How should college and above instructors develop learning goals for their students and themselves?

 Your question doesn’t include what level or discipline you are teaching. IMO for anyone in college or graduate school I would teach them the following:

1. Write a personal Charter beginning with a one sentence mission statement. What do you want to spend your life doing? (This may change, but by age 30 one will go farther if one has it figured out/chosen. See chart below. With a charter, individuals have set their own learning goals and success definition. see also my website at Level Three Leadership I wrote my own personal charter (and one for my department and my school) and used that for my personal development and growth plan.
2. I’d also teach them the Balancing Your Life exercise—how to make a “well rounded” set of annual goals. What do you want to look like on all the —AL aspects of life at age 70? (physical, intellectual, financial, etc. 14 + of them) This is the Visions and Strategies section of the Charter in #1. Again they set their own goals for who they want to be.
3. I’d teach them the four basic Career Concepts (Driver and Brousseau at USC) and encourage them to live “inside-out” and not “outside-in” blindly accepting society’s Linear definition. Not everyone is meant or cut out to be a Chief Executive.
4. I’d teach them the differences between three “levels” of human behavior: Visible Behavior (Level One), Conscious Thought (Level Two) and VABEs (Level Three) Nobel Prizes have been awarded for the concept that people make big decisions based on VABEs OVER solid evidence. VABEs “trump” evidence. And invite them to begin identifying their core VABEs which executives worldwide claim to be 99% habitual-mindlessly repetitive. A one page, data-based, list of one’s VABEs / habitual Life Themes on all the —AL aspects of life is literally a description of one’s personality.
5. Depending on the discipline, I’d write course contracts — grade goal sheets (taught me by Steve Covey, my first instructor in business school). If you want an A in this course, you must do these things. For a B, you must complete the following. And so on. This takes a careful preparation for the instructor—and the advantage is that the students set their own goals for how much work they want to do in your discipline. Each student reads the options and signs a “contract” to strive for whatever grade level they want. It’s “possible” but not likely that everyone could get A’s. This is not a relative grading system, rather an absolute system with clear standards of performance.
6. My goal for myself has always been that a) every class would be so interesting and high energy that everyone in the room would be naturally and fully engaged. And b) that every course would be better than the last one. At HBS we had a rule of replacing the bottom 10% of classes in a course every year. Like Jack Welch’s HR promotion model. And I wanted my course ratings to be the best in the school, at least in my discipline. The year I left HBS to go to UVA, my course was ranked 2nd. Michael Porter had the #1 rated course. This means one cannot waste a single minute in class. I taught by case method my whole career—which lecturers don’t like. I assumed people could read—both the cases and the technical/analytical notes that accompanied them. Lectures (in the main) are the kiss of death for student energy. I’ve known of one or two professors who make a lecture engaging. Most cannot and put students to sleep.
7. I also wanted to read voraciously to add week by week to my knowledge of the field and what others were doing in it. I started keeping track of what I’d read each year and found with 30+ minutes a night or during the day squeezed in I could read on average 40–50 books a year.
8. I made slides of the good books, summarizing on 2–5 slides the main ideas so I could cut and paste those slides into decks for talks that begged those ideas. I now have some 300 slide decks. Thanks to a California colleague for this idea.
9. I wrote teacher’s version of my syllabi with teaching plans for each class including objectives, time allocations, and more. See my book Teaching Management for details. Also on my website above. I revised these every year to ensure every year the course(s) got better and better.