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A case study about the implied and perceived messages sent by one teacher through instruction for academic and behavioral expectations of students
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A case study about the implied and perceived messages sent by one teacher through instruction for academic and behavioral expectations of students
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Content
Running Head: IMPLIED AND PERCEIVED MESSGES 1
A CASE STUDY ABOUT THE IMPLIED AND PERCEIVED MESSAGES SENT BY ONE
TEACHER THROUGH INSTRUCTION FOR ACADEMIC AND BEHAVIORAL
EXPECTATIONS OF STUDENTS
by
Trent Anthony Hall
A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC ROSSIER SCHOOL OF EDUCATION
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF EDUCATION
Final Defense: December, 2017
IMPLIED AND PERCEIVED MESSAGES 2
In memory of my father, Dana Hall, who inspired me to be intellectual, challenge the status quo
and always seek truth.
IMPLIED AND PERCEIVED MESSAGES 3
Acknowledgements
To Julie Slayton, my Dissertation Chair: I cannot thank or admire you enough for the dedication
and time you put into making sure that I and every other student working with you had the best
possible dissertation. I joined your research group because I wanted my dissertation to be
something I was proud of and was the best reflection of my work and you have done everything
you can to make sure that was true. I also admire your integrity in making sure your students do
the work right, even during the arduous process that goes into the final product. There is not
much I can offer you in thanks to equal your dedication other than trying to live up the
expectations you have of your students to make an impact with the knowledge and skills you
have given.
To Carmen Hall, my wife: You are the reason for any of my professional and personal
accomplishments. You inspire me and all those around you to strive to be the best person they
can be and to never give up on improving their lives. I would never have thought of myself as a
Doctoral Candidate but your encouragement that I can do whatever I want and your constant
reminders of how special it is that I have reached this accomplishment kept me moving forward.
To Trinity and Guenever Hall, my daughters: Even though it was not your choice, I am so
grateful for the sacrifices you have made to allow me to accomplish this degree and dissertation.
You have both sacrificed me seeing your school and athletic performances and valuable time
with your dad during your adolescent development. I hope that I am able to use this degree to
improve your lives as well as others.
To Linda Hall, my mother: Thank you for raising me to be a conscientious and responsible adult
and for taking care of Trinity and all the family members while I have been preoccupied with
commutes and homework.
IMPLIED AND PERCEIVED MESSAGES 4
To my committee, Paula Carbone and Artineh Samkian: Thank you for the extra time you
committed to helping me make this dissertation professional and respectable. Thank you also for
the encouragement of getting through the process and to continue to believe that I knew what I
was doing. I do not think I would have made it through as effectively without your support.
To the USC Rossier School of Education staff: I truly enjoyed my experience as a student in the
doctoral program. I learned something valuable from each one of you I came in contact with and
you have all helped me become a better educator.
To the Educational Leadership and TEMS cohorts: I will always remember and appreciate the
comradery and support of all of my classmates. Not only did we persevere together but we
created bonds I hope will last well beyond this experience. The process of the courses,
homework, and dissertation was made so much more enjoyable and meaningful because of you
all.
To the staff of Del Norte High School: Starting with my Principal Greg Mizel, the staff has been
incredibly supportive and understanding of the amount of time I had to commit to USC during
this process, and I always felt encouraged through the whole process without any feelings of
resentment for any duties that may have been lessened. In fact, I feel many of you are more
proud of my degree than I am and that is what makes working with the Del Norte family such a
privilege and the highlight of my career.
To my students, past and present: I would not be in this position without you. My students have
always encouraged me to become more active in the educational community. I have been told so
often that I should be influencing and modeling teaching that it inspired me to take this step. I am
also inspired daily by my students to strive to seek the best possible educational practices to be
worthy of the honor to continue to teach and inspire all the students who come into my room.
IMPLIED AND PERCEIVED MESSAGES 5
Abstract
The century long established educational traditions of teachers moving through processes of
efficiency without students gaining access to developing individual problem-solving and critical
thinking skills has encouraged students to focus on learning to transfer knowledge to graded
assessments rather than applying knowledge in meaningful ways. The result of focusing more on
efficiency and less on meaning has caused teachers and students to have differing perspectives
on the purpose of education. This dissertation addresses this disconnect with the following
research questions: What do teachers communicate through their instruction about what they
want their students to learn behaviorally and academically? and What are the messages students
are getting through teacher instruction about what they should learn behaviorally and
academically? This case study of a high school English teacher and her students explored the
basis of teacher ideologies and beliefs as influential in teacher instruction practices and students’
perceptions of what was expected of them in school and how validated or encouraged they were
to progress in ways meaningful to them in their long term development.
The findings of this study showed the teacher’s academic and behavior expectations were from
her beliefs reflecting a contradiction of frustrations with current educational practices and
practical knowledge reinforcing patterns of efficient, teacher-guided instruction and established
curriculums and instructional practices. The academic and behavioral expectations the students
perceived encouraged them into complying with tasks designed for efficiency and discouraged
them from open expression of their individuality. The students viewed the content and
assessments they were given as irrelevant to their life goals and desired flexibility in teacher
expectations and more dialoguing in class.
IMPLIED AND PERCEIVED MESSAGES 6
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements 3
Abstract 5
Chapter One: Overview of the Study 8
Background of the Problem 8
Statement of the Problem 11
Purpose of the Study 12
Significance of the Study 12
Organization of the Study 13
Chapter Two: Literature Review 14
Teacher Perspectives 14
Cultural Basis for Teacher Ideology 16
Teacher Beliefs 27
Practical Knowledge 34
Instructional Practices Encouraging Teacher/Student Relationships 40
Student Centered Instructional Practices 43
Quality Instruction for Engaging Students 59
Student Perception 67
Classroom Environment 68
Grading Practices 74
Motivation 78
Conceptual Framework 82
Chapter Three: Methods 87
Sample 87
Site Selection 88
Participants 89
Instrumentation and Data Collection 92
Observations 92
Interviews 94
Data Analysis 97
Limitations and Delimitations 100
Credibility and Trustworthiness 101
Ethics 103
Conclusion 103
Chapter Four: Findings 105
Ms. Xavier 106
Ms. Xavier’s Students 110
Research Question One: Implied Messages Teachers Communicate 115
Finding One: Contradiction in Frustration and Reinforcement of Practices 116
Frustrations with Current Educational Practices 117
Reinforcing Established Curriculum and Academic Expectations 122
Finding Two: Scaffolding and Expectations of Self-Regulation 130
Teacher Guided Practice 131
Student Self-Regulation 137
Finding Three: Reinforcing Dominant Cultural Values 140
IMPLIED AND PERCEIVED MESSAGES 7
College Preparation 142
Literary Cannon as Necessary 147
Research Question Two: Perceived Messages Students Receive 155
Finding One: Emphasizing Expectations of Compliance 155
Expectations of Compliance 156
Students Feel Forced to Comply to Academic Expectations 166
Finding Two: Teacher Practices are not Engaging or Student Centered 176
Frustration with Grading Practices 177
Relevance 181
Intrinsic Value and Motivation 189
Finding Three: Valuing of Individual Recognition and Teacher Relatability197
Flexibility 197
Lack of Dialoguing 203
Chapter Five: Discussion, Implications, and Recommendations 215
Summary of Findings 216
Implications and Recommendations 221
References 229
Appendix A: Research Design Matrix 239
Appendix B: Teacher Pre-Observation Interview Protocol and Questions 240
Appendix C: Observation Protocol 243
Appendix D: Post-Observation Questions for the Teacher 245
Appendix E: Child Assent/Parent Permission Form 249
Appendix F: Student Focus Group: Protocol 253
Appendix G: Student Focus Group: Post-Observation Interview 254
IMPLIED AND PERCEIVED MESSAGES 8
CHAPTER ONE: OVERVIEW OF THE STUDY
In this chapter, I will set the context of my study by presenting the background of the
problem. I will follow the background with a statement of the problem, purpose and significance
of the study and the organization of the proposal.
Background of the Problem
When grade schools were developed, the purpose was to reflect a society that was
segmented, linear, and bound by time constraints (Heckman & Montera, 2009). Bureaucratic
organization models were instituted in education through a standardization of rules and
procedures so routine work could be specified and assessed efficiently (Mehta, 2013). The
teachers currently influenced by the bureaucratic model become victims of the standardization
and take on a role of producing students in a factory style manner appropriate for the students’
age, and they are responsible for encouraging students to gain knowledge and to progress in
levels of education by guiding them through standard measurements associated with each level
and relying on task completion tests for efficiency and maximum production (Heckman &
Montera, 2009). Students in the factory style model are expected to passively move through the
system by efficiently producing the standards for their grade level without questioning materials
and purpose and without building outside interests beyond the information given to them
(Heckman & Montera, 2009). The result of this century long establishment is a history of
teachers having to adapt to moving through processes of efficiency without students gaining
access to developing individual problem-solving and critical thinking skills (Darling-Hammond,
2007). Students thus focus on learning how to transfer knowledge onto tests and into graded
assessments for the purpose of being placed in the rankings of the correct level for their
proficiency rather than applying knowledge in meaningful ways (Darling-Hammond, 2007).
IMPLIED AND PERCEIVED MESSAGES 9
The standardization process also encouraged the development of grading to allow
teachers to communicate clear academic and behavioral expectations so students and parents
would know what was necessary to move from one level of grading education to another and
also to encourage competitive natures as a productive trait for future workers (Romanowski,
2004). With the current educational focuses, the grading practices and standardized expectations
of the educational system have negative effects on both teachers and students. Young teachers
react to the environments they were taught in and reflect a disconnection between the idea of
teaching and instructing, as can be seen in Holt-Reynolds’s (1999) case study of a young teacher
named Tayler who had described teaching as telling students what to do and exposing as
allowing students to see the processes of critical thinking. When teachers see the act of teaching
as dictating, they focus their lesson planning more on making their students successfully achieve
on assessments rather than encouraging critical thinking or growth patterns through guided
instruction (Romanowski, 2004). Students in a grade focused environment of dictated instruction
then perceive the focus of education as conforming to the expected behaviors of efficiency and
looking for the extrinsic rewards of higher test scores and grade rankings. The focus in these
areas can have devastating effects on student perspectives of learning such as developing a
deficit mindset of their abilities or being encouraged into cheating, which studies have shown is
something commonplace for a majority of students in middle and high school (Anderman et al.,
1998; Romanowski, 2004). Cheating patterns have also been connected to a devaluing of
learning through what goal orientation theorists argued was a product of students focusing on the
extrinsic rewards of earning grades rather than performance tasks (Anderman et al., 1998; Ames
& Archer, 1998). In research, student perspectives on academic and behavioral expectations
were more positively associated with effort when complex cognitive strategies and social
IMPLIED AND PERCEIVED MESSAGES 10
expectations such as cooperation and cultural awareness were encouraged instead of competition
through grade rankings being emphasized (Anderman et al., 1998; Romanowski, 2004).
Unequal criteria were imposed on students through rewards and punishments often based
on pushing the conforming of sexist and racist social orders rather than the celebration of
individual achievements promoting skills for college and the workplace (Darling-Hammond,
2007; Stanton-Salazar, 1997). The methods and procedures of average school curriculum did not
highlight intellectual resources and often students from low socioeconomic backgrounds had not
learned the expected work habits and mannerisms for academic success and were therefore
labeled as poor performers or of low academic ability (Stanton-Salazar, 1997). Along with
expected socially encouraged behaviors, in general, American students were not given access to
problem-solving and critical thinking skills to apply knowledge in meaningful ways, and it was
even more pronounced in minority groups because only students placed in advanced and college
preparatory classes, mostly White and Asian-Americans, were given opportunities to think,
write, create and develop projects which were challenging (Darling-Hammond, 2007). Strategies
of cultural awareness developed through teacher influence could be deceiving; strategies such as
the process of dialoguing (teachers engaging students in open ended discussion) and encouraging
student choice in assignments can give the illusion of equality while not acknowledging the
intact authoritarian nature of the teacher/student relationship (Ellsworth, 1989). So, any shifts in
approaches to students need to focus on educational practices encouraging students to trust, risk,
and feel acceptance of cultural identity, and if this does not happen, educational reforms will
continue to fail to address deep-seeded expectations of conformity for groups of gender,
ethnicity, and sexual orientations not promoted by the competitive efficient model of the
education system (Ellsworth, 1989).
IMPLIED AND PERCEIVED MESSAGES 11
Statement of the Problem
Heckman and Montera (2009) referred to modern education as having organizational
entropy or the process of not responding to new information or knowledge from the surrounding
world. The shifting of societal workplace expectations and the rise of diverse student
backgrounds have changed the landscape of the academic and behavioral needs of students but
schooling has remained mostly unchanged during these shifts. Expectations being sent by
schools and teachers are based mostly on their ideologies of values, beliefs, and attitudes from
established cultural norms of efficiently structured and exclusive educational models promoting
competition and goal orientation mindsets in students (Galindo, 1997). Students perceive the
highest-achieving classrooms as respectful and orderly environments that would allow them to
stay busy, struggle and still receive support from the teacher who is expected to manage the
class, clarify lessons, make lessons relatable, dialogue with students, and consolidate lessons into
more understandable units (Ferguson, 2012). Academic expectations need to be changed to focus
on knowledge and reflection rather than teachers using curriculum practices based upon
academic expectations of covering content standards without cognitive skills or being able to
adjust to student backgrounds and individual needs (Grossman, Hammerness, & McDonald,
2009). Behavioral expectations also need to model more inclusive and progressive platforms
such as productive and positive relationships between teachers, students, and peers, a process
that would require teachers to assess cultural differences among students and be more sensitive
to behavioral and academic patterns that do not necessarily fit the teacher’s ideology (Grossman
et al., 2009). The lack of student voice within the traditionally bureaucratic processes of
education and the encouragement of cultural awareness restricts some of the change necessary
for addressing individual student needs. Students are not given a voice in the process because
IMPLIED AND PERCEIVED MESSAGES 12
historically there has been doubt of the validity and reliability of student opinion in responses
about quality teaching (Ferguson, 2012). Student feedback needs to be encouraged and more
readily used because it has the benefit of identifying what students are perceiving as most
important in school and by identifying what they see as most important for overcoming the
struggles currently being faced with academic and behavioral expectations teachers may be
consciously or unconsciously imposing in their classrooms.
Purpose of the Study
This study investigated the teacher perspective guiding instructional practices and how
ideologies and beliefs influenced the academic and behavioral expectations in instruction. The
study also investigated how the messages teachers sent through their curriculum and instruction
were perceived by the students. The following research questions guided my dissertation study:
1. What do teachers communicate through their instruction about what they want their
students to learn behaviorally and academically?
2. What are the messages students are getting through teacher instruction about what they
should learn behaviorally and academically?
Significance of the Study
The study was important in two ways. First, it explored the basis of teacher ideologies
and beliefs and the way they influenced teacher instruction practices and the messages sent to
students through these practices. The study focused on the ideologies teachers brought to their
instructional practices through exploring the relationship between academic and behavioral goals
and instructional strategies. It also explored the development of teacher beliefs in their
instruction as a result of experiences from their background and teaching. Second, the study
explored the student voice as a way of expressing the meaning and effectiveness of the academic
IMPLIED AND PERCEIVED MESSAGES 13
and behavioral expectations placed upon them. Students had a chance to explain their
understanding of what was expected of them in school and how validated or encouraged they
were to progress in ways meaningful to them in their long term development. The combination
of teacher and student voice has not been a common connection made in research and it could
reveal possible miscommunications, misunderstandings, and subliminal messages that are
misleading toward the actual goals of classroom academic and behavioral expectations.
IMPLIED AND PERCEIVED MESSAGES 14
CHAPTER TWO: LITERATURE REVIEW
This study was intended to understand the way teachers’ ideology influences their
instruction, the behavioral and academic messages communicated to their students, and how
those messages shape students’ behavior both socially and academically. The literature review
enabled me to gain insight necessary to answer the following research questions: What do
teachers communicate through their instruction about what they want their students to learn
behaviorally and academically? What are the messages students get from teacher instruction
about what they should be learning behaviorally and academically? Thus, the literature explored
in this chapter includes 1) teacher perspectives, 2) instructional practices encouraging
teacher/student relationships, 3) and student perceptions about the messages teachers send for
behavior and academics through instruction. Teacher perspectives were important to this study
because the perspectives were consciously and subconsciously expressed through the behavioral
and academic expectations communicated to students. Instructional practices encouraging
teacher/student relationships were important in offering insight into instructional practices that
were understood to communicate skills and behaviors students needed to develop and
demonstrate in order to meet educators’ expectations for productive classroom behavior and high
academic performance. The literature related to student perceptions provided insight into what
was already known about students’ perceptions of what is important in behavior and academic
goals as communicated by the instruction they were receiving.
Teacher Perspectives
As I am interested in understanding the behavioral and academic expectations teachers
communicate through their instructional choices, I first needed to understand the basis of teacher
perspectives they were likely to hold in relation to the students they taught. By understanding the
IMPLIED AND PERCEIVED MESSAGES 15
range of perspectives that may be consciously or unconsciously held by teachers in setting their
expectations, I was able to interpret their instructional choices through the lens of ideology.
