Chapter 10 page 217
--show students that they care about them personally.
Expectations Dimension
As I discussed earlier, it is important not to tell students that their work is excellent if it is not. This
implies that teachers should set high expectations for students and make sure that the students meet these
expectations. High expectations are extremely valuable in promoting higher motivation and academic
success.
However, it is not enough to set high expectations and then fail every student who doesn’t meet
these expectations. If a teacher walks into class the first day and hands out a demanding syllabus that does
indeed embody high standards, he may find within two weeks that he will either have to fail half of his
students or abandon his high expectations. If you have high expectations, you must set up a careful plan
that enables you to ensure that all students will meet these expectations. This means that you will have
contingency plans to work with or otherwise assist students who fall behind or fail to understand
something.
Short-term Goals Dimension
Students will be more motivated and learn more if they set (perhaps with your help) realistic short-
term goals that they can achieve. Short-term goals have powerful effects on motivation as well as on
achievement. When students set and achieve short-term goals, they increase their expectation of success
because they learn that that they can improve themselves step by step. As they attain their goals one at a
time, they can see how they are in fact improving, and they develop a strong belief that they can improve
further. In addition, short-term goals often help them see that improvement is a matter of developing
specific knowledge and strategies. If students set the short term goal of elaborating as they read in the next
week, then as their performance improves due to the use of this strategy, they learn to attribute this higher
performance to their strategy use.
There are many different ways in which teachers can encourage students to set short-term goals.
Here are some examples:
Elementary school:
--On Monday, have students set two goals for the week.
--Ask students to record reasonable goals on the board and provide them with specific forms of guidance on how to
meet such goals.
--Encourage students to write something in a journal every day and discuss how this helps/hinders thought.
--Students write down three daily learning goals in their morning journal. One goal is about behavior, one is about
a strategy they will use, and one is about something they learned yesterday that they will apply today.
--Before students write a composition, each sets four goals for good writing techniques they will use (such as
spending 15 minutes generating ideas before starting, making sure that they think about counterarguments, etc.).
Middle-school and high school:
--Have students help establish weekly goals for themselves.
--During first week of each marking period, encourage students to set realistic goals for the period. Students write
these in their journals.
--Students keep a journal of weekly short-term goals and they chart their own achievement in relation to these
goals.
--On Mondays, students write in their journal one strategy that they will focus on using that week. On Friday, they
will evaluate how they did.
--Before group discussions, students in each group write down three specific goals that they have for the group
work period.
--Before