Establishing High Standards for All Learners
Establishing a culture of high expectations is vital to ensure that all learners fulfil their potential. If we want them to achieve the highest grades, we need to establish a school wide culture which promotes excellence.
In classrooms, teachers can nurture excellence by talking about learning and studying as a reward in themselves by demonstrating our own joy and passion for the subject, by raising students’ engagement and excitement, by keeping lessons high in concepts, low in repetition and by ensuring the students can see the relevance of the subject. It is also highly beneficial, when encouraging risk taking in students, to take a few risks ourselves. Too often, learners believe that we were born experts, so by talking about our own learning journey to expertise we can encourage them to see that, we too, found many things quite challenging and that persistence pays off.
But what are the characteristics of a wider and transformational excellence culture? How do we support students who struggle to believe in themselves? There are numerous aspects to any student’s home life that can cause barriers to success. By immersing them in a world that values and celebrates academic learning, a school culture can infiltrate every self doubt, ensuring that they are reminded of the best they can be in form rooms, corridors, lessons, assemblies and in every interaction with a teacher.
Once a student sees that they are capable of achieving excellence, it can be transformational. That student is never quite the same. Have students carrying reading books with them everywhere they go. This boosts their notions of possibility. The well timed, public support, the one-to-one conversations and positive parental feedback can help to shift self belief. They need to see themselves as high-achieving students, doing well and wanting to do even better.
Here are six principles for starters, based on a number of insights I’ve drawn from my work with schools.
1. Define success, high standards and appropriate levels of progress and make them explicit.
Peer group influence needs to be highlighted and deconstructed to clearly assert to students what is required to achieve the top grades and to give them a road map of how to get there. What does
success look like for a particular learner, and how do we transmit that awareness? How do we ensure we as teachers know what we’re aiming for? What are the indicators of excellence, and who generates them? How are they specifically taught in subjects? There are many potential gaps to understanding what the appropriate level of challenge might be for our learners in terms of the work we set and accept.
Culture and home background have a huge role to play in setting expectations. For some able students, they have become used to being the best in their first school – quite possibly without too much effort. and as a result, their perception of what standards might apply have been corrupted.
2. Apply and communicate the language of high expectations and aspirations throughout the school.
Keep this language clear in newsletters, briefings and all communications with parents. Make it ‘the norm.’ Avoid any explicit or implicit reference to the ‘geeks and freaks’ stereotypes for smart kids. Encourage an intellectual curiosity and bravery that never sets academic learning as beyond anyone’s reach. Be comfortable being the voice of expertise, scholarship and academic excellence. Be careful never to inadvertently celebrate mediocrity or praise too easily. We need to insist that if work isn’t perfect, it isn’t finished. Students must get used to redrafting their own work after regular peer and then public critique sessions. Give feedback on best work only and don’t waste our time being a proofreader for our students. They will learn nothing from our detailed commentary on their work unless it is at the very top end of what they can do.
Too many students think effort is only for the inept. The whole point of learners as ‘experts in development’ is that they need to grasp the essentials of a subject but also to understand how difficult and frustrating gaining scholarship can be.
3. Celebrate expertise and mastery. Normalise intellectual debate.
We must take the stabilisers off and counteract the tendency of students to want everything spoon-fed and ‘bite sized.’ Don’t protect students from grappling with difficult tasks as they won’t develop what psychologists call ‘mastery experiences.’ Students who have this well-earned sense of mastery are more optimistic and decisive. They’ve learned that they’re capable of overcoming adversity and achieving goals. Engage effective role-models who embody the joy of learning and the success that results from hard work.
Ensure students are routinely expected to give extended, reasoned answers or are at least given that opportunity. Offer teachers CPD time to deepen their subject knowledge.
4. Deliberately set up productive failure by continually raising the bar.
Building the capacity to resist the temptation to quit when the practice task looks like being beyond a learner’s current ability level is critical to long term achievement. Perseverance and diligence are cardinal Confucian learning virtues. ‘No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.’ By scaffolding the work too clearly and for too long, we can undermine expectations and restrict the ranges of response that our students could potentially develop off the leash.
The ‘learning paradox’ is that the more you struggle and even fail while you’re trying to master new information, the better you’re likely to recall and apply that information later. Until we make the high level most challenging demands we will never know if our students would have been capable of reaching the highest standards.
5. Teach students about the role that effort and personal responsibility plays in success.
Teach students that self-esteem cannot be given to them before they embark on a task, but that it comes as the result of tasks being mastered. Not only does the relationship involving self- esteem and academic results not signify that high self-esteem contributes to high academic results, repeatedly praising children for how intelligent they are has been shown to lower the scores on standardised tests questions.
This either leads to ‘imposter syndrome,’ where a child never really believes that they’re clever and is waiting to be found out, or it leads to a brittle self-image that is way too reliant on externally given accreditation. We thereby create slaves of praise who fall apart when faced with genuine challenge.
6. Model high level subject specific academic language.
Establish clear expectations regarding precision in the use of high level subject specific language in the way that we model and encourage language use – both in and out of lessons. We need to make academic and subject-specific language the norm. We should model precise language use all the time and point out that excellence is a habit, and that we become what we consistently do, so get your students used to using language well and spelling accurately with good punctuation at all times.
By appropriate use of academic and subject-specific language, we can encourage students to do the same. Lower academic language skills often hold back high-ability students and it is clear that we are sometimes guilty of undermining the significance and point
of high level subject specific language by dumbing down our own language in class. Make the use of technical language a high priority when evaluating the quality of teaching and learning and make it clear that precision is expected.