Ideology is generally referred to as the conscious and unconscious orientation characterizing a
group’s goals, expectations, and actions. For this study, teacher ideology will also be explained
through Galindo’s (1997) definition of language ideologies as systems of ideas creating views of
reality that appear most rational for how the social world ought to be and presented through a
basis of values, beliefs, and attitudes developed from unexamined assumptions. The literature in
this section will explore the various sociopolitical and personal influences on the values, beliefs,
and attitudes teachers develop for the ideologies that influence instructional practices and
academic and behavioral expectations. The sociopolitical influences on teacher ideology come
from the school environments Mehta (2013) described as unproductive atmospheres of distrust
and regulation where policy makers imposed external accountability and regulations on
practitioners who were not always motivated in the tasks of assessment or effective in covering
standardized measures. These two bodies of education have developed a standardization of the
profession through rules and procedures that make the overall system routine work with clearly
prescribed and defined goals for all stakeholders, which have not been drastically reformed since
the mid-19
th
Century (Hargreaves & Shirley, 2009; Heckman & Montera, 2009; Mehta, 2013).
Attempts by educators to change the ideology to be more imaginative and break existing patterns
of stagnation became irrelevant in the long term, encouraging teachers in the middle and later
parts of their careers to become complacent and cynical about reform (Hargreaves & Shirley,
2009; Heckman & Montera, 2009; Mehta, 2013). These conditions have changed teachers’ ideals
of their job descriptions from professionals with deep levels of knowledge, judgement, and
expertise to individuals competently managing classrooms for efficiency and control in order to
IMPLIED AND PERCEIVED MESSAGES 16
complete the required tasks for standardization (Darling-Hammond, 2007; Hargreaves & Shirley,
2009; Mehta, 2013). Hess and Azuma (1991) explained school environments as wearing on
teachers because of the emphasis on accepting prescribed curricula, accepting rules of
authorities, persisting at tasks to master skills that were often not appealing, and accepting social
behaviors necessary for social capital and group dynamics. Thus, teacher ideology often reflects
a sense of autonomy and what Hargreaves and Shirley (2009) defined as the presentism of being
focused on short-term objectives, the conservatism of loyalty to established educational
practices, and the individualism of working alone in their classrooms.
The contradiction of American social ideals also effects teacher ideology in academic and
behavior expectations. As Hess and Azuma (1991) explained, school environments focused on
self-control, patience, harmony, and compliance often contradict the social dynamics of the
American culture that promotes behaviors of verbal assertiveness, independence, and taking
initiative. The contradiction plays out in classrooms where teachers use hierarchical reward
based strategies reflecting prescribed behaviors of compliance rather than modeling and
promoting actions to encourage independence and growth (Hess & Azuma, 1991). Because of
the grade school belief that children of particular ages have a narrow range of attributes, teacher
ideology is more typically focused on scaffolding by presenting small and easy steps, assuring
prompt success, and moving quickly from one problem to the next without fostering interest,
mastery, or reasons for motivation (Heckman & Montera, 2009; Hess & Azuma, 1991). Another
social ideal in conflict is the gap between K-12 school perception of college ready skills and
college faculty perception of those same skills. Collier and Morgan (2007) proposed university
success required mastery of the college student’s role in understanding instructors’ expectations
of workload, explicit expectations for assignments, communication and problem solving and
IMPLIED AND PERCEIVED MESSAGES 17
being able to apply those expectations successfully to completing coursework. Moss and
Bordelon (2007) showed the approach used in high schools through their study of a rhetoric and
writing course designed specifically to address college readiness through direct instruction of the
teacher in argumentation, critical analysis and the ability to pass a placement exam of prompt
analysis. Academic and behavioral expectations therefore can be confused between social
expectations, grade school teacher interpretations of what is important to college success, and
faculty expectations for what brings success in their courses.
Research has presented ways for teachers to counteract the contradictions being presented
to them about instruction and classroom management. Grossman et al., (2009) said that teacher
practices and instructional routines should develop productive and professional relationships
with students, help students develop positive relationships with each other, and require a
sensitivity and knowledge about group dynamics as part of the instructional approach to
classroom routines. With these adjustments, teacher ideology would then focus less on covering
material and more on providing learning opportunities to engage students in collaboration and
accessing prior knowledge through cultural awareness to help students interpret new material and
allow them to engage in higher order thinking processes (Darling-Hammond, 2007; Grossman et
al., 2009). The literature in this section will be synthesized to show the cultural influences on
teacher ideology through government assessments and school cultures, roles of assessments,
teacher beliefs about student behaviors and learning from the dominant cultural perspectives, and
the practical knowledge teachers gain from their experiences in the classroom.
Cultural Basis for Teacher Ideology
In this section, I will present literature exploring the role cultural influences and
assessments play on teacher ideology. The articles will show teachers’ ideologies are often
IMPLIED AND PERCEIVED MESSAGES 18
reflective of power norms defined in society, directly influenced by the assessments
implemented by policy makers, reflect a disconnection between teacher generated grading
practices and government adopted curriculum and standards expectations, result in conflicts
generated from cultural divides between teachers and students, and create greater likelihoods of
success with minority groups when more open to criticizing the academic and behavioral norms
of school environments influenced by the overall social norms and school communities.
Delpit’s (1988, 1992, 2006) writings expressed the concept of the culture of power being
made up of how power is enacted in classrooms, the rules for participating in power that are
reflections of those who have power, explicit instruction of how to acquire power easier, and an
imbalance of those with power being unwilling to acknowledge it and those with less power
being aware of its existence (Delpit, 1988). Power was shown in the classroom through the
power the teacher has over the students, the power of textbooks in determining curriculum, the
power of the state to enforce standardization, and the power of the individual or group to create
norms for ways of talking, acting and dressing. Teachers, especially when they were from
different cultural or class backgrounds as the children, had trouble moving away from the
standardized curriculum to transferring the knowledge to life experiences for problem solving
and advanced thinking (Delpit, 2006). The results of this struggle between established norms and
awareness of student background was an ideology with duality between liberal educators
promoting the goal of education for children to develop individually, without outside social
standards being forced upon them, while also expecting compliance and adherence to class
norms often implied rather than implicitly stated. Delpit (1992) explained the dichotomy of
teacher expectations can confuse students in the way school norms may clash with the values and
expected behaviors of the home environment. Teachers can misread student abilities levels based
IMPLIED AND PERCEIVED MESSAGES 19
on the language and interaction patterns learned at home and could even use instructional
patterns and behavioral expectations conflicting with community norms and values. Teachers’
misreading of student abilities can reflect an emphasis on failure rather than models of success
by labeling students who are problematic and at risk and then proposing remedies for
deficiencies until they are acceptably falling into expected patterns of behavior and achievement.
Delpit (2006) argued a need to rethink the approach to explaining education was more than just
succeeding in society but also taking pride in individuality and community pride. Delpit’s (1988,
1992, 2006) writing is important in understanding that teacher ideology is often about power
dynamics and promotion of cultural norms rather than working with students in their current
capacities gained from their backgrounds.
Anagnostopoulos (2003) used a critical discourse analysis framework and multi-layered
qualitative approach to examine the relationships in literature studies between testing texts and
the classroom tasks teachers and students used regularly. She focused specifically on the
connection of the Chicago district assessment, the CASE, and its effect on two 10
th
grade
classrooms in Colson High School, a large neighborhood vocational-tech magnet school in
Chicago with 90% racial and ethnic minorities and 30% Limited English Proficient. She studied
both a first year teacher and a teacher who had taught English for 9 years. The data was collected
through a longitudinal study of weekly interviews with administrators, teachers, and students and
12 classroom observations a year from 1995 to 2001. The interviews were semi-structured and
focused on how each individual understood the district’s standards and assessments and how the
standards affected their perceptions of what was most important to emphasize as productive
lessons. Observations used descriptive notes of all classroom activities, the material used, the
classroom seating arrangements, postings about the novels and CASE materials.
IMPLIED AND PERCEIVED MESSAGES 20
Anagnostopoulos (2003) used a discursive process of analysis of the material to identify the way
district testing texts shaped teachers’ and students’ interactions with literary texts and to identify
the political and academic consequences of the texts. What she found was teachers approached
the teaching of the districts’ standards through highly conventional and narrow definitions of
reading literature. The materials and classroom activities positioned students to be active readers
and engaged in critiquing the texts but avoided any themes of race or social privilege the students
may have been able to connect to their life experiences. When asked in the interviews to explain
the direction of the lessons, teachers often expressed their approach to the literature was
governed by time constraints and the need to cover the novel; one of the teachers specifically
designed lessons based on anticipation of what might be presented on the CASE assessment.
Anagnostopoulos (2003) included a table of activities this teacher used and found 90% of his
classroom activities were worksheet completion assignments. Classroom observations also
revealed instances when students would attempt to engage the texts in critical ways of exploring
race and personal connections but the teachers would quickly guide the direction of the class
back to summary and even saw the discussions as disruptive. Her conclusion was, because of the
testing, teachers saw students who expressed connections from their own viewpoints as
challenging their authoritative position and needing to be repositioned as academic readers who
uncritically accepted the authors’ and teachers’ perspectives. This article is important to show
teachers’ ideology about what is important in their curriculum is often dictated by the standards
their students are judged by and may even be in contradiction to student interests and
developmental needs.
Moss and Bordelon’s (2007) study examined the instructional practices of teachers
implementing a rhetoric and writing course piloted in a Southwestern school district and focused
IMPLIED AND PERCEIVED MESSAGES 21
on direct, explicit instruction of college level reading and writing to benefit linguistically and
culturally diverse students. The research guiding the curriculum used in the rhetoric and writing
course was based on genre theory and a Socio-literate view of literacy that it is acquired through
exposure to texts reflecting multiple social contexts. Teachers using the curriculum were trained
to focus on rhetoric and argumentation of expository texts rather than the more traditional
English teacher focus on literary review. The study was focused in the Western High School
District with 39,000 students and 69% of those students being designated as non-white. 50% of
the district population was bilingual and 27% spoke limited English. Out of the district, three
schools were chosen for the study with one of the schools being high socioeconomically and the
other two being low socioeconomically. Three teachers located at three different high schools
were used as purposive sampling and identified by the district curriculum specialist as excellent
teachers that effectively implemented the developed rhetoric and writing course. One of the
teachers identified had 35 years of experience, one 5 years of experience, and the other 8 years of
experience. All three teachers were White, Credentialed English majors. Thirteen twelfth-grade
students of the three teachers were also selected to form a focus group. The group of students
were 7 males and 6 females. The group was also comprised of 9 Hispanic students, 2 white
students, and 2 Filipino students. Multiple data sources were used including course documents,
interviews with course developers and the teachers and students involved in the study, and
teacher responses to surveys and written reflections on their perception of the implementation of
the curriculum. The research was conducted in three phases. Phase one was a review of the
course documents found in the rhetoric notebook developed for the curriculum of the course and
meetings with the directors of the curriculum about the background and purpose of the
documents for instruction. Phase two was 15 classroom visits, 5 per teacher, over a 3-month
IMPLIED AND PERCEIVED MESSAGES 22
period of time. During the observations, teacher handouts were collected, and an interview
conducted with the teacher at the start of the study, after each observation, and at the end of the
study. Researchers, during this phase, also attended professional development meetings and took
field notes on what was said during the meeting and the teachers’ written reflections on the
implementation of the curriculum. A survey of 10 Likert items and two open-ended questions
were given to teachers during one of the meetings to identify successes and challenges in the
implementation of the rhetorical curriculum. Phase three was the interviews with the students.
Each student was interviewed individually about their perceptions of the curriculum and then
they meet in small groups at their particular school sites to respond verbally to a written prompt
with the purpose of allowing observation of the strategies they used to address an essay prompt.
After the data was transcribed and coded, a constant comparative method was used to triangulate
data. Moss and Bordelon (2007) found all of the teachers spent large percentages of class time on
teaching argumentation through a process of students critically reading an essay, making and
discussing assertions, using multiple sources of evidence for support, and writing an
argumentative essay on the thematic subject of the unit. Students also engaged in English
Placement Test practices using short-answer and multiple-choice questions to assess
comprehension of the content of essays. The teacher practice in the study was through the
techniques of scaffolding and direct instruction that incorporated modeling. All the classrooms
were teacher-directed with large and small group activities. During the surveys, teachers
identified the core skills of the course as being valuable, namely the focus on critical thinking
and pre-post reading activities. The students were at various levels of language skills and so
showed mixed reactions to the course with some students thinking it was too challenging and
others feeling success with the activities. With the writing prompt samples, students were able to
IMPLIED AND PERCEIVED MESSAGES 23
show specific and flexible strategies to determine their position toward the prompts. Moss and
Bordelon (2007) concluded linguistically and culturally diverse students needed more direct
instruction from teachers who explicitly clarified requirements for reading and writing. They also
concluded that while the direct and explicit curriculum was beneficial to students, when used
over multiple class and school environments, further development of the course would need to
allow for teacher autonomy in adjusting the curriculum to the needs of their students and that
more dialoguing with students needed to be encouraged. The importance of this study is in
showing how a formalized curriculum encouraging direct teacher instruction and heavy
scaffolding could affect teachers’ ideology by encouraging direct instructional practices even
when there is a necessity for flexibility to individual class and student needs.
Bowers’s (2011) secondary data analysis of the Educational Longitudinal Study done in
2002 and 2004 was focused on the intersection of grades as informative assessments of academic
knowledge and non-cognitive behaviors. The sample of the study was about 15,400 students in
grade 10 across about 750 different schools in the United States involved in an extensive
questionnaire of multiple subjects combined with the report of their school transcripts. The
questionnaire was an assessment battery adapted from the National Assessment of Educational
Progress and addressed academic knowledge in mathematics. The transcripts were used to
analyze the grades across subjects in high school. Multidimensional scaling was used to estimate
latent variables in the relationship between the assessment and grades. The results of the analysis
suggested that teacher assigned grades in high school were a multidimensional assessment of
both student academic knowledge and non-cognitive behaviors such as engagement,
participation, attendance, and effort. Because the evidence revealed some students performed
well on the test but received low grades and some students performed poorly on the test and
IMPLIED AND PERCEIVED MESSAGES 24
received high grades, Bowers (2011) asserted teachers graded based on how well students
conformed to academic and social demands of schools. This study is important in showing that
even though teachers express a belief that their academic and behavioral expectations are heavily
influenced by standardization and district mandates, the majority of their grading practices
actually represent individual standards of expectations based on an ideology of what is most
practical for their classroom efficiency.
Milner’s (2010) case studies of a range of school contexts (urban, suburban, rural, public
and private) created an explanatory framework addressing the opportunity gaps in the current
educational environment through theory, research, and practices described in established
literature. His described effects of color blindness were connected to teachers’ failing to
understand racial backgrounds of their students and ignoring the reality that curriculum was
Eurocentric and constructed for the needs of White students in a way that devalued students from
other backgrounds. He used demographics from the 2008 National Center for Educational
Statistics to emphasize the racial divide between the teachers and students, which made it likely
teachers were presenting expectations for curriculum and behavior reflecting themselves and not
their students. The separation of teacher and student expectations was found to cause cultural
conflicts. When a White teacher presented expectations from a position of empowerment and
with cultural values often foreign to students of different cultural backgrounds, the cultural
conflicts resulted in oppositional or confrontational environments where students and teachers
engaged in power struggles. Milner (2010) labeled teacher mindsets in response to power
struggles as teachers believing they must teach students the same way they would raise their own
children, not tolerating behaviors they had deemed as socially inappropriate, and establishing a
hard line of forced assimilation or consequences. He suggested rather than expecting students of
IMPLIED AND PERCEIVED MESSAGES 25
diverse backgrounds to understand cultural expectations in a classroom, teachers needed to be
able to explain academic and behavioral expectations and their purposes. Milner’s (2010) theory
of the myth of meritocracy explained teachers who came from privileged positions prejudged
students based on their backgrounds and behaviors because they believed individual choices
were the main determinant in student success instead of social influences. The myth of
meritocracy also explained teacher mindsets of believing all people were born with the same
opportunities; if students do not succeed, it is because of lack of effort and some students do not
have the ability to succeed in the academic environment created in the school or class
environment. Milner’s (2010) final set of identified teacher mindsets were based on the teachers’
own backgrounds created from beliefs that they should separate themselves from the students’
home environments, they should feel sorry for the students’ cultural backgrounds and inability to
understand what was expected of them, and students were directly reliant on teachers to explain
what was important. He concluded his study with a proposition for teachers to develop context
neutral mindsets based on ideology that students could be interested in the subject no matter
where they came from, teachers had the ability to motivate students in classrooms, and there
were few differences in schools to necessitate drastic changes in approaching students of
different backgrounds. Milner’s (2010) framework of teacher mindsets is important to this study
in that it illuminates that teacher ideology for productive academic and behavioral expectations
often contradicts and alienates their students.
