Sunday, November 16, 2014

Module 4 – Unit 2 – Activity 4

 Teach-now

Module 4 – Unit 2 – Activity 4

Reflections on High Expectations

As educators, it is essential that we share our high expectations with our students. Besides giving them a goal to work towards, setting high expectations for our students can help them believe in themselves. However, since students come from different backgrounds and learn at different rates, we should be setting two different types of standards/expectations for our students. The first is the expectations for how our students will behave and treat one another. Every student in the classroom is part of our classroom culture, and they should all be held accountable the high standards that are expected of them. Individually, though, teachers need to understand the prior knowledge and learning behavior that each student exhibits, and then set reasonable, high expectations for each child.

Spiegel discusses an experiment that was done in 1964, where teachers were told that certain students were pre-destined to succeed based on the results of an IQ test from Harvard. He was lying, of course. These students were actually just chosen at random from several classes.  However, what he found was that over the next two years, the students who were expect to improve their IQ, actually improved their IQ significantly more than other students (Spiegel, nd). He realized that the teachers’ expectations for these students affected how well they did in class. These students were given more time to answer questions, received more praise and positive feedback from their teacher, and if they did poorly on something ,their teacher would sit down with them and figure out how this aberration occurred.

This is a huge deal because teachers are just human, and unless we specifically train ourselves not to, it’s quite easy to make snap judgments about our students from the very first day. But what we don’t realize it that, more often than not, our students actually conform to our expectations of them. And so, I think it’s really important for teachers to have high expectations for all students, and from time to time should self-reflect and try to see if each student in the class is being given the same opportunity and expectation to succeed.

A study done by Public Agenda found that the majority of students believe that schools could and should expect more of them (“The Power”, nd). This is something that I have found as well. In my school, we have online homework that the students have to do, but there’s really no punishment if they don’t do it. What I’ve learned, though, is that if I put a huge emphasis on the entire class completing it from the first week, and I make a big deal when the students do complete it, that soon, the majority of the students are actively checking to make sure everyone is doing it, and they’re even helping each other if they’re confused or don’t understand something. It’s important for students to have goals like this – class goals and individual goals. As I’ve said before, whatever you do and say on the first day of class will set the tone…create the rules of that specific classroom culture…that the students will live by until the end of the year. We need to make our goals clear for them, we need to praise them when they do well and help them when they falter along the way, and we must make our students believe that they can achieve anything that we expect of them.

And if we can do that, and still set high expectations for them, then when people say, “You can do anything…”, well, for students in this kind of environment, it’s most likely true.

For our group, I thought we did really well. Samiyyah, Dorothy, and I all seem to have high expectations for our work in this course, and all three of us organized and planned our Glog and worked well together.  We each added certain parts and even changed some things that others put up, but we trusted one another to do quality work when we were each working on the Glog.

References:
Spiegel, A. (n.d.). Teachers' Expectations Can Influence How Students Perform. Retrieved November 16, 2014, from http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2012/09/18/161159263/teachers-expectations-can-influence-how-students-perform

The Power of High Expectations: Closing the Gap in Your Classroom. (n.d.). Retrieved November 16, 2014, from http://teachingasleadership.org/sites/default/files/Related-Readings/DCA_Ch2_2011.pdf

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