What implicit biases affect my assumptions and decisions? Take the Implicit Association Test (IAT) at this link to foster self-reflection: https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/takeatest.html.
How Do I Connect to Students’ Assets?
What do I know about my students’ strengths, home languages, cultures, and life experiences? What more do I want to learn? How will I learn it?
In what specific ways do I design learning to connect to and build on students’ strengths, home languages, cultures, and life experiences? What more do I want to learn about connecting to students’ strengths and assets in my teaching?
How do I engage and value parents as partners in student learning?
Additional Resources to Foster This Mindset
Emdin, C. (2016). For white folks who teach in the hood . . . and the rest of y’all too: Reality pedagogy and urban education. Boston, MA: Beacon Press.
Hammond, Z. (2015). Culturally responsive teaching and the brain: Promoting authentic engagement and rigor among culturally and linguistically diverse students. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin.
LeMoine, N., & Soto, I. (2016). Academic language mastery: Culture in context. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin.
Quezada, R. L., Lindsey, D. B., & Lindsey, R. B. (2012). Culturally proficient practice: Supporting educators of English learning students. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin.
Rosin, H., & Spiegel, A. (Hosts). (2017, June 9). The culture inside [Audio podcast]. Retrieved from http://www.npr.org/programs/invisibilia/532950995/the-culture-inside
Expect Excellence From Every English Learner
VISION: Keep rigor of tasks and texts high while providing appropriate scaffolds and supports to engage ELs in building concepts, skills, and language to thrive on a path toward college and career success. When a student struggles, a teacher who expects excellence knows the struggle is temporary, and the student has the capacity for growth.
Why This Mindset Matters
Students rise or fall to the level of teacher expectations. Research clearly indicates a strong correlation between teacher expectations and student achievement (Carrasquillo & Rodríguez, 2002; Darling-Hammond & Schon, 1996; Gershenson, Holt, & Papageorge, 2015; Rosenthal & Jacobsen, 1968). When we have high expectations, we can help students grow toward those expectations. When we have low expectations for students, we limit the impact of our teaching to that low level.
Ways We Might Get Stuck
Believing in high expectations for all students and making high expectations a reality are two different things. In theory, it is easy to believe every student can achieve. In practice, it is easy to teach students who currently underperform at low levels. Some of the ways we can easily get stuck include the following:
We Meet Students Where They Are: It’s good teaching to identify where students are currently performing and help them build from their current levels to increasingly higher levels of performance and independent success. The essential word here is build. Sometimes, as I reflected at the opening of this chapter, we can get stuck meeting students where they are without also building from that place to help them thrive with rigorous goals. We do this when we adjust the complexity of our tasks and texts so our students don’t have to struggle or when we overscaffold so students don’t get to apply learning beyond our guidance.
We Protect Students From Struggle: Even if we start with high expectations and challenging tasks, sometimes when students struggle we jump in too soon. We may give an answer instead of letting students figure one out. We may tell students what to do when a prompt may be enough to ignite student problem solving. If students struggle in unproductive ways that lead them to be disengaged, then of course providing immediate guidance, scaffolding, or teaching is important. That said, we must also foster opportunities for students to struggle productively toward ambitious goals. Teaching with high expectations requires both a strategic use of scaffolds and giving students the think time and trial-and-error opportunities needed to solve problems and make meaning through rigorous tasks and texts.
We Sort and Track Students: With the intention of addressing specific needs, schools often sort and track students in ways that hinder the learning of underperforming students (Noguera, Darling-Hammond, & Friedlaender, 2015). ELs are often removed from core teaching to engage in low-level, disconnected language instruction. To learn and excel with the academic language essential for content success, ELs need to engage daily in speaking, listening, reading, and writing across the core curriculum. To excel with rigorous academic content, ELs need to access and engage with rigorous academic content. Flip to Chapter 4, pages 86–107, for flexible strategies to differentiate that don’t involve tracking.
Actions to Live the Mindset
1. Be Specific About Your Goals for Student Learning
Get specific about what you want students to learn and the criteria students need to succeed with the goal. Section IV of this guide helps you get specific about goals for academic literacy and language. For example, for teaching theme, you’ll find literacy goals and language objectives as shown in Table 2.1.
To make goals clear, do more than post and say the goals. Engage students in collaborating to explain what they are learning and why. Provide examples of what success looks like, and model how these exemplars demonstrate the learning objectives. Flip to pages 128–129 for a specific routine to model expectations with an exemplar.
Observe students as they engage in conversations and lesson tasks to watch specifically for your teaching goals. This book helps you do this in Section IV by giving you observation questions aligned with each learning goal. Look for the heading “Observe” to focus your observations, then use your observation data to personalize teaching so students reach success with your high expectations.
Table 2.1
2. Collaborate to Calibrate Expectations
Making our goals clear is important for our communication with our students and their ownership of their own learning. How do we know our goals are appropriate for our grade level and content area? Collaborate with colleagues to answer this question. Powerful processes for teacher teams include all of the following:
Unpack grade-level content standards to identify the most essential concepts and skills, and design tasks you can use to have students learn and demonstrate success with those concepts and skills.
Co-create or choose together exemplars of what success looks like for conversations (video exemplar or transcript) and written tasks.
Co-create a rubric of success criteria to measure success with the task.
Collaborate to calibrate your scoring of student work (or conversation videos or transcripts) with the rubric. Flip to pages 132–134 for a great protocol to use with colleagues and with students to calibrate your expectations.
Collaborating to make expectations visible and calibrate how you score the same work sample is powerful professional