Bartolomé (2004) conducted a study showing how some teachers, who understand the
politics of teaching, devise strategies on their students’ behalf to combat inequalities they might
experience in school. The study was conducted at a high school approximately 18 miles north of
the Mexican border with a predominately Mexican/Latino but still culturally and linguistically
IMPLIED AND PERCEIVED MESSAGES 26
diverse population. The sample was four educators ranging in experience from 8 to 25 years who
had been identified as exemplary by administrators and colleagues. The interview of each teacher
consisted of open-ended questions intended to uncover teacher explanations of their views of
their own experiences and beliefs about low SES, non-White, and linguistic minority students.
The interviews revealed teachers believed their students’ academic and social successes came
from the school personnel’s ability to create a caring and equal environment for students who
had not traditionally received that kind of support. Teachers questioned the dominant ideologies
of meritocracy and deficit mindsets and resisted idealizing the mainstream, White, middle-class
culture. The educators expressed they saw racism and economic restrictions as having a greater
importance in their students’ lives than academic and social abilities. They also rejected deficit
mindset because they saw their students’ main problem as not having money, respect, and access
to resources. They also believed their role as teachers was to assist students in a better
understanding of both school and mainstream culture so students could overcome perceptions of
grading and evaluation procedures and gain confidence and empowerment in their abilities.
Bartolomé (2004) explained that the teachers successful in educating non-mainstream groups
looked for alternative explanations for the academic underachievement of their students and
fought against the myth of meritocracy’s assimilationist models reinforcing under-representation
of certain demographics in social structures. This study shows the importance of teacher
ideology reflecting denouncements of discriminatory academic and behavior policies that
alienate students rather than encourage them and their ability to come up with new behavioral
and academic expectations necessary for the populations where they work.
The cultural basis for teacher ideology is a reflection of the promotion of cultural norms
and traditional power dynamics encouraging teachers to focus on compliance, autonomy and
IMPLIED AND PERCEIVED MESSAGES 27
covering material rather than adjusting to the cultural and individual needs of their students
(Anagnostopoulos, 2003; Delpit, 1988, 1992, 2006; Moss & Bordelon, 2007). Teacher ideology
based on the cultural norms also heavily influence assessment and grading practices since
teachers set academic and behavior expectations not as much on standardization as on their own
generated ideals of what is appropriate behavior (Bowers, 2011). Teacher ideologies based upon
reactions to testing regimens are reflected in behavioral expectations that contradict or alienate
their students when teacher beliefs could encourage learning instead by acknowledging the
conforming expectations of sociopolitical policies and empowering students to overcome them
(Bartolomé, 2004; Milner’s 2010).
Teacher Beliefs
In this section, I will present literature exploring the role teacher beliefs have in the way
academic and behavioral expectations are created for their students. Beliefs are the psychological
state an individual holds as the premise of truth and teachers develop their beliefs to reflect their
ideologies and in reaction to previous educational experiences both as students and as teachers.
The articles will show the importance of teachers recognizing their beliefs and how they may
reflect personal biases, teachers often place higher beliefs on efficiency than other aspects of
classroom dynamics, teachers’ beliefs about student behavior are correlated with their view of
academic potential and therefore spend much of their time on behavioral patterns, and teachers
have a positive association with being directly involved in the lessons they teach.
Pajares’s (1992) explored how the concept and study of teacher belief can be applied to
understanding teacher practice but it has been hard to define and research. His article built off the
view that beliefs were the best indicators of the reason individuals made decisions in their lives,
and they have proved a valuable psychological construct for teacher education. His argument
IMPLIED AND PERCEIVED MESSAGES 28
was teacher beliefs were hard to study because they often were labeled in many different ways,
such as personal practical knowledge, values, rules of practice etc. Another reason research
struggles with identifying the concepts of belief is the difference between knowledge and belief
in a person’s perspectives. Pajares (1992) explained knowledge was open to evaluation and
critical examination because it could be identified through logic and reasoning but beliefs were
not as easily identifiable and yet were more influential than knowledge. Beliefs were identified,
through research, as having more influence because they were “eternal truths” in the minds of
teachers and were more readily applied to practical classroom situations (Pajares, 1992, p. 312).
Researchers also concluded that beliefs influenced the way teachers explained their teaching
outside of the classroom but most of teachers’ behaviors in the classroom were a combination of
beliefs and experience. According to Pajares (1992), teachers will use their declarative
knowledge of the logic and authority to apply to a situation but will be more effective in
classroom management when they use a series of judgments based upon their evaluations of the
people, context, and situation. He, therefore, defined beliefs as an evaluation and judgment rather
than the knowledge of objective facts, and individual belief systems were formed by beliefs,
attitudes, and values. In applying his definition of beliefs to teachers, Pajares (1992) labeled
educational beliefs as about teacher efficacy, epistemology, performance attributions, self-
concept, student self-efficacy, and discipline orientations. He concluded by explaining the
connection of teacher beliefs to practice, especially with in-service teachers. He explained that
teacher candidates bring in preconceived teacher beliefs they then apply to their classroom
practices, and most preservice teachers had unrealistic and self-serving biases of what they see as
most important about education from their own experiences. Pajares’s (1992) research is useful
IMPLIED AND PERCEIVED MESSAGES 29
in exploring how defining teacher beliefs can encourage teachers to become more aware of their
beliefs and reform practices through self-reflection.
Nelson and Harper’s (2006) literature review explored how the growth of student
teachers and the growth of their students reflect the difficulty in the student teacher learning
process. Their research found educators had been lead to develop an aversion to difficult
classroom tasks requiring more time and development because American culture understands
good learners as those who quickly acquire information and skills. American teachers have
developed a belief that their students view learning as an exercise of rapid progression rather
than in-depth engagement. Nelson and Harper (2006) explained teachers formulate their beliefs
about teaching and learning from their prior experiences, and in order to grow, they will have to
move into areas which are not as comfortable or familiar in their teaching practices. Nelson and
Harper (2006) built off of the concept of liminality, which explains there are three phases of
transition: separation, limen or margin, and reaggregation. They found teachers did not often
move into these phases of liminality because they were stuck in an aggregated state of
preconceived assumptions and reluctant to leave those assumptions. Nelson and Harper (2006)
suggested most educational practices and teacher beliefs were based on a modernist perspective
established by Piaget and Vygotsky encouraging linear and product-oriented systems of learning
and proposed teachers should move their thinking more toward a postmodern perspective of
complex, open ended, and transformative processes. In a postmodern perspective, students would
be guided to focus less on accomplishing tasks rapidly and more on the learning itself. The study
is important because their research provides evidence of American educators denying their
students chances for in-depth learning because of beliefs in the need for efficiency as the main
academic and behavioral goals.
IMPLIED AND PERCEIVED MESSAGES 30
Eder’s (1981) study explored the nature of ability groupings for instructing low ability
students and the impact of differential learning environments in schools. Her study was designed
for a three days a week, full academic year observation of a first-grade classroom. The
observations were recorded through brief notes made in the classroom followed by detailed notes
after the observations and video-taping. In-depth interviews were then conducted and coded
based on what was recognized between teacher and student interactions during the observations.
A sociolinguistic approach was used in analyzing the data to examine the teacher-student
relationship and social dynamics across group levels. Eder (1981) found the ability groups for
reading had been designed based on discussions the teacher had with the kindergarten teacher to
determine the level the students had previously been working in and the observations the first-
grade teacher had made of the students in the first week of the school year. The kindergarten
teacher had based much of her groupings of students off of the level of maturity the students
exhibited in class because attention span and good listening skills were determined as extremely
important for knowing letters. Eder (1981) observed the placing of students based on behavior
had negative consequences because the students who did not pay attention as closely were
grouped together and distracted one another and then performance management in these groups
were compromised by the teacher spending more effort on managing behaviors then on reading
instruction. This study is important in understanding teacher beliefs because it emphasized how
teachers often make choices about student grouping and academic abilities based on student
behavior rather than student ability, and when teachers grouped students together in like behavior
patterns, it tended to perpetuate those behaviors, whether they were positive or negative, rather
than encouraging student development.
IMPLIED AND PERCEIVED MESSAGES 31
Bloome, Puro, and Theodorou’s (1989) microethnographic analysis of classroom lessons
presented the concept of looking at classroom education from a display of students and teachers
interacting through a series of procedures rather than for the purpose of acquiring academic
content and skills. They asserted that although classroom lessons were more procedural exercises
than anything else, cultural meanings and values were assigned to lessons to communicate
meanings and values for students progressing well beyond any one lesson or set of lessons.
Therefore, lessons were labeled as procedural displays that showed the teacher and students
completing procedural accomplishments and enacting lessons based on cultural meanings and
values determined by the education community. Teachers and students enacted lessons through
expected and trained behaviors without necessarily engaging in content or constructing cultural
significance. Bloome et, al. (1989) claimed procedural displays were cooperative efforts of the
teacher and students, emphasizing either a student or teacher perspective but not both, requiring
engagement in order to be considered effective teaching, and are considered tangential. In their
ethnographic study of an 8
th
grade Language Arts class and a 7
th
grade Social Studies class, they
found questions and discussions in the class were less concerned with substantive engagement of
academic content than with moving efficiently through the lesson and progressing students
through a series of directed questions built one upon the other. The classroom studies Bloome et,
al. (1989) reviewed showed the amount of time teachers spent on academic tasks determined the
height of test achievement, so classroom management emphasizing time-on-task became
emphasized as effective teaching. They argued major assumptions were made when completion
of tasks was correlated with academic achievement because it assumed the responses of students
to a limited number of questions reflected a completion of a task. These responses were then
assumed to represent strong cognitive processing. The importance of this study is to reflect
IMPLIED AND PERCEIVED MESSAGES 32
teacher beliefs are based on assumptions of getting through lessons being equivalent to academic
substance, which encourages teachers to spend much of their effort on managing classroom
behavior and completing procedural tasks rather than checking for content competence and
understanding.
Eisenhart, Shrum, Harding, and Cuthbert (1988) focused their literature review on an
investigation of what teachers believed about the circumstances of their jobs and the extent those
beliefs were shared with students. In attempting to define teacher beliefs, they were unable to
find a singular definition because the identified teacher beliefs were a product of long-term
socialization pressures, interaction of groups with common problems, intersections of school
system structures with teacher aspirations, and an accumulation of teacher experiences. To
further find a definition of teacher beliefs, Eisnehart et al. (1988) reviewed ethnographies,
diaries, essays, and other anecdotal descriptions of teaching and identified domains of belief. The
first domain was the high responsibility, expertise and control domain consisting of: the
responsibility for creating an educational environment of nurturing student work; the importance
of protecting the inviolability of the teachers’ classroom; being most rewarded by instructional
activities that allowed students to achieve visible success, the importance of activities directed
toward developing students’ enthusiasm, and the ability to continue rather than just transmitting
a particular subject matter. The second domain of teacher beliefs was problematic responsibility,
expertise, and control consisting of: the importance of sharing and cooperating with other
teachers and colleagues; seeing teaching success as mysterious and beyond the teachers’ control,
viewing much of a students’ success in learning activities as determined by the level of support
or other resources from home, seeing teaching activities as demanding extra work, and being
frustrated by a job expecting a lot but giving little in return. The third teacher domain identified
IMPLIED AND PERCEIVED MESSAGES 33
was low responsibility, expertise, and control consisting of not believing themselves experts in
the development of new curriculum or standardized tests and non-instructional business
interference with teaching. Eisenhart et al. (1988) also designed an empirical study to identify
more direct identifications of beliefs. They did a partial pilot study based on the Heuristic
Elicitation Methodology. They tape recorded reports of the experiences of four senior elementary
education majors in 1983-1984 through open-ended questions about their views of teaching and
the meaning they attached to their work experiences. Then, Eisenhart et al. (1988) organized a
matrix of the attitudes expressed by class activities. They found teacher beliefs could be divided
into positive orientations toward in-class instructional activities in which teachers had direct
responsibilities, ambiguous views of activities where teacher responsibilities were unclear, and
negative orientations toward non-educative activities where the teacher took little responsibility
and did not have control or expertise. The combination Eisenhart et al. (1988) presented of an
extensive literature review and empirical pilot study is important because they identified
teachers’ beliefs as positively oriented toward in-class instructional activities with direct teacher
involvement, and teachers as more receptive to educational innovations when they are the ones
redesigning or developing their academic and behavioral expectations.
Teacher beliefs are important to define in understanding the reasoning behind the
classroom environments teachers create for their academic and behavioral expectations.
Teachers’ beliefs about the importance of efficiency and behavior effect the perceptions of
students’ academic abilities and their own confidence to push students into areas more engaging
and challenging for their academic progression (Bloom et, al., 1989; Eder, 1981; Nelson &
Harper, 2006). Through the literature, teachers’ beliefs can be defined as positively oriented
toward classroom activities that allow for autonomy and self-reflection, and they will be more
IMPLIED AND PERCEIVED MESSAGES 34
open to reimaging classroom expectations and goals with a refocus on student interaction
(Eisenhart et al., 1998; Pajares 1992).
Practical Knowledge
In this section, I will present literature exploring how teacher ideology is reflected in the
concept of practical knowledge. The articles will show teachers’ beliefs are influenced by the
practical knowledge they gain through their experiences in the classroom; they can better
understand the basis behind their practices if they develop a conceptual image of their teaching;
using different techniques for understanding practice helps teachers understand their class
environments; teachers’ knowledge of their students and the cultural backgrounds they come
from help in classroom management and to better understand their ideology and developing
beliefs.
Elbaz’s (1981) case study focused on the concept of practical knowledge and how it was
held by teachers through a series of open-ended discussions with one experienced high school
English teacher. Her article explained interest in practical knowledge as a theory came as a
counteraction to the simplistically linear view of a teacher’s role being based off of the belief that
knowledge is empirical and analytical rather than experiential. She explained practical
knowledge studies encouraged teachers to view themselves as originators of knowledge. Data for
the case study was collected through a series of five interviews of 1 to 2 hours supplemented by
two periods of observation. To frame her study, Elbaz (1981) separated practical knowledge into
five categories: knowledge of subject matter, curriculum instruction, knowledge of self, and the
milieu of schooling. She also identified five orientations of practical knowledge: situational,
theoretical, personal, social, and experiential. The situational orientation focus allowed Elbaz
(1981) to reflect on teacher knowledge not so much as a general concept but more in relation to
IMPLIED AND PERCEIVED MESSAGES 35
how it was applied to specific situations and tasks. The social orientation was reflected in the
way teachers adjusted their curriculum and subject matter to account for ethnic or economic
demographics in their students. The personal orientation reflected how teachers’ beliefs were a
product of the need to integrate, order, and make meaning of one’s own experiences with
curriculum and teaching practices. The experiential orientation reflected the teachers’
spontaneity in adjusting tasks and time for student needs. The theoretical orientation examined
the way teachers apply theory and view it ranging from seeing theory as irrelevant in classroom
practice to a single-minded direct application of theory. Encouraging her subject to reflect
through imagery was another construct Elbaz (1981) employed in the case study. Imagery was
used to allow teachers to express their feelings, values, needs, and beliefs in metaphoric
statements of how teaching should be, revealing an internalized value system for the teacher to
recognize and evaluate. Elbaz (1981) used the imagery approach to allow her subject to express
her beliefs about subject matter, which was described using the imagery of a space where
students and teachers can share practice. Imagery was also used to express the subject’s view of
the institution of school and how teachers often believed their classroom goals were in
opposition to the organization’s goals. Through her observations and interviews, Elbaz (1981)
concluded teachers’ knowledge was based on their experiences in classrooms and schools, and it
was experiential knowledge that was often applied towards problems that arose. She also
concluded the five orientations of practical knowledge could be focal points for studying
teaching because they brought awareness of the teachers’ balance of theoretical and practical
knowledge applied in the direct act of teaching. This case study of practical knowledge
introduced important constructs for examining teachers’ ideologies toward academic and
IMPLIED AND PERCEIVED MESSAGES 36
behavioral expectations through seeing orientations of knowledge applied in the act of teaching
and through the reflective process of imagery.
Clandinin (1985) offered a conceptualization of teacher imagery as an important
component of practical knowledge and narrative unity in an individual’s understanding of
teacher knowledge. She focused her study on the ideal of teacher practice calling forth images
from a narrative perspective to guide future actions. She argued imagery reflection was an
important component to understand why teachers often implemented curriculum not in alignment
with a teacher’s practical knowledge of what worked for students. Clandinin’s (1985) study used
dialectical relationships with two teachers over a year’s period of interviews and observations.
One of the teachers was an early childhood education teacher with 12 years of experience and the
other was an inner-city elementary school teacher with 12 years of experience. Observations
were done in a participant methodology for 3 ½ days in the early childhood environment and a
week in the elementary school. Dictaphone notes were made after the observations on what was
observed about the teacher’s activities, the projects completed, the physical appearance of the
classroom, and Clandinin’s own activities. The unstructured open-ended interviews were focused
on the teacher’s reactions to the narrative accounts of the observations. Both of the teachers
developed metaphoric images of their practice to help them clarify their beliefs and goals
towards their students’ academics and behaviors, which Clandinin (1985) concluded showed the
concept of imagery as an imaginative process of meaningful and useful patterns for a teacher’s
instructional practice. She found teachers were able to express their images of their practice
verbally and through their instruction to create a connection between their beliefs and actions in
the classroom. The study is useful in connecting the theoretical understanding of practical
IMPLIED AND PERCEIVED MESSAGES 37
knowledge and the idea of imagery as a perspective for inquiry into teacher beliefs and ideology
about academic and behavioral expectations for their specific class and students.
