Classroom Expectations Research Articles

Are child and adolescent students more uncivil after COVID-19?

The goal of the current work was to understand how the COVID-19 pandemic school shutdowns may have impacted classroom incivility in children and adolescents. Study 1 compared prepandemic (Fall 2019) to postpandemic school shutdown (Fall 2022) rates of classroom incivility in a sample of 308 adolescents (49.7% boys; 61.0% White) between the ages of 9 and 14 (M = 12.06; SD = 1.38). Classroom incivility was significantly higher postpandemic shutdowns, while bullying, emotional problems, and friendships remained stable. In Study 2, we surveyed 101 primary educators (95% females; 88.1% White). Findings suggested that young students lacked social skills and knowledge of classroom expectations, contributing to increased classroom incivility. Our results highlight the need to monitor ongoing levels of classroom incivility. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Improving Behavior in a Self-Contained Elementary Classroom for Students With Emotional or Behavioral Disorders: A Study of CW-FIT

Class-wide Function-related Intervention Teams (CW-FIT) is a classroom management intervention in which teachers incorporate positive behavior support (PBS) principles by teaching specific classroom expectations and providing feedback on student behavior as part of an interdependent group contingency. Interventions like CW-FIT may be helpful for students with emotional or behavioral disorders (EBD), as such students often struggle to succeed in school. In the present replication study, researchers examined the effects of CW-FIT in a self-contained elementary EBD classroom. One teacher and her five students with EBD participated. Researchers used an A-B-A-B withdrawal design with maintenance probes to examine changes in students’ on-task behavior, as well as teacher praise and reprimand rates. Results revealed the teacher was able to implement CW-FIT with fidelity with corresponding increases in student on-task behavior and teacher praise, though there was little effect on teacher reprimands. The teacher and the students found CW-FIT to be socially valid. Results suggest CW-FIT can be an effective classroom management intervention in self-contained elementary EBD classrooms.

Past School Discipline Experiences: Perspectives of Disabled Adults.

School discipline has potential life-long consequences for students. Disabled youth can be misunderstood and experience harsh discipline and are at increased risk for negative outcomes, yet little research includes their voices. The aim of this study was to explore past school discipline experiences among disabled adults. Disabled adult perspectives (N = 9) regarding past school discipline experiences were explored employing qualitative descriptive methodology framed by the Peace and Power Conceptual Model. Peace-Power versus Power-Over-Powers involve actions/behaviors reflecting critical emancipation or oppression of those in power. Eight peace-power versus power-over themes emerged: "humiliating," "threatening," "escaping," "observing," "avoiding," "diverging," "isolating," and "failing." Disabled students can experience oppressive power-over dynamics separating them from others because they are unable to meet rigid classroom expectations. Educators may lack awareness of structural biases shaping reactions warranting need for school policies and practices promoting restorative justice, social-emotional learning, and inclusion. Classroom discipline can represent emancipatory peace-power or oppressive power-over powers. Not all teacher interactions represent 1 power or the other. Future research should focus on including disabled student voices informing school discipline practices. Educators' perspectives of their role fostering inclusive classrooms should also be considered.

Embodied Listening

In this paper, we propose embodied listening as pedagogical praxis in which we are receptive to how our whole bodies are involved in communicating with each other. Embodied listening disrupts what we call “speech-as-presence”—normative expectations of student participation emphasizing verbal contributions and privileging particular bodies. These expectations contribute to the reproduction of oppressive logics at work in classrooms—racism, hetero-patriarchy, white feminism, masculinism, ableism, colonialism. We argue that embodied listening can serve as a source of knowledge about these logics, supporting transformation of classroom expectations beyond imposed norms. We reflect on our experiences developing embodied listening practices in our undergraduate courses through our observations and students’ own reflections. Our findings demonstrate both the transformative potential of listening in classrooms and the tensions produced as these strategies discomfited students and disrupted classroom norms. Finally, we engage with critical perspectives on listening positionality from Indigenous studies, disability studies, and sound studies towards deepening our understanding of differences and multiplicities in how we listen. We illustrate how we continue to develop ways to incorporate this work in our classrooms and support students in the exhaustive and uncomfortable work of embodied listening and imaginative ways of being in the classroom.

