High Expectations

Basics

The effective school expects that all students can attain mastery of the essential school skills. In order to meet these high expectations, a school is restructured to be an institution designed for “learning” not “instruction.” Teachers and students must have access to “tools” and “time” to help all students learn.

 

Whether you think you can or think you can't, you are probably right.
First Generation Second Generation
In the effective school there is a climate of expectation in which the staff believes and demonstrates that all students can attain mastery of the essential school skills, and the staff also believes that they have the capability to help all students achieve that mastery.

In the second generation, the emphasis placed on high expectations for success will be broadened significantly. In the first generation, expectations were described in terms of attitudes and beliefs that suggested how the teacher should behave or instruct in the teaching-learning situation.  Those descriptions sought to tell teachers how they should initially deliver the lesson.  High expectations meant, for example, that the teacher should evenly distribute questions asked among all students and should provide each student with an equal opportunity to participate in the learning process. Unfortunately, this “equalization of opportunity,” though beneficial, proved to be insufficient to assure mastery for many learners. Teachers found themselves in the difficult position of having had high expectations and having acted upon them—yet some students still did not learn.

In the second generation, the teachers will anticipate this and they will develop a broader array of responses.  For example, teachers will implement additional strategies, such as reteaching and regrouping, to assure that all students do achieve master. Implementing this expanded concept of high expectations will require the school as an organization to reflect high expectations. Most of the useful strategies will require the cooperation of the school as a whole; teachers cannot implement most of these strategies working alone in isolated classrooms.

High expectations for success will be judged, not only by the initial staff beliefs and behaviors, but also by the organization’s response when some student do not learn.For example, if the teacher plans a lesson, delivers that lesson, assesses learning and finds that some student did not learn, and still goes on to the next lesson, then that teacher didn’t expect the students to learn in the first place.If the school condones through silence that teacher’s behavior, it apparently does not expect the student to learn, or the teacher to teach these students.

Several changes are called for in order to implement this expanded concept of high expectations successfully.

  • First, teachers will have to come to recognize that high expectations for student success must be “launched from a platform of teachers having high expectations for self.

  • Second, the school organization will have to be restructured to assure that teachers have access to more “tools” to help them achieve successful “Learning for All."

  • Third, schools, as cultural organizations, must recognize that schools must be transformed from institutions designed for “instruction” to institutions designed to assure “learning.”
Best Practices/Activities Resources

 

 Websites:
Home Mission Instruction Safety Evaluating Success Community Relations Time Management