Black and Halliwell’s (2000) study was interested in showing the need for a more holistic
view of what teachers knew about teaching effectively. Their focus on practical knowledge was
to emphasize how everyday teaching involved more complex decisions than just applying
theories to practice. Based off of the concept of images to encourage professional growth, they
used techniques of drawing and metaphor with their subjects. Black and Halliwell (2000)
believed having their subjects draw images of themselves as teachers allowed for them to
articulate and examine the tensions in their situations at work. The metaphors were used in
conjunction with journaling so the subjects could write about and express ideals of specific
situations and the taken-for-granted hidden norms of working as a teacher. Black and Halliwell’s
(2000) sample for this particular study was 14 Australian, early childhood teachers working in
privately owned institutions. The teachers used the processes of reflective inquiry in cycles over
a 12-week period and met for 2 hours in reflective conversations six times. The researchers
collected all the information and constructed narrative accounts that were then shared with the
subjects for review. Black and Halliwell (2000) found the teachers who created personal stories
of practice through the combination of drawing, metaphors, and journaling saw it as a liberating
way of understanding the complexities of teaching and what they needed to focus on in their
future. The more personal visual and metaphoric forms of expression allowed the teachers to
communicate meanings about their struggles and teacher ideologies in ways literal language
could not do alone. Black and Halliwell’s (2000) study showed how more open ended and non-
traditional forms of research can help teachers understand and express some of the complexities
behind the ideologies they use in addressing academic and behavioral challenges in classrooms.
IMPLIED AND PERCEIVED MESSAGES 38
Connelly, Clandinin, and He (1997) described the methods used for research focusing on
teachers' personal practical knowledge in relation to professional knowledge. They explained the
function of personal practical knowledge as capturing how teacher experiences reflect
knowledge of past experiences, the present mind and body, and future plans and actions.
Connelly et al.’s (1997) basis for research methodology acknowledged the unproductive element
of trying to apply philosophies or theories of teaching to individuals with their own basis of
knowledge and ideologies. Instead, they suggested a better form of understanding teacher beliefs
and behaviors was using field texts: field notes, research interviews, conversations, journal
writings, autobiographical writing, letters between teachers and researchers, oral histories,
annals, chronicles, teacher stories, family stories, photographs, memory boxes, and other
personal/family artifacts. Connelly et al., (1997) focused on how the field texts gathered between
one of the authors and their subject, a Chinese teacher educator with a Canadian graduate degree,
used field texts to develop conceptual terms more aligned with the information they gathered
about the subject’s teaching practice. They used the concept of image to try and identify the most
telling quality or ideological focus revealed in the field texts and stories about the subject; in her
case, it was tensions between Chinese educational expectations and Western educational beliefs.
They also found it important to identify the rules a teacher applies to their general principles
based on broader and more comprehensive personal ideologies of education. Connelly et al.’s
(1997) concept of metaphor was similar in purpose as image but it allowed a teacher to use a
more linguistic and imaginative exploration of possible hidden ideologies in a teachers’
reflection. Their subject modeled this by explaining her cultural ideology conflict through the
metaphor of push and pull. Connelly et al.’s (1997) final concept for identifying teachers’
practical knowledge was narrative unity and threading teachers’ life experiences together to
IMPLIED AND PERCEIVED MESSAGES 39
construct a story of their personal and teaching lives in order to see the affect it had on their
teacher beliefs. Their study of the methodologies of imagery, metaphor, and narrative is
important in introducing alternative forms of reflection that may allow teachers to gain better
understanding of their practical knowledge and the possibly overt academic and behavioral
expectations being practiced and applied in their classroom.
van Tartwijk, den Brok, Veldman, and Wubbels (2009) conducted a study to contribute
knowledge about the elements of practical knowledge underlying classroom management
strategies in classrooms where teachers have successfully positive multicultural classrooms. The
sample was four secondary schools with multicultural populations that collaborated with
university education programs. They originally had 50 teachers who were identified by
principals as having excellent classroom management skills in classes with at least
one third of
the students being born in non-western European countries. The students of these 50 teachers
were given the Questionnaire on Teacher Interaction to identify eight typical interpersonal styles:
directive, authoritative, tolerant-authoritative, tolerant, uncertain-tolerant, uncertain-aggressive,
repressive, and drudging. The 50 teachers were then narrowed down to 12 who were selected
based on being regarded by students as directive, authoritative, and because the teachers were
willing or able to participate in the next phase of research. Data was gathered through
videotaping a lesson from each teacher and then conducting a video-stimulated interview
immediately after the lesson. The teachers were asked in the interviews to describe situations
identified by the researchers in the videotapes and then to describe their own behaviors and
thoughts during those moments. The study found almost all teachers talked about being clear
about rules and procedures in the classroom as a component of orderly behavior, the importance
of sticking to rules, being aware of negative behaviors and correcting them before the behaviors
IMPLIED AND PERCEIVED MESSAGES 40
escalate, building trusting relationships, taking anticipated student responses into account when
lesson planning, and developing understanding of the culturally determined communication
styles of their students. Overall, van Tartwijk et al.’s (2009) study is important in identifying the
practical knowledge effective teachers employ in their expected behaviors and how it is
important for teachers to use small modifications when dealing with students who do not achieve
behavioral expectations rather than engaging in power struggles over correctness.
Although there is sparse information in the area of practical teaching and most of the
studies were conducted at the turn of the millennium, the study of practical knowledge
introduces constructs such as image, drawing, and field notes which are more personal and
interactive ways for teachers to express their ideologies about academic and behavioral
expectations, particularly in their own classrooms (Black & Halliwell, 2000; Clandinin, 1985;
Elbaz, 1981). Practical knowledge studies are also important to show teachers’ academic and
behavioral expectations in relation to applying policy procedures, theoretical practices, and
effective classroom management techniques in ways directly applicable to teachers’ classroom
experiences (Connelly et al., 1997; van Tartwijk et al., 2009).
Instructional Practices Encouraging Teacher/Student Relationships
An understanding of literature on effective teaching practices encouraging
teacher/student relationships will aid my goal to analyze the connections between what teachers
are communicating in their desired academic and behavioral patterns and the messages students
are receiving about those desired behaviors. Identifying effective methods for teachers to connect
to current student understandings of what is valuable for their educational goals helps to clarify
what might be a disconnection between teacher and student goals. Vygotsky’s sociocultural
theories of learning encouraged holistic teaching of higher complexity rather than activities
IMPLIED AND PERCEIVED MESSAGES 41
developed for recall and practice, and he acknowledged the essential role of teachers to develop
processes of synthesis and higher concept learning (Au, 2003; Darling-Hammond, 2007).
Vygotsky’s most widely used theory for education is the zone of proximal development used to
encourage teachers to be aware of the difference between a student’s actual level of development
and abilities and the performance they could achieve with the collaboration of a mentor (Au,
2003; John-Steiner & Mahn, 1996; Tappan, 1998). In this model for teachers, students will start
off relying on a teacher or guiding figure, then effective teachers will use guided practice to
increase students’ responsibility for their own learning (Au, 2003; John-Steiner & Mahn, 1996).
Sociocultural curriculum models encourage the creation of classrooms with co-participation and
cooperative learning allowing students to build upon knowledge gained from their cultural and
life experiences and possibly from teachers presenting culturally responsive lessons with
materials from diverse cultures so students can gain a sense of ownership (Au, 2003; Gay, 2010;
John-Steiner & Mahn, 1996).
Over time, sociocultural theory has developed a greater awareness of the need to have
student centered instructional models encouraging teachers to look at cultural and social
dynamics within a classroom prohibiting students from reaching the expected academic and
behavioral goals encouraged by the teachers. Researchers have identified contradictions between
social and academic expectations by explaining school success is often linked to learning
conformed cultural behaviors for academic achievement rather than encouraging students’ self-
esteem and ethnic identity through higher level problem solving abilities (Brown, et al., 2009;
Ogbu & Simmons, 1998). Most teachers do not teach in demographics they are connected to or
understand, and it may be hard for them to gain trust among all ethnic groups of students unless
they design curriculum and expected behaviors that show they have the student’s best interests in
IMPLIED AND PERCEIVED MESSAGES 42
mind (Gay, 2010; Ogbu & Simons, 1998). Concepts like Ladson-Billing’s (1995) Culturally
Relevant Pedagogy created pedagogical practices addressing student achievement through
affirming cultural identity and challenging the limiting inequalities the traditional schools
perpetuate. As teachers are able to acknowledge and affirm students’ cultural backgrounds, they
will gain a better awareness of how students need to be supported in their understanding of
academic and behavioral expectations and also will allow teachers to develop relationships with
students based on a belief of all students having the capability to succeed (Ladson-Billings,
1995).
Literature encourages teachers to use dialoguing as a main component of reaching out to
students in a way that builds relationships of understanding and encouragement. Vygotsky's
conception of the relationship that exists between the more expert teacher and the less expert
student in the ZPD is fundamentally dialogical in nature (Tappan, 1998). Dialogues can be a
valuable tool for navigating new approaches to curriculum in culturally relevant pedagogy by
urging educators to describe and examine their practice with colleagues and students (Heckman
& Montera, 2009). Educators who use dialoguing to become aware of community activities and
the cultural knowledge from a students’ home will develop relationships and purposes that allow
their students to become more engaged especially when curriculum breaks away from the
textbook and formal school curriculum and becomes more reflective of the students’
demographics (Heckman & Montera, 2009). Educators should focus their dialogues not as much
on changing power dynamics or empowering student voices, often reluctant to drastic changes in
expectations of their behaviors, but rather through emphasizing care and validation. Noddings’
(1995) morally defensible mission for schools expressed the main goal of education should be to
produce competent, caring, living, and lovable people by having teachers relax their impulse to
IMPLIED AND PERCEIVED MESSAGES 43
control, get rid of the hierarchies of uniformed school requirements, develop curriculum around
themes of caring for others, and teach students that caring implies competence. Tappan (1998)
suggests the best approach for teacher/student relationships would be a combination of a
Vygotskian perspective of modeling idyllic behaviors of cultural acceptance for students to
imitate with the open-ended co-constructed dialogue that Noddings emphasizes as central to
moral education.
Vygotsky had described dialoguing in the zone of proximal development as the
spontaneous and disorganized realizations of students working with the systemic and logical
approach of educators, but it is important to recognize Noddings’s introduction of a caring
regimen acknowledges relaxing control and the lack of comfort with open dialogue can produce
conflicts and contention (Ellsworth, 1989; Tappan, 1998). As Ellsworth (1989) points out,
educators trying to end oppressive formations of classroom dynamics still have to be aware of
the socially constructed authority teachers have over students. As a need for balance between
Western social ideals of a center for knowledgeable authority and recognition and validation of
all cultural perspectives arises, dialogue development between the students and teacher becomes
critical (Ellsworth, 1989). Also, teachers, when engaging in culturally relevant pedagogy, will
need to understand the elements of trust and risk that are not naturally occurring in classrooms
where students have already been given academic and behavioral norms counteracting home
cultural experiences (Ellsworth, 1989). The literature in this section will be synthesized to show
the current understandings in how teachers can build relationships with their students through the
development of student centered instructional practices, building cultural awareness, and
exploring the use of quality instruction, like dialoguing, to engage students and communicate
messages about relevance and cultural acceptance.
IMPLIED AND PERCEIVED MESSAGES 44
Student Centered Instructional Practices
In this section, I will present literature exploring the importance of student centered
instructional practices in making academic and behavioral expectations explicit and effective.
The writings will show teachers are more effective communicating academic and behavioral
expectations when they have classrooms encouraging positive and hybrid models of instruction,
teachers can change their approaches from cynical to more empowering instruction by
developing cultural responses to student needs, and teachers need to address their own cultural
biases to be more successful in addressing student needs.
Tharp and Gallimore’s (1989) theoretical work redefined teaching as offering assistance
to students at points in the zone of proximal development (ZPD) when their performance
required it. In Tharp and Gallimore’s (1989) view, schools had a lack of the actual teaching
process to encourage young members of the society to gain basic cognitive, social, and
attitudinal structure for cultural socialization beyond the ZPD. In this theory, a key component of
a child’s development comes with internalization, when they connect what they have learned
socially with a psychological understanding of external activities. Tharp and Gallimore (1989)
explained it as the teachers’ role to assist students in the transition process through assisted
performance at the point where students can progress only with the assistance of an adult. In
order for teachers to be most effective in this process, they need to be aware of the four stages of
the ZPD: (1) where performance is assisted by more capable others, (2) where performance is
assisted by the self; (3) where performance is developed, automatized, and fossilized; (4) where
de-automatization of performance leads to recursion back through the ZPD. The recognition of
these stages allows teachers to have academic and behavioral expectations appropriate to the
individual growth of students, and it also encourages pedagogical practices situated in assisted
IMPLIED AND PERCEIVED MESSAGES 45
performance such as small groups, positive classroom environments, and new materials or
technologies to encourage students’ independence. Tharp and Gallimore (1989) used these stages
to also explain the main mechanisms for assisting students through the ZPD: modeling,
contingency management, and feedback. Modeling is the process of offering behavior for
students to imitate in building toward performance of academic and behavioral expectations.
Contingency management is assisting performance by rewards and punishments to guide the
behaviors expected. Feeding-back is an important component of assisting performance by
guiding students to the next levels of achievement. Tharp and Gallimore (1989) also presented
three levels of verbal assistance: instructing, questioning, and cognitive structuring. Instructions
are typically used either to impart knowledge directly or in assigning tasks but they must avoid
becoming too authoritative or students will likely resist instruction. Questioning is an important
dialectic medium for increasing understanding but it is often used in classrooms as recitation or
assessment rather than inquiry. Cognitive structuring provides explanations and structures to
organize and justify activities, which the students can then apply to their own schema and
explanations of the importance of the material they are learning. Tharp and Gallimore’s (1989)
work is important in explaining Vygotsky’s ZPD theories in ways that directly relate to
instructional practices focused on the learner rather than promotion of the teachers’ beliefs of
what is important.
Smagorinsky’s (2013) literature review applied Vygotsky’s theories to the educational
challenges faced by 21
st
Century teachers. He first encouraged the use of language as a way to
form new ideas in the classroom because emphasis on human development focused on engaging
others socially in order to learn valuable cultural tools. Exploratory speech could be beneficial in
both discussion, as students learned to formulate ideas, as well as in writing in developmental
IMPLIED AND PERCEIVED MESSAGES 46
writing process like “writing to learn” where students were encouraged to develop thought
without judgment. Smagorinsky (2013) argued, through role-playing in literature and writing,
students could see the world from different perspectives to understand social positions for
themselves and as a means of empathizing with others. Emphasis on language also encouraged
learning through engagement with others in the classroom environment. Culturally learned ways
of knowing impacted classroom dynamics as students from European social backgrounds
favored centralized management systems, and other cultures, such as Mexican-American,
emphasized the importance of a collectivist approaches to learning. Smagorinsky (2013)
suggested teachers shift their ideologies to hybrid models that allowed for more learning spaces
and opportunities brought on by classroom participation. Hybrid classroom models also allow
students to integrate their home cultures more intrinsically and less superficially. In his study,
going through the motions of being in school or acknowledging a culture did not progress
learning as much as making things meaningful and useful in applying them to cultural
awareness. Smagorinsky (2013) stressed the biggest challenge for 21
st
Century teachers was
balancing between respecting students’ cultures of origin and socializing them into the academic
and behavioral expectations of the dominant society. His work is important in establishing the
social climate of learning as a critical component for teachers to understand the backgrounds of
their students as well as offering ways for students to gain knowledge in more meaningful and
applicable ways for their long-term goals.
Hatt’s (2005) study presented the concept of pedagogical love through teachers and
students cooperating in curriculum encouraging both parties to gain understanding and
knowledge of each other. He collected data through focus-group inquires designed to show
teacher experiences and present them in episodic narratives. The narratives showed pedagogical
IMPLIED AND PERCEIVED MESSAGES 47
love promoted the necessity for teachers to understand the needs of each child they dealt with by
having a relational knowledge of the child’s home and developing an inclusive classroom
environment. He found, teachers and students were often not aligned in their goals because of the
competitive nature of academic success and the students who struggled were often lost in failed
competition rather than encouraged through pathic learning and cooperation. Hatt (2005)
suggested a transactional or gnoseologic curriculum to engage students through critical and
cognitive inquiries to promote dialogue of learning and curiosity. In this model, the interaction of
communication in dialogic relationships between teacher and student became necessary to have a
co-emergence of knowledge between teachers and students. The teachers in the study engaged
students in highly interactive and enabling lessons by teaching students to reflect on their
learning and showed the role of the teacher was focused on developing and maintaining authentic
personal relationships through pathic interactions. This study is important in emphasizing student
centered instruction must make a conscious effort to include students’ emotional and intellectual
needs outside of the covering and development of the academic curriculum.