Elementary School Teachers’ Self-Assessment of Use of Positive Behavior Support Strategies and Goal Setting Related to Equity-Focused Features

The goal of the Maximize Program is to collaborate with educators to develop resources and procedures to facilitate teachers’ use of equity-focused behavioral supports. In this study, we describe teachers’ responses to the first iteration of the interactive Maximize Technology Platform. Ninety elementary school teachers from three schools were encouraged to use the platform to learn about the foundational concept of equity literacy, complete a self-assessment of practices, and set a goal for improvement. We observed teachers’ platform use, self-reported use of 10 behavior support strategies, goals set for improving equity-focused features of these strategies, and reported progress during the first quarter of the academic year. Over 70% of teachers reported frequent use of four strategies: Classroom Expectations, Praise, Greetings, and Community Circles. Fewer teachers reported using Student Choice, Effective Questioning, and Corrective Feedback. Variations in use between general education and other teachers were observed. Over 60% of teachers set an equity-focused goal. Variability in the types of goals set and rates of reported improvement highlight the complexity of this work. Results offer promise about the use of interactive technology to facilitate professional learning and goal-setting about equity initiatives and offer insights for leveraging interactive technology to facilitate teachers’ implementation of equity-focused practices.

Cultivating Trauma-Informed Educational Practices for Students with Refugee Backgrounds

Abstract Schools provide spaces for academic knowledge while also addressing children’s social and emotional developmental needs. Because of the holistic development occurring within the education system, it is important to have an awareness of students’ experiences and challenges both inside and outside of the classroom. Students with refugee backgrounds represent diverse cultures, languages, and experiences but often share some common challenges and traumas. While trauma can impact students’ ability to learn and develop, classroom expectations, procedures, and rhythms can be adjusted to be trauma informed. Trauma-informed educational practices allow for a universal precautionary model for teachers and school staff to neutralize the environment for possible retraumatization, contributing to the creation of better educational experiences for students with refugee backgrounds as well as the rest of the student body. The aim of this article is to provide primary and secondary school staff—including teachers, administrators, and social workers—with practical information about trauma-informed educational practices to help them address the specific and unique needs of students with refugee backgrounds. Authors include examples of how school social workers, teachers, staff, and administrators can think about trauma-informed practices in the context of education and students with refugee backgrounds.

What is an "ArchintorTM?" A paradigm shift in teaching, facilitation, and learning: The impact of different types of coursework expectations on classroom network structures.

Hypothetically, a student could attend a class, listen to lectures, and pass the class without knowing or interacting with other students. What happens to the network when the classroom expectations change? For example, there is a coursework expectation that students exchange contact information, or the instructor uses collaborative learning practices. Or what if the principal investigator (PI) of a scientific team goes on a sabbatical? This study uses the framework of classrooms because of their relatability across science. We asked how do different instructor coursework expectations change network structures within a classroom or other learning environments? A social network survey was administered at the start and end of the semester (pre- and post-test) in six university sociology classrooms to explore how expectations impacted the communication and learning networks. We found practical changes in course expectations impact the communication and learning networks, suggesting that instructors, facilitators, and others could be the archintorTM (architect+instructor+facilitator) of the network. Understanding that expectations can impact a network's structure marks a paradigm shift in educational assessment approaches. If the archintorTM has identified the "optimal" network structure, then their task is to design expectations that result in specific interactions that ultimately improve student achievement and success. This work provides recommendations for classroom archintorsTM to create the most impactful classroom networks. Future research should extend beyond education and classroom networks and identify the best or desired networks in other areas like public policy, urban planning, and more. If these "optimal" networks were identified, an archintorTM could design a social network to solve wicked problems, manage a crisis, and create social change.

