Curriculum Leadership Institute

Pathways to School Improvement

expectations

Illustrate Your System for Teaching and Learning, Literally

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One of the best parts of working with amazing school districts across the country is being able to highlight their awesome ideas for promoting positive changes in teaching and learning. Sweetwater County School District 1 in Rock Springs, Wyoming, identified a need to better communicate their district-wide expectations for teaching and learning. In a large district like theirs, they realized that not all teachers understood the system for curriculum, instruction, and assessment and therefore were not following it. To better communicate these processes with all teachers, they created the following graphic:

In this graphic, you’ll note that at the center of all curriculum work is the question of, “What’s best for students?” Sweetwater CSD1 is a PLC district and have aligned the four PLC questions to each phase of their system. The foundation for teaching and learning is curriculum (they call curriculum maps). This clarifies the curricular targets for teachers and students. Teachers are then able to create aligned instructional plans (IPRs), including short-cycle, formative assessments. Following their initial instruction, PLCs meet to go over data and determine ways to prepare students for common assessments. This may include re-teaching or further differentiation strategies. Then, they give their district-created common assessments. Again, PLCs meet to analyze local data gathered from their common assessments and determine if re-teaching and reassessment are necessary. Lastly, they revisit their IPRs to update them or make notes on what worked and what didn’t. The intent behind all of these steps, of course, is to improve teaching and learning for their students.

Your district may not implement the exact steps represented in their graphic. But, if you’re using the CLI Model, your process should include curriculum, instruction and the use of pacing guides and Instructional Planning Resources (although you may call them something else), common assessments, and analysis of data. A more generic version of this graphic might look like this, created for Sublette County School District 1 in Pinedale, Wyoming:

In this graphic, the district added pacing guides to plan out roughly when the curriculum is going to be taught and to ensure that teachers stay on track. The analysis of data is maintained, as well as re-teaching and reassessment.

Although the graphic for your district might look slightly different, an illustration of your teaching and learning process both appeals to visual learners and can easily be distributed and posted in all schools, classrooms, teachers’ lounges, etc. in your district. It will help to close the gap between teachers who understand district-wide expectations and those that don’t.

High Expectations Communicate Respect

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Photo source: Megan Soule / Unsplash

As a new school year begins, educators need to set and communicate expectations to the students in their classrooms. When identifying expectations, teachers often struggle deciding whether expectations are too high, too low, realistic, and uniformly applied. Popular research continues to indicate that setting high expectations leads to better results than setting moderate or low expectations, because students feel respected as participants in the classroom community.

While the classroom teacher is responsible for communicating and enforcing the rules, some expectations can be determined collaboratively among teachers of the building. Examples of collaboratively set expectations may include: descriptions of student success at achieving the prescribed curriculum, student behavior in common areas within the school or playground areas, lunchroom behaviors, or limits to absences or tardiness. However, there are also classroom expectations that must be set and applied within the classroom that are not dependent upon how the other classrooms operate. High expectations for demonstrating responsibility, courtesy, cooperation, clear communication, and honesty represent each classroom individually and demonstrates respect for each student as an individual within the classroom community.

In a 2010 edition from FORBES Media, Sangeeth Varghese, a business consultant for the corporate world, identified several characteristic actions that increase the success of expectations. These characteristics are found to push individual employees to build confidence and strive for excellence.  Those same characteristic actions apply to classrooms and could be used to demonstrate the relationship between learning in the classroom and success in the “real world.” Varghese’s recommendations include:

• Declare very high expectations.

“Sometimes seemingly impossible goals are the most likely to be met. Ordinary expectations can be self-defeating because people realize such goals won’t be hard to accomplish, so they don’t try very hard. Thus you should set goals that will at first provoke the response that they can never be attained. Be clear that you are expecting something truly out of the ordinary. As you declare and continually reinforce what you’re hoping for, those from whom you’re desiring it will start working toward it with such a focused effort that the ball should quickly start rolling toward the goal.”

• Communicate your expectations clearly.

“Make sure that there is no ambiguity about what is expected. Describe what you’re aiming for fully and in a positive way. There should be no confusion in anyone’s mind about what you’re demanding. If your goals and priorities are clearly articulated those who will execute them will be able to focus all their effort on attaining them.”

• Make sure those expectations fit their recipients.

“A leader should make sure that he declares the right expectations to the right people. He should consider his audience’s backgrounds, abilities and circumstances before setting expectations. There is no point in setting a goal that’s far removed from what someone has any experience and expertise in. Only establish expectations that have a real, strong chance of succeeding–even if they do sound impossible at first.”

• Communicate your expectations at every level.

“A leader must reinforce his expectations consistently, in both personal and public settings, formally and informally, inside and outside the organization. Every moment you spend with a person should confirm your trust that he will grow to the level you expect. At the same time, you should also make sure your high expectations for that person are reinforced by being conveyed to others inside and outside his immediate milieu.”

• Reconfirm your expectations constantly.

“Do not be discouraged when someone doesn’t immediately grow to fit your expectations. Rather, continue to encourage by being clear that those expectations persist.”

While following the guidelines for establishing expectations in the classroom, we have found that teachers struggle with the temptation to lower expectations for some students out of compassion or simple inconsistency. Students with identified learning needs must have academic expectations that are realistic with their need, but expectations for behavior and participation should be uniformly applied in order to extend to students the challenge and respect that is necessary to grow as successful citizens. When expectations are arbitrarily applied, students to whom the expectations are not applied feel that they are not worthy of the challenge/disrespected and students to whom the expectations are applied may feel that they are being unfairly challenged.

Teachers must guard against the risk of “selling students short” by lowering expectations for “some” students to avoid being perceived as unfair or not respecting all students’ ability to learn and work together.

At the Curriculum Leadership Institute, we believe all students deserve the respect of high expectations!