 hours of formal early childhood education training with at least 10 hours in each of the eight CDA subject areas, plus 480 hours of professional work experience with the setting's age group earned within 3 years before applying.
Where those training hours come from, and what your state may require on top of them, is the subject of our guide to professional development for childcare teachers.
Written as a goal: "Earn the center-based Preschool CDA — the credential whose setting covers children ages 3 to 5 — by finishing the 120 training hours, logging the 480 experience hours within 3 years, assembling the Professional Portfolio, taking the CDA exam, and completing the Verification Visit if the exam result doesn't waive it." Since February 2, 2026 the Council no longer requires the visit for candidates who show a qualifying level of competence on the exam, and the visit can only be scheduled after the exam.
The CDA is also the credential BLS names: when states require a nationally recognized credential for childcare workers, BLS says it is most often the CDA.
Budget matters when you plan it — the Council's online assessment fee is $525 and the credential is valid for 3 years from the award date, after which renewal costs $250 and may be submitted up to 6 months before expiration, in the original setting only.
A longer-horizon version aims past the credential.
BLS lists an associate's degree as the typical entry-level education for preschool teachers — a statistical label rather than a legal minimum, with requirements that vary by setting and state — and reports that public-school preschool teachers generally need at least a bachelor's degree plus a license to teach early childhood education.
The same BLS release shows why the move is worth planning: May 2025 median annual wages for preschool teachers (SOC 25-2011) were $52,800 in educational services (state, local, private) against $36,850 in child daycare services.
Check the rules behind a credential goal before you commit
How to write SMART goals
The SMART format — Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time-bound — is a checklist for turning an intention into a plan.
In a preschool room it translates directly: "get better at circle time" becomes "by the end of the spring term, run a daily circle time with a planned opening, one story and a closing routine, and note which children stay engaged from start to finish so the plan can be adjusted."
Preschool measurement looks different from school measurement.
Observation notes, work samples, a photo of a finished block structure, the number of families who joined a check-in, your own registry transcript — these are the artifacts that make a goal verifiable without turning your room into a testing center.
Specific
Name the practice you are changing and where it happens: arrival, small groups, cleanup, the check-in with families.Measurable
Decide before you start what evidence will show it worked — observation notes, work samples, family sign-ins, or the training certificate itself.Achievable
Check the goal against your actual week, including staffing, your room's schedule and any fee a credential charges, and shrink it until it fits.Relevant
Tie the goal to the job: a task from the preschool teacher's task list, a topic your center is working on, or the next role you want.Time-bound
Give it a date — a season, a term, or the CDA application window you are working toward. A goal with no deadline is a wish.
One test at the end: read the goal back and ask what a director would see in the fall if all they had was your goal statement and your evidence.
If nothing distinguishable changed, the goal was a value statement rather than a plan — rewrite it until a stranger could tell whether you hit it.
Goals for your evaluation
An evaluation goes better when you arrive with goals instead of waiting to be assigned them.
Bring two or three drafts, each tied to something real in your room — a task from the job's task list, a behavior pattern you have been tracking, or the credential and coursework you want next — and say what support would make each one happen: coaching time, a training slot, coverage for the exam, help with the fee.
Keep goals and duties separate.
Maintaining student records is a duty — it is on O*NET's task list for preschool teachers — while a goal is what those records start doing: regrouping children for small-group instruction, or spotting the skill gap a new activity should close.
A duty done is expected; a goal hit is growth, and it deserves to be written that way.
Be honest about what you control.
A goal that depends on ratios, staffing or another teacher's habits is the center's decision rather than yours, and it reads as a complaint dressed as ambition.
Choose goals your own hands can carry, and raise the staffing issues separately, as the working-condition questions they are.
Then let the goals do career work.
The written record of goals set and goals met is the raw material for a raise conversation, a lead-teacher application, or the story you tell in your next interview.
And when those goals are ready to go to work somewhere new, the preschool teacher jobs on our board are where they get used.
Career information, not licensing or legal advice. Credential rules come from the Council for Professional Recognition, training rules for center staff from your state child care licensing agency, and public-school certification from your state education agency — confirm current requirements with the agency that issues them.