Gary Meers, Ed.D.

Hi Anie,
The key in setting student expectations for your courses is to base your requirements on business/industry standards. Through the use of advisory committees you can gain a clear picture of what your expectations should be. These expectations need to be relevant and engaging. Career college students should not be asked to complete work for the sake of work, there must be application. Assignments should be problem based where the students can see application of newly acquired knowledge and/or skills.
You can defend easily the requirements and expectations of your classes by showing how through the completion of their work students will be prepared to enter and succeed in the workplace. This way you are reinforcing what the workplace is requiring.
Another check is to make sure that assignments you make are relevant, engaging and project based. That is the students see a definite out come as a result of completing the work.
Gary

WILLIAM Travelstead

This is good advice for tech-school learning expectation.

Many instructors act as if their class is the most important class of all the curriculum offered in the school. As instructors we need to know what other outside class projects are being required of each student. A important factor I always try to be aware of is to take a overview of all the classes a student may be taking at one time. Overloading homework assignments can create a delima in assignment completion especially with evening class students who work full time day jobs. Every instructor has to assign out of class projects but I have found any project which demands more than one hour per day outside class will burden the time management factor per project. Most of the time a student will have 4 or 5 projects due from different classes. This translates to about 4 or 5 hours of outside work per day.

I have found the instructors who pressure students usally get their projects turned in and all their other projects are late or incomplete.

This is no way to manage outside projects.

We as teachers need to inform and instruct all students about time management. Developing this skill early will benefit eavry student at the entry level job position.

William E. Travelstead

Gary Meers, Ed.D.

Hi William,
Time management and project coordination are two planning factors that will assist with student success. I feel that instructors should, even though we are teaching adults, help students with their time management. By giving examples of how a project can be completed and helping the students to get started will save much time for the students when they get home and are working alone. Getting started is often the hardest part and I like to help them get over this hump in class so they can concentrate on moving the project forward when they are on their own.
Also, I visit with other instructors that have my students and we all try to stagger our due dates. We have found that by staggering certain due dates we get a higher percent of completion. If we can't stagger the due dates, we have found that by talking about the project among ourselves we have a better understanding of what the students are facing and that helps us to help the students.
Gary

Denny Cutright

I think goals should be set far enough out there as to make you stretch to reach them. If you set a tiny goal, what did you really accomplish? Does this satisfy you? Are you happy with the end result? So what are reasonable goals? Do you want to be average or do you want to be at the top? Small goals do it for some people and may eventually get you there, but for a student to excell they must have high standards. The sky is not the limit, reach for the stars and beyond. I think you should let the students know exactly what you expect of them from day one, keep them working and keep them motivated.

Gary Meers, Ed.D.

Hi Denny,
Right you are about goal setting. We must help students to set high goals for themselves and we must reflect that we are successful as instructors because we have these same high goals for ourselves.
By having feedback steps along the instructional path the students can see how they are moving along in their quest to achieve their goals. Progress helps with an understanding of success.
Gary

Sally Hall

Thank you - this was helpful! I often try and give some amount of class time for my students to work on assignments I give, because of the very reason you stated. However, I still have students who will come to class when the assignment is due - and they don't have it done. I used to be more lax on this, now I tell them it is due when class starts and I won't accept late assignments. Because then what I get is a handful of late (1, 2, 3 days) and it doesn't seem fair to the other students, not to mention the headache of keeping track of who gets what points deductected for lateness....

Sally Hall

This was helpful. I am going to start being very specific about my expectations and goals for the students of each class. I think this will help them. Often they have to do several practices (on practical industry proficiencies) before they can be marked "profiecient" Many just want their first attempt to be their proficiency!!

Troy Scheet CHEP

This is an excellent topic. Along with being one of the more difficult challenges it is one of the more important ones. I always strive to set realistic expectations, but I tend to be on the high end of the bar.
All too often I see other instructors fail to set realistic expectations or worst set the bar too low.
Consistency is something I would like to see more of from some of my counterparts.

Gary Meers, Ed.D.

Hi Troy,
You make a very good point about setting realistic standards for your students. These standards have to reflect the business/industry standards and be understandable to the students. They need to know why the standards are in place and that they are for their own good.
Gary