Corkett, Hatt and Benevides’s (2011) study examined the relationship between teacher
self-efficacy, student-self efficacy, and student achievement abilities. The study was initiated by
the superintendent of a Catholic school district in Ontario to examine 122 six graders in two high
performing, two average performing, and two low performing classrooms. The participants were
mostly middle-class, Caucasian students. Reading and Writing abilities were established through
the Woodcock-Johnson Tests of Achievement. Self-efficacy was determined through a Student
Literacy Self-Efficacy Questionnaire of 30 items focused on reading and writing and a teacher
version of the same questionnaire to assess teachers’ perceptions of each individual student’s
self-efficacy for reading and writing. Self-efficacy for reading and writing were determined by
IMPLIED AND PERCEIVED MESSAGES 48
the degree to which individuals believed they could accomplish tasks involving reading and
writing. The results comparing the reading and writing assessment with the self-efficacy
questionnaires found students were not effective at predicting their own abilities and teachers
were somewhat successful in predicting their student abilities but not accurate in all areas.
Teachers also showed they were not effective in predicting how students felt about their own
reading and writing abilities and were mostly unaware of their students’ self-efficacy. The study
showed self-efficacy was based on a perception of abilities rather than actual performance. While
Corkett et al.’s (2011) study was limited by the mostly Caucasian base, it identified teachers
need to be aware of how students’ perceptions of their self-efficacy could influence their abilities
because they are not able to effectively articulate their abilities with their performances. This
study is important for student and teacher relationships because it raised the need for teachers to
focus on student performance and ability to improve rather than just focusing on academic
performance so students can raise their confidence and belief in being able to achieve.
Ladson-Billings’s (1992, 1995) writings developed the theory of culturally relevant
pedagogy based on three criteria: students must experience academic success, students must
develop and maintain cultural competence, and students must develop a critical consciousness to
challenge the status quo of the current society. Culturally relevant pedagogy is a valuable
construct for teachers as it allows them to see academic and behavioral expectations as not being
an antagonistic process of enforcing behaviors on a student but instead as a way to value the
skills and abilities a student possess and building them in academically meaningful ways.
Ladson-Billings (1995) introduced teachers to alternative ways to move around mandated
curriculum and assessments by engaging in critical reflection and critiques of the materials they
were using so students were aware of the inequality in resources and materials assigned in
IMPLIED AND PERCEIVED MESSAGES 49
educational settings. Ladson-Billings’s work (1992, 1995) was primarily based off of a 3-year
study of eight teachers in a majority African-American elementary school district in Northern
California. The teachers were identified by parents and principles as being effective based on
student achievement; student attitude toward themselves, others, and school; parent-teacher
interactions; and classroom management. Each teacher participated in an ethnographic interview
to discuss his/her background, philosophy of teaching, ideas about curriculum, classroom
management, and parent and community involvement. Teachers were observed in classroom
segments and videotaped, and then they reviewed the videotapes and discussed their decision
making and pedagogical reasoning. Ladson-Billings (1992) found similarities in the tendencies
of the teachers who had been singled out as effective who referred to themselves as artists,
believed all students were capable of success, and legitimatized the cultural backgrounds of their
students by acknowledging them and framing lessons around them. The teachers in this study
worked to model the importance of literacy and academic excellence as an extension of self-
identity. They shared power dynamics with students by creating cooperative and supportive
classrooms where students would sometimes take the role of the teacher and the teacher the role
of the student. They moved beyond district curriculum mandates to introduce additional material
and also encouraged students to question the validity, reliability, and logic of the materials they
were being given to study. Ladson-Billings’ (1992) work is foundational in the study of teacher
beliefs in academic and behavioral expectations because it encourages teachers to work with
their students, acknowledging the importance of their individual background and abilities, rather
than fighting against them in a way to impose dominant cultural values.
Morrison, Robbins, and Rose’s (2008) article synthesized 45 classroom-based studies
from 1995-2007 to illustrate what culturally relevant pedagogy appeared like in a practical sense
IMPLIED AND PERCEIVED MESSAGES 50
within classrooms. From their coding, they identified five overlapping categories of support
culturally relevant teachers used when assisting their students: modeling, scaffolding, and
clarification of challenging curriculum; using students’ strengths as instructional starting points;
investing and taking personal responsibility for students’ success; creating and nurturing
cooperative environments; and high behavioral expectations. Morrison et al. (2008) found
teachers encouraged students’ feelings of cultural competence by reshaping the prescribed
curriculum, building on students’ funds of knowledge, and establishing relationships between
school and the students’ homes. Finally, they found teachers encouraged students to develop
critical consciousness through critical literacy, engaging students in social justice work, making
the power dynamics of mainstream society explicit, and sharing power in the classroom. This
article is important in showing how culturally relevant pedagogy, as a complex and constructivist
activity, forces teachers to have to combat and counteract the academic and behavioral
expectations of traditional education practices familiar to them and promoted by their colleagues.
Gay (2002) makes a theoretical case for improving the school success of ethnically
diverse students through culturally responsive pedagogy and preparing preservice teachers with
knowledge, attitudes, and skills needed for this adjustment. The basis for this argument comes
from research findings, theoretical claims, practical experiences, and personal stories of
educators serving ethnically diverse students. The study examined five essential elements of
culturally responsive teaching: developing a knowledge base about cultural diversity, including
ethnic and cultural diversity content in the curriculum, demonstrating caring and building
learning communities, communicating with ethnically diverse students, and responding to ethnic
diversity in the delivery of instruction. Gay (2002) summarized the understanding of cultural
characteristics as teachers knowing: which ethnic groups give priority to communal living and
IMPLIED AND PERCEIVED MESSAGES 51
cooperative problem solving and how those preferences affect educational motivation, aspiration,
and task performance; how different ethnic groups’ views of appropriate ways for children to
interact with adults are exhibited in instructional settings; and the implications of gender roles in
different ethnic groups to implement equity measures in classroom instruction. Teachers can
develop more culturally appropriate lessons with multicultural influences by acquiring more
knowledge about the contributions of different ethnic groups in the various disciplines to use as
examples. Gay (2002) also introduced three kinds of curricula routinely present in classrooms
with cultural diversity: formal plans for instruction from governing bodies of educational
systems; the symbolic curriculum of images, symbols, motoes, celebrations, and other artifacts
used to teach students knowledge, skills, morals, and values; and the societal curriculum from
the knowledge, ideas, and impressions ethnic groups are given from media portrayals. The
culturally responsive teacher will deal with formal plans by addressing topics such as racism and
social inequalities that are typically ignored in standardized curriculum by introducing a wide
range of diverse ethnic individuals and contextualizing race, class, ethnicity, and gender themes
within the curriculum base. For symbolic curriculum, culturally responsive teachers will make
sure there are diverse representations of people presented. With society focused curriculum,
culturally responsive teachers will include critical analyses of ethnic groups and experiences as
presented in the media and pop culture. For creating culturally responsive classroom
environments, Gay (2002) presented the following concepts: cultural scaffolding of using
students’ own cultures as experiences to expand their knowledge; holistic or integrated learning
of teaching personal, moral, social, political, cultural, and academic knowledge and skills
simultaneously; culturally encoded experiences to promote cultural socialization; and protocols
of participation in discourse to encourage cultural backgrounds that are more participatory in
IMPLIED AND PERCEIVED MESSAGES 52
nature rather than patterns of task engagement that are direct and linear in communication.
Finally, Gay (2002) explained the eight key components of ethnic learning styles are: preferred
content; ways of working through learning tasks; techniques for organizing and conveying ideas
and thoughts; physical and social settings for task performance; structural arrangements of work,
study, and performance; perceptual stimulation for receiving, processing, and demonstrating
comprehension and competence; motivations, incentives, and rewards for learning; and
interpersonal interactional styles. This article is important in expressing that the preparation for
teaching students of diverse backgrounds requires knowledge of specific cultures and how they
affect learning behaviors and classroom academics so teachers can have appropriate and
meaningful academic and behavioral goals.
Haberman’s writings (1991, 1995, 2008) focused on his research and observations of
teaching behaviors starting in the 1950s. He found there was a typical form of teaching in urban
school settings, labeled as the pedagogy of poverty, that had largely remained unchanged over
the decades consisting of: giving information, asking questions, giving directions, making
assignments, monitoring seatwork, reviewing assignments, giving tests, assigning homework,
reviewing homework, settling disputes, punishing non-compliance, marking papers, and giving
grades (Haberman, 1991). The pedagogy of poverty affected teachers’ beliefs by appealing to a
number of ideologies promoting the established culture. It appealed to educators and community
members who did not do well in school themselves and who wanted to push accountability for
students’ failures, people who had low expectations for minorities and the poor and feared
empowering them, and people who did not understand there was a range of pedagogy teachers
could use. The pedagogy of poverty also appealed to teachers who saw clearly defined roles for
teachers and students, believed students acted appropriately and learned more when they just
IMPLIED AND PERCEIVED MESSAGES 53
listen to teachers, believed in a bell curve where some students would inevitably be unable to
succeed, and believed teaching was the job of compelling students to learn basic skills. The
problems with the pedagogy of poverty were in how it separated the academic and behavioral
expectations of the teachers from the realistic effects on students. Constant teacher direction and
student compliance built resentments from the teachers’ end from becoming authoritative figures
rather than caregivers and from the student end with an acceptance of a system not challenging
them to be involved or thoughtful. To try and counteract the pedagogy of poverty, Haberman
(1995) conducted a research study by identifying teachers he labeled as stars who succeed in
urban settings. His definition of star teachers were those who had been identified by principals,
supervisors, other teachers, parents, and themselves as outstanding and had students who had
improved on tests and work samples. Through interviews and observations of star teachers since
the 1950s, Haberman (1995) identified 14 functions of their teaching that remained stable:
persistence to always improve and expect more from their students; protecting learners and
learning by breaking away from standardized and imposed curriculum; application of
generalizations from taking multiple sources and being able to apply them to practice;
approaching at risk students from a perspective of empathy and caring; professional versus
personal orientations to students by generating genuine respect rather than seeking adoration;
understanding and counteracting the elements of burnout; and accepting their own fallibility.
Haberman’s (2008) work also identified how star teachers addressed the influences on
youngsters growing up in poverty, namely distrust of adults, seeing the people around them as
possible threats, having little hope their situations will improve, and the influence bureaucracy
has had on enforcing their sense of powerlessness. He said star teachers counteracted the
students’ feelings of negativity by coming to the realization that teachers could not assert
IMPLIED AND PERCEIVED MESSAGES 54
authority through threats and coercion and instead needed to put students’ needs ahead of the
subject matter, respect students’ ideas of expression, never shame or embarrass them,
demonstrate empathy by building student confidence, and creating a supportive classroom
environment. Haberman’s work (1991, 1995, 2008) is important in identifying progressive
teachers see teacher strength as the ability to share authority with students and understand the
meaning and purpose behind their actions with care for the students as the number one priority.
Paris’s (2012) article redefined culturally relevant pedagogy as culturally sustaining
pedagogy to promote the value of multiethnic and multilingual aspects in both the present and
future. He defined culturally sustaining pedagogy as seeking to foster and sustain linguistic,
literate, and cultural pluralism as part of the process of schooling. His research was to promote
pedagogical and curricular interventions that would move teaching and learning beyond deficit
approaches. Paris’s (2012) main argument for presenting a new approach is the limitations of the
culturally relevant pedagogy to address the shifting changes and practices of students beyond
heritage alone. Culturally sustaining pedagogy moves students to sustain their own cultural and
linguistic competencies while also finding meaning and access to dominant cultural competence.
The importance of Paris’s (2010) article is to acknowledge students from diverse backgrounds
need not just respond to the cultural oppressions of the past and present but also be prepared for a
future of demographically changing United States populations and globalized schools and
communities.
Lim and Renshaw’s (2001) article presented sociocultural theory as relevant to guiding
teaching and learning through sensitivity to understanding and valuing cultural diversity. From
this perspective, learning was viewed as a process of becoming a participant in communities of
practice rather than the individual accumulation and transmission of knowledge. New and
IMPLIED AND PERCEIVED MESSAGES 55
different ways of thinking were encouraged through individuals interacting in interpersonal
relationships, social practices, and collective action. One of the techniques Lim and Renshaw
(2001) promoted was scaffolding cultural reciprocity to examine similarities and differences in
diverse views and multiple representations of problems in order to move towards more effective
lessons for individuals of all backgrounds. The proposal for pedagogies to be socioculturally
based promoted the valuing of differences for transformation of interpersonal relationships and
communities and developing new cultural identities. Lim and Renshaw’s (2001) theory is
important for encouraging teachers to develop practices and scaffolding allowing for students to
express their individual cultural identities in a meaningful way and also challenging power
structures and social norms effecting students’ abilities to progress and learn.
Noddings’s work (1986, 1988) explained her theory on the ethics of caring and fidelity in
the approach teachers should take to their academic and behavioral expectations. Fidelity was
explained by Noddings (1986) as the quality of faithfulness with a high degree of accuracy, and,
therefore, people are in good faith when they know to what or whom they are faithful to and
have reflected on their commitment to be faithful in true and finer ways. In her view, it was the
duty of those with an ethic of caring to be faithful and moral in their actions. When fidelity and
ethics of caring are applied to teaching, there becomes an understanding that delivering
curriculum must be coupled with awareness of the effects of each instructional move on the
development of students into good people. Noddings (1986) also explained fidelity should be a
guiding aspect of teacher ideology because it encouraged a teacher to look beyond themselves
and towards the joy of empowering others so that self-actualization and socialization were done
to strive for the best and not done as fidelity to institutions having unrealistic expectations. She
argued, when teachers act as models of caring for their students, they will help develop the
IMPLIED AND PERCEIVED MESSAGES 56
characteristics they believe are best for student achievement such as preparation, critical
thinking, appreciative listening, and genuine curiosity. Ethics of caring also reflect in academic
expectations through assessment as teachers struggle with how grading reflects care for students
in the way standards are upheld. Teachers either decide to encourage students with grading
practices which allow for leniency or they believe hard lines on standards and grading
procedures are acts of care in preparing students for higher expectations. These ideals of
academic assessment reflect the contradiction in society of schools being developmental zones
for acceptable citizenship that are assessed through calculated academic achievement scores. As
for research into the behaviors and ideals of teachers, Noddings (1986, 1988) argued a switch
was necessary from the Kantian fidelity to the duty of truth telling towards a fidelity of caring
and faithfulness established through the building of relationships. Her ethics of caring also
encouraged collaboration between students and teachers as a way to support, evaluate, and
encourage student exploration of areas of interest to them. Noddings (1988) emphasized moral
education should focus teacher ideology of academics and behavior less on assessments of
ability in completion of specific tasks and more towards modeling, dialoguing, practice, and
confirmation. Dialogue is an open form of encouragement of student and teacher relationships by
emphasizing that conclusions about ideas are not held by one person but by groups in search of
enlightenment. Noddings’s (1986, 1988) writings are important because they explain how
teachers need to be guided away from narrow achievement goals obsessed with evaluation and
measurements that are directed at things that are easy to measure and reinforce competitive
dynamics and instead focus on the needs and experiences necessary to grow students and
teachers in various instructional procedures.
IMPLIED AND PERCEIVED MESSAGES 57
Valenzuela’s (1999) writing on subtractive schooling addressed the conflict of teachers
expecting students to care about school as an abstract concept and students often perceiving
themselves as automatons in an uncaring system. She found, through a three year mixed methods
ethnographic investigation of immigrant Mexican and Mexican-American students at the urban
Houston, Texas Seguin High School that teachers rarely knew their students in personal ways
and the students felt, because of this, they were seen as objects to be manipulated. Her
observations, fieldwork, and interviews found the sociocultural gaps between the mostly white,
older, middle-class teachers’ privileged background expectations and their students who had
grown up with different cultural values of loyalty and togetherness caused miscommunications in
what values should be emphasized for student success. For example, Valenzuela (1999) pointed
out how teachers often told students they did not need to be in school if they did not want to be
or they needed to leave the class if they were not cooperating, which possibly communicated to
the student that they were not really a necessary component of the class or an important
individual. She focused on a specific case in which a student had stopped feeling comfortable
speaking up for herself because teachers had made her feel insecure about asking too many
questions and then she ran into struggles with a current teacher who expected her to speak up in
class. When the teacher realized the student had been discouraged before, her reaction was
frustration with having to make up for previous teachers’ mistakes and having another
responsibility added to her job. Valenzuela (1999) used this instance as an example of the
disconnection that can occur between students and teachers because they both had their own
goals, frustrations, and struggles that were often not aligned and hard to coordinate, especially
when there was a lack of communication and seeking to better understand the dynamics of the
relationship between the student and teacher. As with Noddings (1986, 1988), Valenzuela (1999)
IMPLIED AND PERCEIVED MESSAGES 58
found caring was a central aspect of the student and teacher relationship but it was also a struggle
for most teachers who were uncomfortable dealing with the culture outside of the classroom and
often resorted to methodological modes of teaching standards and assessing them without
engaging students in meaningful and caring ways. Teachers often retreated into a posture of
efficiency in the classroom and calling for students to resist the cultural influences around them
without helping students engage in meaningful discussions about what those influences are and
how they affect students’ abilities to perform academically. Students who wanted to care about
school and did well gave in to feelings of dismissal and developed a view of schooling as
meaningless, unrewarding, and irrelevant to their lives because their backgrounds and life
experiences were rarely addressed. The individual rebellions and postures of resistance students
developed when they began to struggle academically resulted from the disconnection they felt in
education environments that dismissed them as individuals with unique experiences and needs.
