Teachers’ Expectations

This week, I will attempt on parts of the 4-stage cyclical process of reflective practice to help facilitate my reflection on setting of teachers’ expectation.

Faith in us Teachers

Setting high expectations is part of direction setting because it has to be closely aligned with our school’s goal. Although high performance expectations cannot be the only substance of our school’s goal, they do demonstrate to the teachers “the expectations of excellence, quality and/or high performance in teaching and learning for the students”. I think that this is central behavior associated with leading of team or school (Just look at the outcomes of events with low or no clear set expectations).

How to go about setting expectations?

One example which I did with the ICT PLC was to “enlarge” the teachers’ capacity to imagine what might be achieved, and “increase” their sense of accountability for bringing this about (through their individual ICT action plan). As the starting point of ICT implementation in the school this year, the emphasis is to establish a culture of high expectations, high collaboration, and mutual respect among the members of the team. For my part, I need to be able to set the tone for the shared ICT goals, high standards, and high expectations (during reviews during ICT PLC meetings) and to provide the necessary support to teachers in order to turn high expectations into high performance (through training based on individual teacher's needs, sharing of implementation processes, ICT resources).

I also see the need to establish appropriate, measurable, and agreed-on indicators and targets. Some of these are already been set by the Ministry level (such as the ICT baseline standards, BYiTES 3.0) while others need to be set based on the agreement between teachers (among teachers within departments on their ICT action plans, teachers agreeing to becoming ICT mentors, teachers willingly sharing of ICT practices). As mentioned during last Friday’s management meeting, the performances of the teacher are based on their own belief, combined with either optimism or pessimism and in this case, on the use of ICT in their teaching and learning. However, as leaders, I believe that our expectations for high performance of teachers should be based on the belief, with considerable optimism, about the untapped potential of teachers for growth and development.

And Yes, we will be pleasantly surprised at what our teachers will be able to accomplished (… all 7 departments had come out with their ICT action plans for 2011! …was told of a collaboration project between humanities and science department, an initiative by the teachers themselves!). Teachers are able to motivate each other (I hear of heads encouraging themselves to continuously write their weekly journals) and more importantly, to shift their expectations of themselves (many teachers asking for professional development in ICT). The students too can cause the teachers to shift the expectations for them, thus enabling the initiation processing of ICT implementation to begin. What I hope to see? That there is an opportunity to say, “You know what about designing and developing ICT implementation. If we approach this properly, we realize that everyone is in this together. We start as low as single building blocks, then we work together upwards and so we are not going to tumble as we progress.”

I also need to take the responsibility for communicating these expectations for teachers and then followed through to make sure the expectations are met. For this to happen, I really need to be personally involved at the start with the teachers. Preaching just won’t make these happen. Moreover, I feel that this responsibility must be enacted uniformly. Treating some teachers differently will be counter-productive. Teachers’ Expectations