During our field placement for the summer term, we did a lot of reflection-based activities with the students, looking back on our respective high school experiences. The students that had just graduated from a particular comprehensive neighborhood high school repeatedly brought up one teacher, Ms. W., who had made a huge impact on their high school careers. They emphasized how demanding she was and how seriously they had to take her class, and, even though she was hard on them at times, they all loved her and were grateful for how hard she made them work. One day, Ms. W. paid a visit to our fieldwork class to check up on her recent graduates and see how they were preparing for the transition to college. She took the opportunity to address the aspiring teachers on the topic of setting expectations and motivating students.
Ms. W.'s approach was, essentially, an extreme degree of the kind of conventional approach we often found unfavorable in our summer discussions. On day one, she places an 18-page contact onto each student's desk. For the entire first period she reads it out, page by page, dictating every system and procedure they will be expected to follow within her classroom. She then sends it home with them, requiring them to return it, signed by the student and their guardian along with guardian contact information, for a test grade. But we heard from the students throughout the summer term how this contract was a kind of reality check for them; it let them know that the teacher wasn't going to tolerate play, and that to get a good grade in her class, they would have to put the work in.
Ultimately, her approach couldn't be called anything less than successful. At a neighborhood school with a college-going rate of less than 50% (greatphillyschools.org), most of those college bound graduates were her honors class students (she created and teaches the only honors classes at the school).
Which brings us up to my current classroom. My school, a public magnet high school, is very different in a number of ways from the two neighborhood schools mentioned above. One of these ways has been how I have observed the setting of expectations. Following all the discussion of Ms. W.'s strong approach, I was surprised to hear my partner teacher decline to overview her rules and procedures until the third class with her freshmen. She did note that most of the other teachers were doing this and she wanted to give our students a break from rules on the first two days. There's certainly something to be said about not wanting to saturate students with rules, but even when we got to our rule review it didn't look anything like the others described above.
On the third day of class, my partner teacher was helping students set up their accounts on the school's canvas-type website. Once these accounts were set up, she showed them where to find the class's syllabus. Once the students had it pulled up, she briefly ran through the class rules and procedures. A far cry from an 18-page contract, the two-page document was mostly schoolwide policies for tardiness, absences, and classes cut. In terms of class rules, she only lists the following:
These rules are not significantly more comprehensive than the collaboratively-determined rules from my school last year, but the method of delivering them does much more to set expectations than the words themselves. My partner teacher framed setting up the online accounts and directing them to the syllabus by telling them that this is how college classes expect you to keep up to date on assignments and expectations. She informed the classes that they are expected to take on a level of personal responsibility akin to a college course. After this talk, she reminded the class that we would start working with summer reading the following week, and each period students followed up with her after class to ask to borrow the books. If they thought they could get away without doing the assignment before, they didn't afterwards. Despite little to no disciplinary emphasis, we've had nearly 100% homework completion, and virtually all students have completed their reading assignments.
In their chapter on "Establishing Norms for Behavior," Weinstein and Novodvorsky emphasize "reasonable and necessary" rules, which are expressed in a "clear and understandable" manner in order to guide and facilitate "class-running routines" (97 & 100). Although Ms. W. and my partner teacher handle classroom rules very differently, both of their techniques seem to satisfy these specifications from Weinstein and Novodvorsky, and both approaches facilitate their respective "class running routines" (100). For example, although my partner teacher may not delineate her expectations in completing a "do now," as Ms. W. might, her classes uniformly learn and meet her expectations after only a few repetitions.
Ultimately, outside of broad strokes, I've learned that it's impossible to define exactly what "setting clear and high expectations" looks like. There are tons of factors that dictate how a teacher can most effectively set expectations for a group of students. Ms. W. acknowledged this herself, saying that her approach is unique to her personality and probably wouldn't work for everybody.
A huge component of this conversation, though, is the role that the greater school environment plays. For example, I don't know if my partner teacher would employ the college-style approach outside of a magnet school, where the school's selectivity reinforces college-style expectations. After all, in being introduced to school norms and policies, students are repeatedly reminded that repeated infraction may result in "deselction for the following year," meaning they will be sent back to their neighborhood schools. The neighborhood schools themselves, obviously, don't have the benefit of this underlying consequence, and teachers may, as a result, need to emphasize their own consequences to set the same level of expectations. In this regard, not having to emphasize their own consequences may be a luxury of magnet school teachers. In any case, it's clear that "setting clear and high expectations" amounts to much more than your determined class rules, and presenting your expectations in a method that reinforces them will hold a much greater influence on the outcome than the words themselves.
Works Cited
Weinstein, Carol Simon., and Ingrid Novodvorsky. Middle and Secondary Classroom Management: Lessons from Research and Practice. New York: McGraw Hill, 2011.