Valenzuela’s (1999) writing is important to understanding student and teacher relationships
because it shows the disconnect between teacher and student experiences and how the two
parties are often working from places of conflicting or disconnected goals and therefore put into
unnecessary conflict.
The development of student centered instructional practices is important in creating
social climates and critical components more engaging and applicable for students by directing
instructional practice to focus on the learner rather than the dominant Western Eurocentric
culture’s prescribed curriculum (Smagorinksy, 2013; Tharp & Gallimore, 1989). Student and
teacher relationships need teachers to be aware of student abilities and performance as well as
their emotional and intellectual needs outside of the academic curriculum so students can raise
their confidence and belief in academic achievement (Corkett et al., 2011; Hatt, 2005). Teacher
IMPLIED AND PERCEIVED MESSAGES 59
beliefs about academic and behavioral expectations need to go through a critical reflection of
awareness of one’s own cultural biases that may or may not take into account differing cultural
values and how those values are imposed on students (Ladson-Billings, 1992, 1995; Morrison et
al., 2008). Teachers with beliefs based on cultural awareness develop expectations that not only
acknowledge diverse backgrounds in meaningful ways of empowering students but also develop
culturally relevant pedagogy by allowing for students to express their individual cultural
identities in ways that challenge the power structures and cultural norms that may be effecting
their progress in learning (Gay, 2002; Haberman, 1991, 1995, 2008; Lim & Renshaw, 2001).
Student centered instructional practices through cultural awareness are important in teachers’
academic and behavioral expectations because they explain the need for teachers to challenge
conflicts of dominant power dynamics based on the cultural disconnection between teachers and
students and encourage cooperative and positive experiences that will empower students of
diverse cultural backgrounds (Noddings 1986, 1988; Valenzuela, 1999).
Quality Instruction for Engaging Students
In this section, I will present literature laying a foundation for and exploring the value of
teachers creating quality instruction to engage their students and to promote and clarify academic
and behavioral expectations. The articles will show teachers may encourage understanding and
collaboration but do not necessarily push their students to higher levels of thinking, teachers
need to gain an understanding of their students to effectively communicate expectations, teachers
have to be more open and aware of the influences in students’ lives in order to relate to them
about expectations, and teachers who are willing to have multi-modal assessments are more
likely to engage students in ways where expectations are relatable and understood.
IMPLIED AND PERCEIVED MESSAGES 60
Matsumura, Slater, and Crosson’s (2008) study investigated the relation of teachers using
rigorous instructional practices and encouraging respectful, collaborative learning environments
with students’ behavior toward one another and the rate and participation of students in
classroom discussions. Full class period observations over a 2-week period of English language
arts and mathematics lessons were conducted in 34 sixth- and seventh-grade classrooms in five
high-poverty, urban, public middle schools. Classroom artifacts and student work were also
collected. Classroom climate rubrics with a 4-point scale were used for classroom observations
of classroom climate, rigor of instruction, rigor of the discussion, rigor of the curricula/task
materials, rigor of the lesson activity, rigor of expectations for student learning, clarity and detail
of expectations for student learning, and student interactions. Matsumura et al. (2008) applied
multiple regression techniques to explain predictive relations between classroom climate,
instructional quality, and student behavior. For academic expectations, although teachers were
positive in their interactions with students, they rarely encouraged students to extend their
discussion contributions to include reasoning or evidence. In fewer than 10% of reading
comprehension exercises, teachers used high-level skills such as interpretation, inference,
analyzation of motives or comparison of themes. Teachers used high quality texts but 43% of the
questions asked to students were recall of superficial information. In nearly ½ the observations,
teachers provided students only with procedural directions for engaging in lessons. For
behavioral expectations, Matsumura et al. (2008) found the degree of respect that teachers
showed students significantly predicted students’ behavior toward one another. Results showed
in 73% of the observations, teachers were respectful toward students in discussions. In ½ of the
observations, students had some opportunity to work together and explicit rules were posted
against unkind treatment of others. The presence of explicit rules in the classroom for respectful,
IMPLIED AND PERCEIVED MESSAGES 61
prosocial behavior also significantly predicted the number of students who participated in
discussions. The importance of this study is showing students imitate or respond to the academic
and behavioral expectations set by their teachers and more respectful and positive behaviors
modeled by teachers result in positive classroom environments and environments encouraging to
student expression of their voice in discussion.
Cummins’s (2009) Transformative Multiliteracies Pedagogy framework identified
students’ underachievement as a result of societal power relations and emphasized the
importance of teachers working with the identity and culture of their students to give them
empowerment. Transformative Multiliteracies Pedagogy focuses on how societal power relations
express themselves in the classroom through identity negotiation and is characterized by:
distinctions among transmission, social constructivist, and transformative pedagogy; an analysis
of how societal power relations affect culturally and linguistically diverse students; and the
construct of multiliteracies. Cummins (2009) explained a transformative pedagogy would allow
the teacher-student classroom interactions to challenge the coercive relations of power through
an explicit instructional focus on social justice and classroom work that promotes students’
cultural and linguistic capital and their identities. His framework was designed to counteract
teacher ideology based on creating academic and behavioral expectations centered in the power
dynamics of a dominant individual or group subjugating subordinate individuals and groups with
a collaborative approach to teaching that empowers students to gain confidence in their
individuality and identity. The Transformative Multiliteracies Pedagogy ultimately looks to
construct an image of the student as intelligent and strengthened by their diversity, acknowledge
cultural and linguistic capital, promote cognitive engagement through identity investment, enable
students to construct their own knowledge through the social realities of their dialogue, and use
IMPLIED AND PERCEIVED MESSAGES 62
various technological tools to enable students to present work to multiple audiences. Cummins’s
(2009) framework is important to expose the teacher ideologies around academic and behavioral
expectations concentrated in beliefs of dominant power structures are not empowering students
to find identity or strength in developing their own voice.
Cummins’s (1986) theoretical framework analyzed minority students’ failure in school
and suggested the required changes involve teachers personally redefining their interaction with
students in a way that would be greatly benefited by the use of dialogue. The framework
proposed three types of interactions within power relations: the classroom interactions between
teachers and students, relationships between schools and minority communities, and the
intergroup power relations within the society as a whole. The main tenet of his framework was
that students were dominated, empowered, or disabled by their interactions with educators. He
explained the dominant group controlled the institutions and how rewards were distributed and
the dominated group was seen as inferior and denied access to high-status positions in the
institutional structure of society. Cummins (1986) identified four elements in school
organizations that contributed to the extent at which minority students were empowered or
disabled: the incorporation of minority students’ culture and language, inclusion of minority
communities in the education of their children, pedagogical assumptions and practices operating
in the classroom, and the assessment of minority students. Cultural and linguistic incorporation is
a struggle in education circles because of conflicting ideologies. According to Cummins (1986),
research suggested the incorporation of students’ language and culture was a significant predictor
of success, and yet, institutions were resistant to add diverse languages and cultures into
curriculum seemingly to discourage empowerment of minority groups. Individual educators who
see their role as adding language and cultural affiliations to their curriculum will empower their
IMPLIED AND PERCEIVED MESSAGES 63
students more than teachers who hold onto the power dynamic ideals of the society and try to
replace or subtract students’ cultural backgrounds. Another teacher belief Cummins (1986)
raised was seeing parents of minority students as uneducated and lacking interest in supporting
their children’s’ education. Teachers who encourage an ideology of collaboration with
community groups and parents will model an inclusionary position which can also empower
students. The teacher belief of learning disabilities is also debilitating to students as students
designated at risk are often pedagogically handled by being placed in a passive role. Teachers’
insistence on correctness in academic expectations and appropriateness in behavioral
expectations for power dynamic purposes inhibit students from progressing by making them
more reliant on those power dynamics. Teachers with academic and behavioral ideology of
empowerment will encourage students to break power structures in favor of becoming
independent and active generators of their own knowledge. Cummins (1986) moved teacher
ideology from a transmission model of a teacher’s role being imparting knowledge or skills onto
students to a reciprocal interaction model encouraging genuine dialogue between students and
teachers for more collaborative learning and cognitive skills. He also showed assessment plays a
role in the disabling of student ability, mostly because teachers’ academic expectations are based
on carrying out accepted roles and educational structures continuing discriminatory practices
rather than challenging the socioeducational system with new standards and assessment
measurements. The importance of Cummins’s (1986) framework is to illuminate the academic
and behavioral expectations of teachers come from a belief that is sincere but misguided and
significant change will come when teachers break away from ideologies of enforcing cultural
expectations to engage students.
IMPLIED AND PERCEIVED MESSAGES 64
Benson’s (2008) qualitative study of an 11
th
and 12
th
grade language arts course called
Perspective of Literature and Composition provided a contextual examination of the
multiliteracies theory and the lack of documentation of it as well as students’ experiences with
the thinking process involved with the theory and building toward the importance of dialogue as
a way to balance instructional mandates. The school was in an urban area of a Midwestern city
with a population of 90% White students. Benson (2008) observed the class twice a week for 50
minutes each, taking field notes and analytical memos. The course instructor also submitted
syllabi, assignment descriptions, documents from planning meetings, a 2-week planning journal,
and interviews. Seven focal students were identified through a literacy interest survey rating 59
activities on a 5-point scale. The focal students were interviewed three times and provided
samples of their work. Data was analyzed using grounded theory for recurring patterns and then
coded into categories of student understanding of the course purpose, student beliefs about the
need for literacy, student beliefs about the value of non-print texts, and student engagement with
assignments. Through the analysis of the teachers’ documents, Benson (2008) found the teacher
followed the district’s core framework but adjusted assignments to better align with students’
interests and needs. The teacher had developed a Big 4 framework for text discussion consisting
of audience, composition, purpose, and context. He used the framework to design multimodal
assignments to work alongside more traditional print-oriented assignments to help students
understand the language arts curriculum with new insights. In analyzing the data, Benson (2008)
found numerous contradictions in the students’ experiences with multimodal assignments. The
students were resistant and did not always see the different types of assignments as meaningful
for them because they strayed from the expected materials they had been conditioned to believe
were most important in language arts instruction. The student perspectives revealed that teachers
IMPLIED AND PERCEIVED MESSAGES 65
need to not only come up with various types of assessments and discourses to engage students
but they also have to effectively communicate the need to do non-traditional approaches to work.
Benson (2008) concluded multimodal thinking was best when woven into the overall course
design, teachers need to provide conversations highlighting the importance of assignments that
are not traditional and print based, teachers need to reexamine assessment practices to emphasis
all forms of discourse as equally meaningful, and teachers need to collaborate across disciplines
to create meaning making in multimodal assignments. This study is important in emphasizing
creative assignments and assessments are not as effective without teachers engaging in discourse
with students, such as dialogue, and explaining the purpose for changing academic expectations
away from traditional print based formats.
Rodriguez’s (2009) study explored the use of dialogue, specifically with the use of hip
hop music, in disrupting the traditional ways of teachers who were generally disconnected from
the culture of their students. He provided two examples of the ways hip hop and dialogical
pedagogy intersect: using hip hop as cultural capital when engaging low-income youth of color
in education settings and using hip hop culture in a university classroom of predominately white,
middle-class preservice teachers. His first setting was a small alternative high school in the
industrial sector of a large urban city in the Northeast with a student population comprised of
almost all African-American and Latina/o students who had been pushed out of regular school
system environments. In this sample, Rodriguez (2009) mainly focused on a single experience
with a student who, upon initially meeting Rodriguez, asked him a question about rap. Rodriguez
(2009) saw this as a pedagogical moment to challenge conventional teacher ideology of what
was important or meaningful knowledge in relation to what students saw as meaningful
knowledge. The seeming cultural capital test the student was introducing to Rodriguez showed
IMPLIED AND PERCEIVED MESSAGES 66
the conflict in culturally capital between teachers who believed they had important academic
knowledge to impart and students who did not see teachers as understanding the reality of what
was important to their cultural backgrounds. Rodriguez’s (2009) second setting for his study was
a public university in the Miami-Dade County area where he taught preservice teachers. He
explained the teachers’ cultural backgrounds of mainly identified White did not mix with this
area of the country’s highly diverse student body of 90% African-American and Latino. He
noted that the cultural capital disconnect was evident within his preservice student teachers as
80% of them had Hispanic/Latina/o heritage and yet still identify themselves as White, showing
not only a rejection of their own cultural identity but possibly a deficit ideology of their students’
cultural backgrounds as something that needed to be overcome. As a way to understand the
cultural disconnect between the teachers and students, Rodriguez (2009) presented his preservice
students with two open-ended questions: when you enter a relatively nice restaurant and you sit
down at the table, what is the first thing you are supposed to do, according to etiquette? and the
question the student asked, is the Game Easy E’s son? 75% of his preservice students knew
placing a napkin on your lap was the appropriate thing to do at a table, and 85% of the preservice
students could not even answer the second question because they did not know who Easy E was.
Rodriquez (2009) saw the result of these questions as emphasizing the process of
professionalizing educators made them increasingly detached from the cultural realities of what
was valuable in their students’ lives. Based on these initial findings, Rodriguez (2009) decided to
develop a case study connecting a group of high school students he taught in a six-week summer
institute at a Southeastern university and an undergraduate social foundations course for
preservice teaches at the same university. The students were all African-American or Latina/o
and the preservice teachers, as in his previous class, were predominately middle class women
IMPLIED AND PERCEIVED MESSAGES 67
who identified themselves as White. The high school students researched and presented a
presentation on the effects of teacher discrimination as a significant factor to school experience
and presented it to the preservice teachers in two 2-hour sessions. Rodriguez (2009) video
recorded and took field notes in observation of the encounters between the two groups. The high
school students expressed their knowledge and experiences of frustration with teachers’ with
deficit mindsets whose approach to students was looking down on their cultural knowledge
backgrounds and dismissing their current positions in life as not desirable. The preservice
teachers were observed as generally being kind to the student presenters but they also showed
elements of disrespect and invalidated their frustrations as problematic of the environment they
lived in and not a result of teacher ignorance. Rodriguez (2009) concluded from his observations
that his preservice teachers had trouble separating their preconceived stereotypes of minority
youth as being disruptive and unteachable from the perspective the students were sharing of
feeling devalued. He ultimately recommended an understanding of hip hop as a necessary
component of teacher education to help teachers try to connect to the cultural backgrounds of
their students. Hip hop focus aside, Rodriguez’s (2009) study is important in revealing the
disconnection between teachers’ academic and behavioral expectations and students who value
different rules based on the cultural influences of their communities, and the need for teachers
and students to engage in more authentic dialoguing to understand their cultural gaps rather than
teachers reinforcing the power dynamics they have already pre-judged as most meaningful for
their students.
Quality instruction for engaging students is important in encouraging teachers to move
away from academic and behavioral expectations that reinforce dominant power dynamics or
technically specific theory but instead need to focus more on creating productive interactions
IMPLIED AND PERCEIVED MESSAGES 68
with students in ways that are empowering recognitions of cultural identity (Cummins, 1986,
2009; Matsumura et al., 2006). Teachers and students often have different understandings of
what is valuable knowledge, and instruction directly engaging students, such as dialogue, will
not only help bridge some of the cultural gaps but it will also allow teachers to explain how
alternate assignments and assessments will be beneficial for students in challenging the power
dynamics which often effect their experiences in school (Benson, 2008; Rodriguez, 2009).
Student Perception
Ultimately, this dissertation is looking to discover the differences between what teachers’
instructional practices are communicating about desired academic and behavioral patterns and
the students’ perceptions of those messages. Teacher goals for academic and behavioral patterns
in classroom instruction can be well intentioned but also may not align with students’
understanding of why a lesson or behavior pattern is important for their growth. Ferguson (2012)
explained a conflict in education in the different perceptions of educators and their students. He
said administrators and teachers often saw teacher performance through the lens of performance
based assessments regardless of student engagement and argued school improvement was
stunted without the inclusion of student voice. With student education and engagement as the
primary goal in a classroom, student perception becomes a key issue in effective educational
reform. Romanowski (2004) argued there was a divide between teacher views on motivation,
usually tied to assessments and a student’s want for approval, and student perceptions of intrinsic
value in their school work. Therefore, student perceptions often focus on areas that are not the
original intention of academic or behavior patterns introduced by the teacher. Students react
strongly to the positive reinforcement of grading and ranking systems and are encouraged to
compete with other students through mastering disposable knowledge necessary for high scores
IMPLIED AND PERCEIVED MESSAGES 69
on tests (Romanowski, 2004). The message being sent by teachers in academic and behavioral
standards is either misguided or misinterpreted by students to not be about long-term knowledge
but for more immediate gratifications. Research needs to reflect the origination of this
misunderstanding but literature for student perspectives is sparse and so the articles reviewed in
this dissertation are over a broad range of years and from multiple cultural backgrounds but not
directly on teacher practice. The literature in this section will be synthesized to explore the basis
of student perceptions of classroom practices and how their view of the purpose of school work
effects their effort and drive to succeed academically and behave according to the norms
established by teachers. In order to show a perspective of students relevant to this study, the
section will be broken into student views of the influence of classroom environment and grading
practices and their motivation to engage in expected academic and behavioral expectations.