What Teachers Expect: The Relationship between Student Learning Behaviour and Teacher Expectation

Teachers play an essential role in any education system and are an important factor that has a bearing on student success. Teachers’ anticipation and commitment in the field of teaching and learning are but a significant component of the teacher’s performance in general. This study seeks to offer ways to improve students learning behaviour in the Aowin Municipality by considering the relationship between teachers’ expectations and students’ learning behaviour in the Ghanaian context. A Correlational research design was employed for the study. Using the Krejcie and Morgan table of sample size, a sample of 225 comprising 205 students and 20 teachers from 19 Junior High Schools in the Aowin Municipality was selected for the study. A multi-stage sampling method is adopted and used for conducting the study. An adapted Teacher Expectations questionnaire by Gallahar, with a reliability coefficient of 0.87 was used for the study. It was found that the relationship between teacher expectation (independent variable) and students’ behaviour (dependent variable), though not statistically significant (r (215) = -.204, p = .403), it was concluded that what teachers expect of their students may have some form of influence on the learning behaviours of students. It is therefore recommended that the school authorities should regulate the kind of expectations teachers give their students. For instance, the head teacher can have the general expectations for the school as well as specific classroom expectations by the individual class teachers. This can be read or pasted to keep reminding the students of what is expected of them

Pedagogical processes and standard dialect use: Implications for creative multilingual interaction from a Yorùbá‐language classroom in southwestern Nigeria

AbstractIn many language classrooms in multilingual nations, standard dialects are associated with and promoted in formal domains. Through classroom pedagogical processes that reify standard language use, other dialects are relegated to informal domains and therefore devalued in classroom settings. Informed by critical pedagogy, this article challenges the reification of standard dialects and examines their relationship with learners’ language use through an analysis of a Yorùbá‐language classroom in southwestern Nigeria. Findings from ethnographic data—classroom observations, instructor interviews, educational language policy, and curricular documents—show that learners’ social, linguistic, and cultural experiences interacted with and sometimes contradicted classroom expectations. I argue that the expectation of standard dialect use stifles fluid interaction in the classroom but, paradoxically, triggers learners’ linguistic creativity. To bridge the gap between classroom expectations and learners’ experiences, I call for an alternative pedagogy that privileges language users’ multilingual realities for optimizing standard language use in the classroom context. The article also contributes to ongoing conversations in applied linguistics about standard dialect use and the lack of affirmation of learners’ linguistic creativity in educational contexts.

Creating Feminist Futures by Imagining Lessons Differently: Using Speculative Fabulation and Poetic Inquiry as Methods to Trouble Classroom Expectations

ABSTRACT This article employs speculative fabulation and poetic inquiry as methods to explore the role of the body and embodied experiences in the classroom. We read ethnographic material from secondary schools in Finland and Further Education colleges in England with Donna Haraway, Karen Barad, Rosi Braidotti and Jane Bennett to trouble the practices and expectations in mainstream classrooms. By fabulating stories we demonstrate how seeing classrooms as sites of intra-action allows us as educators to see the relationships between humans and non-humans differently. By turning ethnographic data into poems we create shared experiences of lessons, perhaps invoking shared feelings and memories from our past. Above all, we strive towards a feminist future that challenges the prevailing mind/body dualism in the classroom and calls for better understanding of the diverse needs of our students by asking what if things were done differently in our mainstream classrooms?

Indexing authority in the classroom

The paper explores children’s authoritative claims in the peer group, focusing on the practices through which children achieve a position of deontic and/or epistemic authority during peer conflict. Drawing from ethnographic research documented with video recordings in two primary schools in northern Italy, this study adopts a CA-informed approach to analyse 8- to 10-year-old children’s conflictual negotiations of authoritative positions in the group hierarchy. As the analysis illustrates, children mobilize institutional entities and strategically deploy knowledge to underpin their local claims of authority. In the discussion it is argued that such practices are relevant to children’s socialization into classroom expectations and to the local negotiation of valued identities in the peer group. These insights are also declined in relation to the dichotomy between social inclusion and exclusion.

