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| Holding High Expectations |
| posted by: Alix | September 19, 2012, 07:34 PM |
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It appears that everywhere you turn people have been talking about having high expectations in your classroom. It’s no wonder, either. The benefits of having high expectations have been known for decades, going back to Harvard Professor Robert Rosenthal. Rosenthal found that when teachers expected students to dramatically increase their IQ, students did.
The benefits of high expectations are not limited to students. Back in 2006, Education Next featured a story about the effects of expectations on teachers. Teachers who held themselves accountable for the learning of their students were more likely to see gains in student achievement.
How do we integrate this knowledge into our classrooms? First, it starts with us. We need to believe truly and honestly that if we do our job as teachers, our students will succeed. We also need to communicate the belief that our students can succeed to our students. Without that communication, then we just become the mean teacher who makes everything too hard and we risk having our students shut down on us.
We also need to realize that having high expectations is more than just grading tough or having challenging curriculum. Having high expectations is about students learning challenging material and doing quality work, yes. But that can mean moving to a more project-based curriculum rather than giving students more facts to memorize. It can also mean that instead of giving students an F for poor quality work, you make them redo it until it meets the quality that you expect.
Behavior is also essential to holding high expectations. We need to expect and enforce behavior for our students. We shouldn’t excuse things like talking in the hall (for elementary), or showing up late for class (for secondary), because our students can’t help it. The fact is that they can control their behavior and their actions. More importantly, many think learning self-control and responsibility may be more important to the future success of our students than anything else.
Having high standards does not mean that we become inflexible. We can’t and shouldn’t dictate every little detail of our students lives while they’re in our classroom. No one likes to be micromanaged and attempting to do so may end up causing discipline problems. As educators, we need to decide what is important enough that we need to hold our students to it. Do we care whether students write with blue or black ink, or is it more important that their work be legible and neat? The standards that we set should be those necessary to achieve the goals we want for our students, and flexibility should be allowed when there are many ways to achieve those goals.
We shouldn’t forget ourselves as teachers in all of this. It’s important for teachers to maintain high standards. By doing so, we model expected behaviors for our students and we set a tone of professionalism for our classroom. If you’ve never read AAE’s Code of Ethics, that’s a good place to get some ideas about the standards to which we as educators should hold ourselves.
What sort of expectations do you hold in your classroom?
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