Classroom Environment
In this section, I will present articles addressing the effects of classroom environments on
student perceptions of their education. The literature will show classroom environments
determined by teacher expectations of academic and behavior norms influence students through
the perceived intentions of the teacher, the encouragement of deeper learning, and the level of
difficulty in curriculum being presented.
Givens Rolland’s (2012) meta-analysis and narrative review summarized theoretical
literature and addressed what was known about relationships among classroom structures,
teacher support, and student outcomes in United States secondary schools to evaluate teacher
support for academic achievement and behavioral outcomes in relation to students’ perceptions
of mastery and performance classroom goal structures. To evaluate the research on classroom
goal structures and teacher support systematically, a criteria-based approach was used to search
IMPLIED AND PERCEIVED MESSAGES 70
peer and non-peer reviewed journal articles, chapters, and international handbooks. Through her
narrative review, Givens Rolland (2012) defined achievement goal theory to distinguish between
performance goals of students who showed an interest in demonstrating competence and mastery
goals of students who showed interest in developing competence through the learning process.
Her meta-analysis reflected numerous studies that showed positive academic and socio-
emotional outcomes related to mastery oriented goals and classroom climates. Givens Rolland
(2012) explained the achievement goal theory showed students’ personal goal structures were
influenced by the classroom goal structures and the messages that were conveyed explicitly or
implicitly in the learning environment. The studies reviewed by Givens Rolland (2012) covered a
broad range of the history of student surveys from Moos and Tricket’s (1974) Classroom
Environment Scale to the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study-Kindergarten to Patterns of
Adaptive Learning Scales. Through the meta-analysis of writings reporting on these studies,
classroom climate can be largely determined by teacher support measured by factors of teacher
competency, respect, warmth, and socioemotional involvement. Teacher support, based on these
factors, is reported by students to greatly increase their personal mastery, learning-oriented goals,
intrinsic value of learning, and academic self-efficacy. Teacher support combined with a
classroom emphasis on mastery or task oriented goals affects students’ perceptions of success
directly; students are more likely to rate themselves based on comparative performance of scores
and grades but when students are evaluated in multiple ways, relationships between the
environment the teacher has established and student goals is difficult to establish. Students will
adjust to the expectations placed upon them. For instance, in the research, classrooms that
emphasized performance goals had students with higher levels of personal performance goals
and classrooms that emphasized mastery had students with more personal mastery goals. The
IMPLIED AND PERCEIVED MESSAGES 71
student established personal goals effect students’ perceptions of their own competence,
efficiency, and self-esteem. Givens Rolland’s (2012) meta-analysis suggested teachers’
classroom environments for academic and behavioral norms encouraged competitive
assessments and encouraged students to perceive their goals based on achieving higher scores
than their peers. Student perceptions related to individual learning goals and intrinsic value
instead of assessment goals allowed them to gain competence, motivation, and self-worth
making the study important by showing teachers the need to develop socioemotional and
instructional support systems to build students’ perceived competence and academic
achievement goals (Givens Rolland, 2012).
Dart et al. (1999) conducted a study to discover the differences between students’
perceptions of the classroom and their deeper learning. The report defined Deep Learning as an
approach of students to seeking meaning and understanding of the material being studied, a
belief that can conflict with traditional teaching behaviors of transmissive education. Their study
was to determine the difference in students’ perceptions of their classroom and learning when
they had a deep learning approach rather than a surface level learning approach. The study was
of 484 students from 24 classes within a secondary school in Brisbane, Australia using the
Learning Process Questionnaire, the Individualized Classroom Environment Questionnaire, and
the Learner Self Concept scale based on motive/strategy models of learning. Results were
analyzed by determining correlation between individual scores and by finding a set of correlated
learning approaches. The results showed a deeper approach to learning was significantly related
to classroom environment being perceived as more personalized and meaningful. Teachers who
developed a classroom that was perceived as providing more opportunities for individualization,
encouraging students to be active participants instead of passive observers, and emphasizing the
IMPLIED AND PERCEIVED MESSAGES 72
use of skills of inquiry were seen as being more caring and creating a meaningful learning
environment (Dart et al., 1999). The importance of this study is to show students have a desire
for teacher flexibility in academic and behavioral goals in order to combat stagnation in their
development and allow discovery of knowledge through inquiry and emphasis on the relevancy
of curriculum.
In doing a study of a Character Education Program (CRE) in Northwest Ohio,
Romanowski (2003) found students could see a value in education but felt they were being
taught on a level too simplistic and below their capabilities to provide meaning for them. He
created a qualitative study of the CRE program designed to find students’ perspective on the
effectiveness of the program and to produce knowledge for the administrators and teachers to
make adjustments. The study was of 144 students, 25% of the student body, broken into focus
groups of 4-6 students in a rural high school in the area of Ohio where the program was being
implemented. The data was taken through semi-structured interviews and spontaneous
conversations with students in the focus groups. Even though the study was focused specifically
on the CRE, it revealed important findings of student perspectives overall. High school students
expressed frustration with what they perceived as teaching inappropriate for their age and better
suited for younger children. Students also were frustrated with prescribed curriculums not
allowing for teachers to be flexible in how they presented knowledge or for students to be able to
adjust to new lines of inquiry. The lessons having the biggest impact were done through teacher
modeling of desired behaviors so students could see direct applications of what they were
learning. Romanowski (2003) also discovered some elements of students’ perceptions, which
related to the functioning of the classroom environment. Students admitted they ignored and
disrespected the teacher and caused distractions because they perceived their time was being
IMPLIED AND PERCEIVED MESSAGES 73
wasted with activities not meaningful to their development or growth. In Romanowski’s (2003)
analysis of what was working within the program, he also identified what students’ perceived as
successful teaching. Students explained what made curriculum interesting and relevant to them
were the lessons that connected to existing curriculum or pop cultural references they could
relate to and through relevant class discussions where they were allowed to voice their own
opinions and understanding (Romanowski, 2003). The study is important in revealing student
views on what is perceived as effective and ineffective pedagogy practices related to
appropriateness of the curriculum for the age and development range of the students.
Bae, Holloway, Li, and Bempechat (2008) focused on the formation of students’ self-
concepts as a consequence of the students’ perceptions of teachers’ differential treatment. They
based their qualitative study off of research showing teacher perceptions of students significantly
affected student perceptions, and they saw the student perspective as a key to understanding why
some students achieved and others failed. They did a purposive sampling of 6 high achieving and
5 low achieving students form Bay Area high schools with below average API scores. The
interviews were a semi-structured process with different rounds building from questions about
their life outside of school to their conceptions of their own abilities and future aspirations. The
interviews revealed students had a perception of a “good” student. They saw good students as
those who had responsible academic behavior with assignments and those who respected adults
and followed the social norms of the school. The majority of students associated good students
with high grades and only two of them connected intelligence and ability with being a good
student. Students perceived teachers as valuing effort most of all, giving the students the view
that all they had to do was try hard to become better students. The study is important in revealing
students judged most of their academic merit off of quantitative accumulations of points and
IMPLIED AND PERCEIVED MESSAGES 74
scores rather than through engagement in high cognitive functioning, and they could not identify
any reasons why students should be “non-good” students other than a lack of effort or following
appropriate behavioral norms (Bae et al., 2008).
Student perceptions on classroom environments reveal that environments supporting
intrinsic value instead of assessment goals allow for students to build self-worth through
motivation rather than through following of behavioral norms (Bae et al., 2008; Givens Rolland,
2012). Students also expressed a desire for teachers to be flexible in their approaches and make
the classroom environment a place for discovery of knowledge related to relevancy and age
appropriate expectations (Dart et al., 1999; Romanowski, 2003). This section on student
perceptions of classroom environments is important to my research questions because it shows
students are affected by the behavioral and academic expectations teachers establish both in their
motivation and self-worth and that teachers’ goals for academic and behavioral expectations are
not in line with student perspectives of what is valuable.
Grading Practices
In this section, I will present student perceptions of grading practices. Grading practices
are often used by teachers as motivational and punitive measures both academically and
behaviorally, and student perceptions of grades are often associated with negative learning
elements such as cheating, surface level learning, and developing motivations of competition and
recognition rather than mastery of skills (Romanowski, 2004). The articles in this section will
show students are affected negatively by teachers emphasizing academic and behavioral goals
through grading practices. Students have more positive perceptions of academics when focusing
on mastery of skills, and students prefer alternate assessments focused on application of skills
rather than traditional performance based assessments.
IMPLIED AND PERCEIVED MESSAGES 75
Ames and Archer (1988) conducted a quantitative study of 167 academically advanced
students from 8
th
to 11
th
grade to address whether mastery performance goal constructs
differentiated students’ perceptions of their classroom experiences. Ames and Archer (1988)
differentiated between performance goal orientation, which is concerned with showing success
through outperforming others and achieving with little effort, and mastery goals that were
attached to developing something new. Since previous studies had shown students expressed
interest in academic challenges not associated with grades, they wanted to focus their study on
how students’ perceptions of their academic abilities compared with their motivation to perform
well academically. Their subject group was given 15-item questionnaires with 5-point Likert
scale ranges of disagree (1) to strongly agree (5) to assess their processing, self-planning, and
self-monitoring strategies. To establish findings, students’ scores on mastery and performance
scales were correlated with learning strategies, task choices, attitudes, and attrition measures.
Through the correlational analysis, they found that students’ perceived emphasis on mastery
goals encouraged student behaviors incorporating more learning strategies, acceptance of
challenges, and positive attitudes toward the class. Through the same analysis measurements,
performance tasks were negatively related to attitudes and self-perceptions of academic abilities.
When given performance tasks, students focused less on their ability and more on the possibility
of failure; therefore, mastery rather than performance oriented goals were shown to be more
likely to encourage students to sustain involvement in academics and to pursue tasks for further
learning (Ames & Archer, 1988). The importance of the study is to show goal orientation for
students is defined by the meaning of the events the students are given and the individual
motivation adopted to deal with those events, emphasizing the need for teachers to develop and
IMPLIED AND PERCEIVED MESSAGES 76
foster meaningful tasks and assessments beyond the purpose of task assessment in order to
encourage students’ academic perceptions of meaning go beyond immediate gratification.
Sambell, McDowell, and Brown (1997) studied the validity of assessments based on the
positive or negative impact they had on students’ perceptions of meaningful academic goals in
the United Kingdom. The data-collection period started in March 1994 and spanned 2 1/2
academic years, gathering data from 13 case studies of alternative assessment methods in
practice. They conducted a qualitative study of students’ interpretations, perceptions and
behaviors when presented with alternative assessments (problem solutions, reports, posters, short
responses, group projects, research tasks, reflective tasks). They employed case study
methodology to allow students to express themselves more freely in their judgments and
perceptions. The case studies included interviewing staff and students and observations and
examination of documents but the focus was on semi-structured interviews with students.
Sambell et al. (1997) focused their interviews in a staged progression for further validity of their
findings by using data reduction and feedback to check the recollections with earlier interviews.
The observations were focused on aspects of process introduced by teachers such as discussions,
feedback sessions, and formative assessments. The documents were collected to find evidence of
assessment criteria and formation of the assessments such as student handbooks and outlining
processes. The student interviews revealed that students perceived traditional assessments
(testing and quizzes) as having little to no positive impact on their learning and encouraged
detrimental elements to learning. Students also expressed the alternative forms of assessment
enabled learning and in many cases could not distinguish from when they were learning and
when they were being assessed during these types of assessments. They believed the alternative
assessments challenged them to integrate and understand the knowledge rather than just
IMPLIED AND PERCEIVED MESSAGES 77
memorize information but they also showed frustration with alternate assessments taking more
time and not being as efficient. Despite the extra effort and time on alternate assessments,
students felt traditional forms of assessment were not as effective because they were perceived as
arbitrary and irrelevant and the learning was guided toward the purpose of an assessment rather
than application of knowledge. Because of the perception of the purpose of traditional
assessments, students associated them with being unfair because they did not measure qualities,
skills, and competences that were valuable in other contexts. The issue of fairness from a student
perspective was found to be overlooked and oversimplified from a staff perspective less
concerned with aspects of cheating and effective learning. Sambell et al.’s (1997) argument that
traditional forms of assessment should not be inherently seen as valuable and valid ways of
assessment and in fact often have negative effects on student perception of learning or
encouragement of furthering understanding is important to teachers in how they define their
academic expectations for students.
Docan (2006) studied the impact grading systems had on students. He was interested in
comparing a maintenance method of grading where all students were given As and lost points as
assignments (maintainers) were graded versus an earner oriented system where students started
with zeros and earned points as they completed assignments. He studied teachers’ use of
negative incentives for academic motivation and how that influenced students’ perceptions of
their ability to achieve the grades they wanted. His hypothesis was students who received
negative incentives had higher motivation. To address this hypothesis, he set up a study of 101
students selected from 6 public speaking courses in a southwestern university. Students were
given a grade sheet to record their progress throughout the class they were taking and completed
a Student Motivation Questionnaire given at the beginning and end of the semester. An open-
IMPLIED AND PERCEIVED MESSAGES 78
ended questionnaire was also administered to allow students to express reasoning for their
responses in a 7-point rating system Student Motivation Questionnaire. Students were also given
a quantitative questionnaire focused on student perceptions of grading procedures and their
motivation based on grading practices. The quantitative responses from the questionnaires given
at the beginning and end of the term showed only a slight difference in motivation between the
two groups through the course. The qualitative questionnaire revealed multiple themes. Grading
presented a contradicting effect in student satisfaction as they had higher satisfaction in knowing
one’s progress and grade but grading practices in general created more stress. Over half the
earners felt dissatisfaction in grading processes and it lowered their motivation. Grades were a
large contributor of stress; half the students reported stress through the open-ended
questionnaire. In general, maintainers were slightly more motivated to focus on their grades than
in other classes where they were not given as much direct feedback on the grading process and
earners were slightly less motivated than in classes where the grading feedback was not given as
much emphasis. Docan’s (2006) study is important in identifying students are motivated by
grades because of stress and extrinsic values and students’ perception of academic achievement
are based on the measurable rewards rather than the more intrinsic rewards of mastering goals
and skills from the curriculum itself.
This section on student perceptions of grading practices is important to my research
questions because it shows teachers rely on traditional assessment methods as inherently
valuable yet they are sending negative messages to students to be motivated by stress and
extrinsic rewards rather than knowledge and goal mastery (Docan, 2006; Sambell et al., 1997).
Ames and Archer (1988) also show the importance of teachers to develop purpose and meaning
in their assessments so students’ perceptions are more aligned with the goal orientation of skill
IMPLIED AND PERCEIVED MESSAGES 79
mastery and learning rather than the immediate gratifications of grading that reveal a
disconnection between the goals of teachers and students.
Motivation
In this section, I will present literature exploring student expression of their motivation
and academic self-efficacy. The articles will show students are frustrated and unmotivated by
curriculum they see as irrelevant to their lives, students stay loyal to educational systems which
do not motivate them to succeed, and students are more motivated by tasks building mastery than
by performance tasks.
Nieto (1994) analyzed the work of a qualitative case study she had done in 1992 of 10
students from a wide ethnic and social variety to focus specifically on what were students’ views
of their experiences in school. Although students were originally interviewed to explain the
influences of their backgrounds on their perception of school, the interviews revealed student
understanding of the policies and practices of schools. The students were able to identify
differences between teachers they liked and disliked and also how schools had become overly
emphasized on grading practices. When looking back at her study, Nieto (1994) decided to write
a piece focusing specifically on how the study showed student perceptions on curriculum,
strategies teachers use, student involvement, tracking and discipline policies, and how their
identities were considered in school practices. She found students expressed frustration and
disconnection with curriculum overemphasizing Eurocentric canon knowledge and not relatable
to their lives. To allow them to have pride in the life they experienced outside of school, cultural
awareness was important to students in their engagement. Nieto (1994) argued good teaching
reflected the interests of the students and welcomed different issues and events to show the
diversity of human experience so students could gain a better understanding of equity and justice
IMPLIED AND PERCEIVED MESSAGES 80
in the world around them. Her study had included exclusively high performing students, and it
allowed her the opportunity to ask about the connection between academic success and learning.
The students expressed they did not perceive grades were very helpful other than making them
feel good about receiving a grade (Nieto, 1994). Her study is important in suggesting the
traditional curriculum and practices of schools, even with students traditionally viewed as being
successful, do not encourage a perception of meaning or relevance for the students in their
academic progression.
