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Education Dive
First-day relationship-building key to setting student expectations, boosting success
Lauren Barack@Llauren
Aug. 21, 2019
Dive Brief:
Mary Davenport, who teaches English at an international school in
Brazil, writes for Edutopia that how she starts school in the fall
often influences outcomes for the whole year.
She invites students to share details about themselves with the class,
has them fill out surveys about their learning styles and makes a point
of asking how to correctly pronounce their names. Ahead of the first
day, she also focuses on how her room set-up, including ensuring
there's open space on the walls so students can imagine where their
work may appear during the year.
Davenport doesn’t even bring out the class syllabus until these and
other steps, such as defining active listening, are discussed so
students know they and their classmates — rather than the work — are
the bigger priority.
Dive Insight:
As with any new venture, knowing the expectations of a job or a project
can help create guideposts for someone to follow. For students, this
means having an understanding what a class will cover, how a teacher
may work, and what pupils are meant to bring to the table as well — not
just a book, paper or pens.
While expectations can be helpful, they should ideally also be
malleable. Each student has different needs, as does each classroom. A
student’s interest in trying something new should not be bound by their
worry they may run aground of an expectation — or even harm their own
academic performance.
Work by Hanover Research shows that when students are told what’s
expected from them at the beginning of a school year, they have a
better chance of meeting these goals. “The findings concluded that
teachers’ expectations have the potential to influence student
achievement both directly and indirectly by affecting the amount of
material that the student learns as well as their motivation to try to
learn,” the researchers wrote.
Additionally, students should be shown the steps that can help them
reach these outcomes, “…and their position on the trajectory to achieve
them,” the researchers wrote, adding that challenges should be amended
to individual students over the course of the year, as a child’s goals
may need to change.
Giving students the steps on how to achieve academic goals also teaches
students how to self-manage, one of the cornerstones of social and
emotional learning (SEL), which educators are starting to prioritize
for students’ personal growth. The foundation created by teachers, such
as Davenport, can also help students build a strong relationship with
their teacher from the start.
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