Teachers, Classrooms, and Change - Thinking Classroom #1 - Volume 9 - 2008 - Journal Archive - Thinking Classroom Journal - Reading and Writing for Critical Thinking

We have an exchange student living with us this semester, and after only a month we are already learning to see our own home places through fresh eyes, as she experiences everything for the first time. Our food, our daily schedule, our family habits, our local customs—all of these things are new to her, and so we get to reexamine them ourselves in a new way. It’s been especially interesting seeing our large local high school through her eyes. We thought we knew the place fairly well, since our three sons all attended this same school. But our exchange student has helped us to see the place afresh. One of our most interesting realizations has to do with what teachers expect from students—and what they don’t.

Our exchange student comes from a prosperous Western European country, where she attends a secondary school for university-bound students. Her home school is academically selective, fairly small, with around 450 students in 4 grades, and specializes in the teaching and learning of languages. (Besides her mother tongue, she speaks earflawless English, two other modern European languages passably well, and she’s had a year of Latin. That’s five languages, and she’s only 16 years old.) By contrast, the large suburban high school she attends here has 2400 students, drawn from diverse racial and economic backgrounds. Some of her classmates here live in trailer parks and some in multimillion-dollar waterfront mansions. These students will go in many different directions after high school—some to working class jobs in industry and the service sector, others to elite universities. So, for our exchange student, this is a strikingly different educational world in many ways—physically, socially, economically, and culturally. But what has been most illuminating for us, her educator host parents, has been to see how the teachers’ expectations vary according to their students’ academic placement and program of study.

Most days she comes home with little or no homework, and no suggestions of how to build on the lessons of the day through independent learning. In contrast to the experience of our 16-yearold son, who is taking demanding Advanced Placement courses in the same high school, and unlike her school back home, where she usually has two or three hours of assignments each night, here she might have just twenty minutes of homework. Are high expectations in this school reserved only for the students who are headed for the most ambitious futures? Some of the work she is assigned seems superficial or formulaic. In her English Reading and Writing class, for example, her assigned book report consisted of just a paragraph of plot summary and then a lengthy arts and crafts project—to create an alternative cover design for the book. She was asked to write a longer paper for another class, but then she was marked down for not following the model provided by the teacher to a T. “I should have just filled in the blanks,” she said, “and not tried to create my own paper.” Ouch.

Our exchange student’s experiences in the high school help us understand more of what is happening on our university campuses as well. In the universities where we teach, we have recently been discussing the results of the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE), a large nationwide survey in which students report their own levels of engagement in the academic, co-curricular, and social aspects of university life. The results are often discouraging. Nearly a third of students report that they spend ten hours a week or less doing homework. More than half report that they rarely write more than one draft of a required paper. Most report that they do not engage in conversations about academic topics with fellow students or professors outside of class . In short, the NSSE data reveal that large numbers of university students carry the disengagement they learned in high school along with them into the university world. They still don’t spend much time on homework, they don’t engage in writing practices that would lead to deep reflection or effective persuasive writing, and they don’t acquire the habits of mind that make immersion in the intellectual world of books, theories, ideas, and scholars a rewarding and sustaining activity.

It’s not hard to find reasons for students’ lack of engagement. The decade-long trend toward nationally mandated curricula and externally imposed teaching methods, the proliferation of highstakes testing, and the resulting demoralization of teachers have made for tough times in classrooms in many countries around the world. Some commentators have pointed to the competition for students’ attention that schools face from the attractions of electronic media. Others have described the hopelessness many students experience in the face of globalization, outsourced jobs, and depressed economies, and their understandable reluctance to throw themselves into schoolwork when they don’t have realistic expectations of successful careers. Many of us realize that grade inflation pushes up grades for even mediocre work, and students are led to believe that the ordinary work they do merits extraordinary grades. Readers with a longer-range view might agree with what a teacher in Turkey said to us recently: “Students have a universal aversion to hard work. They take the easiest way out. They always have and they always will. Students were lazy in ancient times, and they are lazy today. Intellectual work is hard work! Who does it if they don’t really have to?”

We recently came across a nearly 25-year-old article on teacher efficacy that sheds light on these issues. Writing in The Journal of Teacher Education, P. Ashton argues that there are eight dimensions involved in teachers’ effective performance:

A sense of personal accomplishment—the teacher’s view that the work is meaningful and important.
Positive expectations for student behavior and achievement.
Personal responsibility for student learning—the teacher accepts accountability and shows a willingness to examine his or her own performance.
Strategies for achieving objectives—the teacher must plan for student learning, set goals, and identify strategies for achieving them.
Positive affect—the teacher must feel good about teaching, about him—or herself, and about students.
Sense of control—the teacher must believe he or she can influence student learning.
Sense of common goals with students—the teacher develops a joint venture with students to achieve goals.
Democratic decision making—the teacher involves students in making decisions regarding goals and strategies.

How can Ashton’s ideas help us understand and respond to our concerns about the current state of low teacher expectations and low student engagement? There are two good lessons for us all in Ashton’s list.

First, we can recognize that we are working in a context in which several of these dimensions of teacher efficacy have been badly injured by national education reform movements. Teachers in many places today feel little sense of control: The most important educational decisions about what to teach, how to teach it, and when to teach it have been removed from their control. External accountability requirements and procedures have made individual teachers feel less personally responsible for what students learn and what they don’t. And in a demoralized teaching profession, few teachers can maintain positive feelings about the work they are engaged in.

Secondly, Ashton reminds us that ultimately, when the classroom door closes and the teacher is alone with her students—away from the politicians and the headmaster and the inspectors, and the multitude of cultural distractions and contradictions—she still has the power to make a difference in her students’ lives. Despite the forces that might make her inclined to assign less, expect less, and shift the responsibility away from herself, the teacher can still involve her students in setting goals and making a plan. The responsibility for learning still ultimately rests with the people in the classroom—the teacher and the students themselves. When the teacher has high expectations for the students, expecting them to grow and learn and progress; when the students have a voice in determining what they want and need to learn, and how they will go about their work; when together they can develop positive attitudes about each other and about their work—then good teaching and learning can happen. All of us know this is true, because somewhere along our own journey, a good teacher gathered us and our fellow students into a joint venture—a venture that defied the forces that threatened at that time and in that place to make our learning irrelevant. Our own good teachers—probably the ones who persuaded us to begin our own careers in education—taught us the crucial lesson:

High expectations, good plans, and shared goals lead to powerful learning.

We leave you with three questions for reflection in your own teaching life:

Are you keeping your eyes on the Big Picture, and resisting the temptation to think only about small matters from day to day? We all know our students have a lot to learn, and although they can’t learn everything by next week, we need to expect a great deal of them as they move toward the large and long-term goals.
Are you demanding enough of your students as they learn the skills that you most want to teach them? Students may resist and complain about hard work, but if you are determined—and optimistic—that students will learn the most important skills, you will have the inner strength to overcome their resistance.
Are you demanding enough of your students—first in asking them to join you in setting goals, and then in pushing and guiding them every day to make progress in achieving those goals? Your high expectations are the first step to your students’ high achievement.

References

Ashton, P. (1984). Teacher efficacy: A motivational paradigm for effective teacher education. Journal of Teacher Education, 35 (5), 28–32.

David Klooster and Patricia Bloem, both children of teachers, are married and have three sons. Pat is Associate Professor of English Education at Grand Valley State University in Allendale, Michigan. David is Professor and Chair, Department of English, at Hope College in Holland, Michigan, USA.

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