What I Think about When I Think about Teaching Ethics: A Philosophical Exploration in Pedagogy

What I Think about When I Think about Teaching Ethics: A Philosophical Exploration in Pedagogy

Reimagining home-based learning through comparisons of alternative schooling methods

Moving forward into a post-pandemic world, we can reimagine institutional education systems by reflecting on the lived experiences of emergency home-based learning and exploring the alternative narratives of traditional homeschooling. Having worked in the educational sector of Ontario during the pandemic, I observed families transitioning their homes into blended learning spaces for emergency home-based learning and the challenges that came with this change. Parents found themselves trying to explain teaching materials with no previous training while teachers tried to enforce traditional classroom expectations in households where many children had no remote learning structures in place (Fontenelle-Tereshchuk, 2020; Orelien-Hernandez et al., 2021). In contrast, the growing homeschooling alternative, a blend of home and educational space, had established relational systems to support this kind of community-based pedagogy. This alleviated many of the challenges of multimodal learning and had shown promise in increasing student academic scores, creating alternatives to socioeconomic barriers found in institutional education, and fostering racial protectionism (Mazama & Lundy, 2012; Statistics Canada, 2021a; Van Pelt, 2015). My paper introduces the preliminary questions and discussion of my proposed study for my master’s thesis using place-based pedagogy (Corbett, 2009; Ellsworth, 2005; Gruenewald, 2003; Illich, 1971) to open a conversation around homeschooling as a resource for post-pandemic pedagogical design and development.

Contextual Influences on English Language Teaching in Libya

There is no doubt that the educational process in any context is affected by the contextual influences that are prevalent within this particular context. Thus, what happens inside the classrooms between teachers and students is often decided by these contextual influences. These influences are to some extent intertwined and affected by the culture of the educational system including elements such as teachers’ beliefs about learning and teaching and the classroom expectations of both teachers and students. This paper therefore sheds light on these contextual influences in an attempt to facilitate the process of English language teaching in Libya. This paper provides useful messages and implications for educational policy makers, curriculum reform processes, teacher education programs in Libya and elsewhere.

Culture expectations in foreign language classrooms – A case in Vietnam

This study explores Vietnamese EFL teachers' and Vietnamese EFL students’ opinions on cultural expectations of roles and styles related to teachers and students in the English classroom. The instrument of a five-point Likert scale questionnaire was deployed and delivered to both the teachers and students to collect the data. One set of the questions was about classroom expectations in an Oriental classroom culture (in the Vietnamese context), and the other asked the participants about the classroom expectations in a Western classroom culture (in the context of teaching English as a Foreign Language in Vietnam). The results revealed that both groups of the participants have a tendency to adopt the characteristics displayed in the Western classroom culture more than those in the Oriental classroom culture. Their perspectives on individual questions were quite similar, producing a consistent result for consideration. Some recommendations for future investigation are also included in the study for future researchers to investigate.

Preschoolers’ executive functions following indoor and outdoor free play

BackgroundChildren's executive functions develop rapidly during the preschool years and are critical for attending to lessons and meeting classroom expectations. Engaging in periods of outdoor play that have lower regulatory requirements and that provide opportunities for physical activity may help children maintain control over their behavior when they are back in settings with higher regulatory requirements. However, little work has formally examined this proposition in early childhood. MethodsThis study used a quasi-experimental design to examine preschoolers' executive functions following indoor compared to outdoor play. A total of 72 children (mean age = 4.5 years, 46% female, 73% non-Hispanic White) participated in task-based assessments of attention shifting and inhibitory control and in classroom observations of attention and inhibitory control. A subsample of the children (n = 51) was assessed for physical activity using accelerometry to examine the extent to which young children's physical activity during outdoor play predicted their subsequent executive functions better than their physical activity during indoor play. ResultsChildren showed greater attention during classroom circle time following outdoor play compared to after indoor play (d = .34). Children's non-sedentary activity during indoor play was not related to their subsequent task-based executive functions but showed negative associations with their subsequent classroom-based executive functions. Children's percentage of time spent in non-sedentary physical activity during outdoor play showed a quadratic association with subsequent task-based inhibitory control but linear associations with subsequent classroom-based attention and inhibitory control during circle time. ConclusionPeriods of outdoor play that involve recommended amounts of physical activity may help young children engage executive functions when they return to the classroom.

