I  think one of the things to consider is that often adult students have had very little success in school before coming to us and that one of the first things they need to know is that someone believes in them - believes he/she can be successful etc.  I agree that our students expectations of themselves is very important - at the same time, some of them don't even know where to begin to create that expectation and they can learn to have their own personal expectations from having teachers that believe in them and help them make connections for themselves to find their own success. For some adult students, their self esteem has been so badly damaged by encountering people who expect nothing or who assume that they are incapable of learning that the student has learned to internalize that as "I'm stupid" or "I can't learn" when in actuality, all they really needed was a teacher that knew how to put a student on the right path.

Expectations need to work both ways. The student needs to have expectations for him or herself; the teacher also needs to expect the student to be able to achieve and to find ways to encourage and nurture that success.

Regards
Katrina Hinson


>>> woodsnh at isp.com  >>>

Barbara Garner wrote:
 > The point I'm trying to make is that while having high expectations,
 > we need to be aware of the possible "blind spots" we may have to
 > certain students' learning needs.

I believe that having high expectations does, in fact, result in high 
performance for many students because many students will work extremely 
hard to please the people around them.  It's the students for whom it 
does not work well that concern me and there are many of them.

I get concerned about who forms the expectations. When we say teachers 
should have high expectations for their students, I take that to mean I 
should expect my student to perform well at the challenges I provide. He 
or she performs at the level I expect. Personally I see that as me being 
rather arrogant because I presume to know more about what my student 
needs to know than my student does.

A traditional American Indian view is that we should not have 
expectations for others, that "expect" and "respect" are diametrically 
opposed. Perhaps this helps explain why so many American Indian children 
do poorly in our modern school systems and they drop out at extremely 
high rates.

A different twist to this topic is students' high expectations of 
themselves. This is far more important and more healthy in my view. I 
feel I can encourage students to develop their own high expectations and 
experience very positive results, but it shifts the emphasis from 
teacher to student.

So often in the field of education we hear about the need to make 
learning student-centered instead of teacher-centered. I believe deeply 
that this begins with the question, who holds the expectations?

 Tom Woods

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