What are your OKRs? Tying Key Results to Objectives

Happy Thursday, Educational Leaders!

Let's start with a question that gets right to the heart of every school improvement plan: What are your OKRs (Objectives & Key Results)?

I mean your real ones — the OKRs built around the changes you actually want to see at your school this year, as their leaders. When they fit your context and your priorities, they stop feeling like a planning exercise and start guiding the everyday work.

A Quick Refresher

You've probably come across this framework before, but here's the short version. An Objective is the "what." It's a clear, one-sentence statement that describes where you want to go. It should be meaningful and a little bit ambitious — something like "Create a stronger learning experience for every student this year." Clear, motivating, and pointed in a real direction.

A Key Result is the "how will we know we got there." It's the specific, measurable benchmark that tells you whether the Objective actually happened. Think of it as something concrete you can point to — a number, a percentage, a clear outcome with a deadline attached.

The catch is that neither one is much use on its own.

Why the Two Need Each Other

An Objective without a Key Result is really just a hope. We've all sat in meetings where someone said, "We want to improve student engagement this year," everyone nodded, and then nothing measurable ever came back to the table. The intention was good, but there was no way to actually track whether it happened.

A Key Result without an Objective has its own kind of problem. It becomes a number floating around without much purpose. As if it is something we're tracking just because it's easy to count, even when it doesn't really mean much for the students in our building.

Tied together, though, they start working. The Objective tells your team why we're doing this. The Key Result tells them how we'll know we did it. That pairing is what turns a goal into a plan.

What a Good Key Result Actually Looks Like

When you sit down to write Key Results, it helps to run each one through three quick questions:

1. Could someone outside our team measure this? If checking the Key Result requires interpretation or a gut read, it isn't quite there yet. A good Key Result is clear enough that anyone could look at the number and tell you whether you hit the target.

2. Is there a real deadline? "Eventually" doesn't count. Neither does "by the end of the year" if you don't actually plan to check until June. Pick a date, and pick check-in points along the way.

3. Will hitting this actually move the Objective forward? This one is easy to overlook. Sometimes we end up measuring whatever's convenient, even when it doesn't really tell us much about the bigger goal. Be honest about whether the Key Result is doing real work.

If your Key Result holds up under all three, you've got something worth committing to.

Here's a real-life snapshot:

Objective: Strengthen the math foundation for our incoming sixth graders.

Key Result: Increase the number of sixth-grade students scoring proficient or above on the fall benchmark assessment by 12 percentage points compared to last year.

A Word of Caution

One mistake schools make all the time is writing Key Results that are basically just rephrased versions of the Objective. "Improve reading proficiency" paired with "Improvement in reading scores." That's the same sentence written twice. A real Key Result should give you a specific number, a specific group of students, and a specific deadline.

Another common slip-up is setting too many Key Results per Objective. Two or three is usually plenty. Once you get to seven, you've basically just made a long list.

Your Turn

Here's something worth sitting with: the school down the road can borrow your objectives word for word. Your Key Results are different. Those are shaped by your students, your staff, and where your school sits right now.

So this week, pull up your list of Objectives. For each one, ask the simple, slightly uncomfortable question: How will we actually know?

That answer is your Key Result. Once you've tied the two together, you'll be able to see your progress clearly as the year goes on.

Until next time — keep being bold!