Inside the Hidden Curriculum: “How-To” Practices for Supporting Underprepared Student Writers in the First-Year Writing Classroom

First-year writing pedagogies prioritize encouraging students to forge an academic identity by conceptualizing and intervening in scholarly conversations. Student writers from institutionally underprepared backgrounds often find this process both limiting and empowering because specific practices associated with classroom expectations and the university experience remain unfamiliar to them. In this article, I reveal a need for “how-to” exercises within the first-year writing classroom that aim to dismantle the hidden curriculum—a term that denotes the resources, norms, and values that are inaccessible to students who have not received guidance on these aspects of university academics. These interventions, which range from instruction on modes of classroom participation to methods of preparing for office hours, already complement the standard first-year writing curriculum and promise to promote success among underprepared students by rendering possibilities for class engagement explicit.

Beyond the Walls: Establishing Classroom Expectations in a Virtual Classroom

Classroom expectations are clearly defined explanations of behavioral and classroom performance that help create a consistent and safe learning environment. The value of setting classroom expectations has been researched for nearly 60 years and researchers have consistently found that teachers who explicitly teach expectations have students who are: on-task at higher rates, have more prosocial behaviors with peers, and overall are more academically successful than children who have not been systematically taught classroom expectations. Setting expectations is a way to define appropriate classroom behavior and to build consistency and structure among students. As result of the COVID-19 pandemic, many classrooms around the globe are experiencing higher rates of behavioral challenges than pre-pandemic levels. Costello et al. determined that during a typical school trajectory, approximately 20% of children experience some social–emotional and behavioral (SEB) concern. There are predictions that these rates will double or triple after the COVID-19 pandemi. Educators are mandated to implement evidenced-based practices and therefore, should further explore the implementation of setting expectations while their students are engaged in virtual learning, hybrid learning, and/or returning to the brick-and-mortar classroom amidst the pandemic. The purpose of this article is to demonstrate that systematically teaching expectations to all students in a virtual setting is an innovative and effective teacher classroom practice that can then be carried into the brick-and-mortar classroom as students return to in-person learning.

Safe to speak: Fostering psychological safety among incoming predoctoral dental students.

To describe the implementation and impact of an introductory session on psychological safety for incoming first-year Doctor of Dental Surgery (DDS) learners. In August 2020, first-year DDS students participated in a 2-h online instructional session focused on defining psychological safety, the behaviors that promote and disrupt it, and setting expectations for learner and faculty behavior to foster it. Learners worked in small groups to discuss the various components of psychological safety and document their discussion in a collaborative workspace before a large group debriefs. Participants were requested to complete an electronic survey before and after the session to evaluate their change in knowledge, confidence in performing tasks to foster psychological safety, and perceptions about their level of control. Six months after the session, learners were requested to participate in a focus group for additional feedback and reflections. Seventy-four participants completed the before and after experience survey. There was a statistically significant increase in knowledge of the components of psychological safety and perceptions of control. In addition, self-reported measures of confidence to perform the tasks increased from an average rating of 36% confident before the session to 86% confident afterward. In the experience, learners were active in their discussion and generated many ideas about behaviors that promote and disrupt psychological safety, which informed the creation of learner and faculty classroom expectations. Engaging learners in discussions about psychological safety can be a useful activity to establish expectations and create group norms that may support collaborative learning environments.

Teaching Classroom Expectations Through Cooperative Learning Activities

Teachers play a critical role in student learning, however effective teaching and learning cannot take place without established rules, procedures, and routines for the classroom. If your goal as a teacher is to help students understand classroom expectations and how to apply these expectations within different situations then just presenting the rules is not enough. Participating in cooperative learning activities is one way for students to learn to create meaning regarding the expectations and to transfer their meaning into other parts of the classroom environment. Applying cooperative learning activities to learn classroom expectations could enable the classroom to run smoothly, efficiently, and provide a positive classroom environment for all.