Technique 54: Make expectations visible - High behavioral expectations

Teach like a champion 3.0: 63 techniques that put students on the path to college - Lemov Doug 2021

Technique 54: Make expectations visible
High behavioral expectations

As a rule of thumb, the more visible the action you ask students to execute, the easier it is for you to see whether students follow through, and the more that students implicitly recognize that you can clearly see what they do. This makes them more likely to do what you've asked and makes it easier for you to hold them accountable. Some of the most effective teachers have a way of making “observable directions” fun and tactile, increasing both the incentive to follow through and their ability to manage.

A colleague of mine, David McBride, used this idea to help a teacher who was struggling at the time to keep students focused. Drawing on Radar and Be Seen Looking, David asked the teacher to script three points into his lesson when he would give a clear task and ensure that he got 100 percent of students doing it, even if at first this was only temporary. He wanted to start by showing the teacher that students would and could follow his directions; that a room where everyone was productively engaged was within his reach.

David asked him to:

· Give an observable direction.

· Use Radar to scan intentionally and strategically to see whether it's being done.

· Stand in Pastore's Perch while scanning.

· Narrate the follow-through of at least two students who've done right away what the teacher has asked.

· Warmly correct at least one student if students were not meeting expectations.

David called this a “reset” and it worked in some cases, but in others it was less helpful because the teacher didn't always see off-task behaviors. So David changed his guidance to emphasize making expectations visible.

“I want you to choose an especially visible direction. Something you know students will know you can see them do. Substitute ’Pencils down and eyes on me’ for ’Eyes on me,’ for example, and then look for that as you scan.”

The results were dramatic. Students putting their pencils down were ten times more visible to the teacher than was fleeting and hard-to-gauge eye contact. It was easier to see who was following through as asked. Not only that, but students sensed the increased clarity implicit in the new directions.

It was evident to them that it would be obvious to the teacher whether they followed through. There were a few challenging kids in the group but there was a far larger number of students who had begun to sense that not doing as the teacher asked was a bit of a game in this classroom—a challenge to see if they could not do as the teacher asked without him noticing. Soon, playing that game had become a norm. There were games the kids played at recess and to play them was to be in the club. A version of that had started to emerge in the classroom, too.

But suddenly, with the gray era eliminated, a larger number of students who had not been following through consistently began to change their behavior. The norm suddenly shifted. The challenging kids were still there but suddenly they were few and far between. There had been one or two bold rebels who induced those around them to follow them in testing the teacher but suddenly the rebels had no followers. It was a case study in the Heath Brothers' observation that the size of the problem does necessarily correlate with the size of the solution.

This story of a classroom reinvigorated, and a teacher saved—he was at the point of giving up—began with making a simple direction more visible and thereby eliminating ambiguity. Follow-through is easier to manage and monitor when directions ask students to do something visible. If you can see it, you can manage it.

Here are a few more examples of how you might make expectations more visible:

· Say “Pencils in the tray” instead of “Pencils down.”

· Say “Books open in front of you” instead of “Books out.”

· Say “Let me see those pencils moving” instead of “You should be writing.”

I hope my story here won't make it seem as though making expectations visible is primarily a reactive strategy or a fix-it strategy for a struggling teacher. You may have noticed that Denarius Frazier, who appears throughout this book and who is surely one of the most exceptional teachers I have met, begins his class in the video Denarius Frazier: Check in with Your Neighbor with almost the exact direction David asked his struggling teacher to use: “Pencils down and track me in three … two … one.”