Just wondering about high expectations.

Recently, I have had several conversations about high expectations for our students and I feel the need to step back and think about this. In education, we read and hear about high expectations all the time. Who would ever complain that we have high expectations for students? The idea is that we set the bar high for every student and everyone should do so. Every school, every programme, every teacher, every coach should do so and many accreditation agencies, if not all of them, refer to high expectations for students.

This is all very nice, but I really think that this phrase, high expectations, is suffering from semantic stretch. A Stanford and Yale research, also referred to by the Heath bothers in their book Made to Stick, defines semantic stretch as “the overuse of any idea or concept that delivers an emotional kick” (Heath, 173). We could even say, for the phrase high expectations, that it is "the overuse of any idea or concept that delivers an educational kick”. We are using this phrase so much, all the time, that it might be time to re-think what we are talking about or, rather, what we should be talking about.

It has become quite evident to me, that many parents, at least in our community, use high expectations for their sons and daughters with an implicit, commonly agreed meaning. High expectations tend to refer to academic high expectations. If my daughter understands well this linguistic concept, teach her a more complex one. If my son knows how to do those kinds of equations, teach him more complicated ones. And let’s see really high grades on report cards and transcripts. This approach is widespread, but is this still the kind of bar that we want to set? I would offer that institutions that consider academics as the only high expectations are not really setting high expectations. And parents expecting this are doing a disservice to their children as they are somehow disconnected from what the world, including universities, wants and needs. We want to have students who get involved in meaningful community service to make a difference. We want students who represent well their sport teams throughout the years. We want to have students who decide to learn how to play an instrument just for the sake of learning something new. We want to have students who follow online classes based on their interests, not for grades. We want to have students who help fellow students in maths club after school. We want to have students who represent positively our schools when they travel for international conferences. We want to have students who make the right, ethical decision should a future test be found on the teacher’s desk. Of course, this list is not exhaustive but not only do we want all of this for our students, but we also need these types of behaviours to build a better world than the one creeping up in front of us. These are high expectations and it appears evident that, should we agree on them, we need to clarify our understanding of high expectations and communicate this clearly with our communities so that when the phrase high expectations is used then we really know what we are talking about.

For what it’s worth…