Halx (2014) explored the elements of critical pedagogy effects on marginalized
populations of Latino males. His study was a selective sampling of 8 Latino male students in the
process of credit recovery from three South Texas high schools with low-SES. He wanted to
conduct a critical theory exploration of student perspectives on the education they were
receiving, how education was advancing their social status, and their feelings about learning
from a more critical pedagogy. He used 1 hour tape-recorded interviews, conducted after brief
word association exercises to familiarize the students with school-oriented terminology. The
interviews were semi-structured and informal to allow for open-ended responses and focused on
the students’ general attitude about school, their awareness of social statuses, the acceptability of
the education they were receiving, the possibilities of advancing socially with education, and the
possibility of having influence in the community. One of Halx’s (2014) findings was the
students’ inability to express an understanding of different social classes around them and their
relative positioning socially in the culture. They were aware of different pay grades but did not
associate it with socioclass distinction or opportunities. Secondly, Halx found students were
loyal to the school structures that had been unsuccessful in previously helping them to achieve
their necessary credits. The students did not exhibit enthusiasm for their classes and knew the
IMPLIED AND PERCEIVED MESSAGES 81
lessons were not helping them learn but still refused to criticize the educational system in which
they were involved. Because of these findings, he recommended teachers prepare for addressing
frustrations students may have when they recognize the social imbalances revealed in critical
pedagogy and realizing students may be developing defense mechanisms to deal with the
insecurities they have of themselves in regards to their ability to achieve in school and society
(Halx, 2014). This study is important in establishing students’ perceptions of successfully
implemented academic and behavioral goals are not necessarily connected to an understanding of
what is in their best interests for academic advancement.
Greene, Miller, Crowson, Duke, and Akey (2004) designed a quantitative study to test the
impact of students’ perceptions of classroom structures on their academic self-efficacy. Their
sample was 220 high school student volunteers from a suburban high school in the Midwest from
three different English classes. They chose to focus their study on English classes because of the
divergent components of the subject area. They used Likert Scale surveys administered by the
classroom teachers with a month in between each of the three surveys used. Their results were
consistent with the causal models done in their research that assumed achievement was
connected to meaningful self-efficacy strategies, self-efficacy was determined by mastery goals
and not performance-based instruction, and self-efficacy was determined by perceptions of
classroom autonomy and support along with meaningful motivation. The findings supported
claims of perceptions on classroom tasks as meaningful, relevant, and interesting would
influence the students’ perceptions on how learning impacted their future success. Students who
perceived their classroom supporting mastery rather than competitive evaluations showed higher
academic self-efficacy. The study found when students perceived the importance of a task for
knowledge they were more likely to adapt mastery skills than when they viewed a task as
IMPLIED AND PERCEIVED MESSAGES 82
important for the purpose of a performance goal to compare them to other students (Greene et al.,
2004). The study is important in suggesting teachers design learning activities based on relevant
student interests and goals and recognize student confidence is built through academic self-
efficacy.
This section on student perceptions of motivation connects to my research questions
because it suggests that traditional curriculum and practices are being presented as meaningful
by teachers but students do not see a relevant connection to their lives (Nieto, 1994). The section
suggests student perceptions of successful academics and behaviors are not connected to an
understanding of what is best for their self-efficacy or teachers’ initial intent, and teachers need
to be more cognizant of creating learning activities relevant to student expectations and life goals
(Greene et al., 2004; Halx, 2014).
Conceptual Framework
In this section, I will present my conceptual framework as the theoretical foundation that
emerged as a result of the data I collected and analyzed. The conceptual framework develops a
theoretical connection of assumptions, beliefs, concepts, and relationships to frame a study
through a picture and definition (Maxwell, 2013; Merriman, 2009). Conceptual frameworks
identify the prevalent concepts in a topic and specific aspects of focus from the literature for the
purpose of the study (Merriam, 2009). The conceptual framework was developed based on the
literature informing its initial construction and the data analysis to reflect the reciprocal process
of teacher beliefs from practical knowledge and students’ actions influencing understanding of
appropriate academic and behavioral expectations through classroom environments being
influenced by student perceptions of the messages they received from teacher practices. The
literature showed teachers build their expectations from the beliefs and practical knowledge
IMPLIED AND PERCEIVED MESSAGES 83
gained through their life and teaching experiences in educational settings. Their ideology then
leads to academic and behavioral expectations for students. The instructional practices teachers
built from expectations of the mainstream culture, the degree of the teacher’s cultural awareness,
and the emphasis on dialogue influence students’ perspectives. Students’ expectations develop
from the teachers’ practice of using techniques that influence classroom environment, grading,
and motivation. Students’ actions are in response to their expectations of what is expected of
them based on the techniques teachers use in their practice. Student actions then inform the
teachers’ expectations of what students are capable of and any new teacher practices that would
need to be developed to adapt academic and behavioral expectations. The reciprocity of the
classroom environment comes from students not only being influenced by the expectations
teachers develop through their ideology and instructional practices but also having an influence
on further teacher practice as their performances will inform future teacher beliefs and
instruction. The interplay between the influences of teachers and students is shown in Figure 1
by the arrows representing teacher expectations guiding their practices and student expectations
Figure 1 The interactions between teacher and student expectations
IMPLIED AND PERCEIVED MESSAGES 84
guiding their actions that then inform future teacher expectations. At the center of both teacher
and student expectations are the perspectives gained from their practical knowledge of previous
educational experiences.
The first component reflects how teacher expectations inform academic and behavioral
expectations. Teacher ideology often reflects patterns of standardization of classroom
assignments and behaviors for management of classrooms (Hargreaves & Shirley, 2009;
Heckman & Montera, 2009; Mehta, 2013; Moss & Bordelon, 2007). Because of sociopolitical
influences, such as time constraints and standardized testing, teachers often emphasize school
behavior patterns focusing on compliance, autonomy, and scaffolding of simple tasks to
maximize student success (Anagnostopoulos, 2003; Heckman & Montera, 2009; Hess & Azuma,
1991; Moss & Bordelon, 2007; Shirley, 2009). Teacher beliefs in defining expected academic
and behavior performance are based upon sociopolitical expectations but also defined by the
pedagogical knowledge from teachers’ experiences in understanding students’ performance and
needs (Nelson & Harper, 2008). Practical knowledge reflects teachers’ applying policy
procedures, theoretical practices, and effective classroom management techniques from their
pedagogical and experiential knowledge to the academic and behavioral expectations they
develop for students (Connelly et al., 1997; van Tartwijk et al., 2009).
The second component shows how instructional practices to build teacher/student
relationships influence academic and behavioral expectations. Teachers’ cultural awareness helps
them develop ideology and expectations acknowledging the diversity of their students and
developing culturally relevant pedagogy to engage students in more relatable and relevant
curriculum (Haberman, 1991, 1995, 2008). In developing academic and behavioral expectations,
it is important for teachers to rely on student centered instructional practices to reflect on the
IMPLIED AND PERCEIVED MESSAGES 85
students’ needs by understanding diverse backgrounds and successfully counteracting negative
aspects of the dominant Western Eurocentric culture, rather than just conforming to practices of
prescribed curriculums (Gay, 2002; Paris, 2012; Smagorinksy, 2013; Tharp & Gallimore, 1989).
Teachers can use quality instruction for engaging students, like dialoguing, to develop academic
and behavioral expectations that engage students in productive and empowering interactions
rather than reinforcing the dominant power dynamics (Cummins, 1986).
The third component shows how students’ perspectives reflect the academic and
behavioral expectations of teachers. Students express a desire for teachers to be flexible in the
approaches taken in the classroom environment in regards to academic and behavior expectations
and would prefer activities that are relatable and relevant to their maturity level and cultural
experiences (Dart et al., 1999; Romanowski, 2003). Purposefulness in instructional practice is a
major factor in student motivation as well. Students do not see the connection of the content
meaningful to teachers in their own lives and often see academic and behavioral expectations as
not connected to what is best for their life goals (Greene et al., 2004; Halx, 2014; Nieto, 1994).
Students who are not understanding how the classroom environment supports intrinsic value and
assessments to build self-worth are more likely to disengage or be defiant, which would reinforce
deficit teacher ideology and may change teacher beliefs towards developing curriculum in the
future (Bae et al., 2008; Givens Rolland, 2012). With grading practices in particular, teachers
relying on traditional assessment methods of testing and ranking send negative messages to
students about motivation through extrinsic rewards rather than mastery of the material (Docan,
2006; Sambell et al., 1997). When teachers are giving academic expectations with the goal of
immediate gratifications through grading procedures, they are de-emphasizing purpose and
meaning for students and may see student motivation decline (Ames & Archer, 1988).
IMPLIED AND PERCEIVED MESSAGES 86
The conceptual framework reflects the literature review and findings showing that
messages students get through teacher instruction about expected academic and behavioral
expectations create behaviors that either conform to or reject these expectations and the students’
performance and behaviors cycle back and influence teachers’ perspectives by developing
beliefs and practical knowledge, which, in turn, affect the student centered instructional
practices, cultural awareness, and quality instruction for engaging students teachers use for
improving instructional practices in their future practice.
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CHAPTER THREE: METHODS
This qualitative study used both interviews and observations of high school teachers and
their students to explore differences between teacher perceptions of the academic and behavioral
expectations they are giving students and the students’ perceptions of those academic and
behavioral expectations. Qualitative methods were used to address the research questions posed
in this study because qualitative methods focus on understanding the process by which events
develop and how people involved in those events construct the meaning of their actions
(Maxwell, 2013; Merriam, 2009). In addition, qualitative methods enable us to understand the
meaning people have assigned to situations and then apply that understanding to improve the
quality of practices in different disciplines (Merriam, 2009). A qualitative method also
emphasizes the inductive process of gathering data to build theories and gain understanding
through the process of the study itself (Merriam, 2009). In this process, the goal is to gain insight
into the difference in perceptions of academic and behavioral expectations from the teacher and
student perspectives.
Sample
Sampling within qualitative research is usually nonrandom, purposeful, and small so that
a specific area of interest or phenomena can be emphasized directly (Merriam, 2009). In this
study, I used a combination of two sampling methods: convenience and purposive sampling. I
used a convenience sampling of the geographic area I work and live in because the geography
allowed me quick access to subjects and a convenient schedule to work around to gain data
quickly and efficiently. I also focused on secondary English classrooms because it is an area I
have a lot of understanding and experience in, allowing me a better understanding of the
academic and behavioral expectations and instructional practices being used in the classroom
IMPLIED AND PERCEIVED MESSAGES 88
environment I observed. Purposive sampling allowed me to focus on demographics and subjects
most relevant to the literature I am building off of and specific to my research questions in an
attempt to try and see evidence of the theories behind my research.
Site Selection
Because I was interested in understanding the ways teachers’ ideologies and their
understanding of students were revealed in the academic and behavioral expectations they
established and enforced with their students, I needed to select a site with a diverse population
representing multiple cultural perspectives representing the growing diversity in school
populations and the various cultural voices needing to be expressed. I looked for schools in the
vicinity of my home in Riverside County that have diverse racial populations and were not
districts I am affiliated with, so it lowered my own connections and biases to the community or
teachers. Information on the ethnic demographics of the schools was cross referenced with the
API (Academic Performance Index) scores, the School Accountability Report Card (SARC) and
the California Healthy Kids Survey for the district I targeted to help identify typical indicators of
social justice gaps such as racial and ethnic demographics, school safety statistics, school
completion rates, and postsecondary preparation information (California Department of
Education Data Quest, 2016; Cummins, 1986, Darling-Hammond, 2007; Gay, 2002). The reason
for these focus areas was to study the difference in the language ideologies of the teachers based
on their expectations of realistic goals with these populations and also the student perceptions
based on demographics not as statistically associated with academic completion (Au, 2003).
With these populations of students, there was also a chance to study deficit mindset in the
students and teacher and if there anything expecting students of diverse backgrounds to
IMPLIED AND PERCEIVED MESSAGES 89
understand cultural expectations in a classroom in establishing academic and behavioral
expectations (Bartolomé, 2004; Milner’s 2010).
Participants
I was not focused on proving that a certain ethnicity, socioeconomic standing, experience
level, or gender was determining factors in the establishment of student academic and behavioral
beliefs, so I used snowball sampling of the high schools in the school district in the Riverside
area to be open to multiple teachers and environments. My study was open to an analysis of
whatever was observed and reporting the findings; it was not designed to prove a specific
interaction was occurring other than teachers influencing students’ expectations and students’
perceptions influencing teacher behaviors in general. So, other than my interest in ethnic
diversity and subject specific areas, I was open to teachers who were most willing to work with
the ideas I was proposing and the data collection instruments and protocols I used. I first sent out
a recruitment email to the principals of all the high schools in my target area. I did not initially
receive any responses. I worked with an Assistant Principal who had taught two years ago at
what will be referred to in this study as Central High School, and I decided to contact her as a
reference before more actively engaging the principals on my own. She called a few of her
friends, and then I also received an email from the principal at Central High School telling me
she would present my offer to the English Department. My Assistant Principal contact gave me
the name of a teacher who was also working on her doctorate and showed some interest. I looked
her name up, which for the purpose of this report will be Ms. Xavier, and emailed her my
recruitment script and a summary of the study needs and goals, and she agreed to participate.
Once I had found a willing school and teacher, I cross referenced the data on the school to see
how well it would match my goals for student motivation and diversity. The Healthy Kids
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Survey showed students in the district of the high school had a 22% self-ranked high interest in
academic achievement, a 13% self-evaluation of meaningful participation, a 53% rate of college
educated parents, 72% rate of self-determined high effort in school, a 49% rate of seeing school
work as interesting, a 76% rate of believing teachers want what is best for them, and a 69% rate
of believing teachers want what is best for them (Temecula Valley School District, 2015).
Central had a lot of ethnic diversity with an African-American population of 5%, an
Asian/Filipino population of 11%, a Hispanic population of 37%, and a White population of 38%
(California Department of Education Data Quest, 2016). Their API showed an academic balance
in their populations as the school had an overall score of 827 with the lowest performing group
being African-Americans at 765 and the highest performing group being Asian at 883 (Analysis,
Measurement, and Accountability Reporting Division, 2016). Their English Language arts
program produced an 83% rate of students exceeding standards and an A-G completion rate of
71% (California Department of Education Data Quest, 2016). Central also has a 94% graduation
rate and over 90% graduation rates for students of all ethnic and socio-economic backgrounds
(Analysis, Measurement, and Accountability Reporting Division, 2016). The school’s SARC
report explained the school mission statement was “to prepare every student for a self-sustained
future by ensuring that all students graduate and are ready for post-secondary education, entry-
level career opportunities, and active participation in the global society” (California Department
of Education Data Quest, 2016), and “their school-wide instructional focus was on collaboration
and higher level questioning and supporting a culture of collaboration and communication”
(California Department of Education Data Quest, 2016). Overall, the school was an appropriate
match for my study because, even though it was a statistically higher performing school than
average in California, it provided ethnic diversity, academic balance, and high student
IMPLIED AND PERCEIVED MESSAGES 91
motivation and engagement that would allow me to measure student success expectations with
the messages sent by the teacher and the school’s instructional focuses.
I observed a first period, 12
th
grade Expository, Reading, and Writing class because it
was the class with the most consistent meeting time and it would allow me observe for the 6
consecutive days necessary for the continuity of my observations. In choosing the students, I
purposefully sampled students after observing the class for two days and identifying students
who were over the age of 18. I was interested in a general view of student perspectives, so it was
not necessary to identify a specific ethnic, gender, or academic achievement qualification,
although I tried to find students representative of different ethnicities and various levels of
engagement in the content and discourse of the class. I selected a group of seven students to
interview in pairs. I chose a smaller focus group because the purpose of my study was to
understand the complexity behind perceptions and behaviors with students who had familiarity
and likely emotion investment in the experiences they go through on a daily basis, and the
smaller sampling size was more likely to produce in-depth or more expressive dialogue in the
students chosen while also having enough students to create a representative study of the class
dynamics (Krueger & Casey, 2009). I initially identified 6 students, 3 Hispanic boys all over the
age of 18, a Hispanic/White girl over 18, an African-American girl under 18, and a
Filipino/American girl under 18. On one of the days, the students I had initially decided to
interview for the day were absent and I asked two White girls over the age of 18 for an interview,
but they did not show up during the scheduled interview time. As a result, on my last day of
interviews, I wanted to make sure I had students show up, so I pulled the two students who had
previously been absent and invited one of the other White girls who had not shown up. So, I
ended up interviewing two pairs of students and one group of three. Overall, the snowball
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sampling allowed me to gain access to a wider possibility of schools, and classrooms and the
identification of students through purposeful sampling to find the diversity I was looking for in
student ethnicities and engagement.
Instrumentation and Data Collection
The purpose of this study was to investigate the teacher perspective guiding instructional
practices and how ideologies and beliefs influence academic and behavioral expectation in
classroom environments. I collected data from teacher interviews and direct classroom
observations.
Observations
Observations in a qualitative study require creative views and insight beyond the
mechanical recording of data or filling out logs from an observation schedule (Maxwell, 2013).
Observations in the setting that is natural for the subject of study allow a firsthand encounter
with that natural environment rather than the secondhand information that could be gained from
interviews and studies (Merriam, 2009). In an observation, the researcher can gain insight as an
outsider who may be more aware of situations and contexts, which can become common place or
mundane to those involved and thus possibly not mentioned in the second hand accounts
(Merriam, 2009). Often, teachers have goals and desires in their personal philosophies of
teaching or in the original designs of a course which could be hard to translate and implement in
the actual classroom. Observations would allow for a comparison of the teachers’ perceptions
and methods mentioned in the interview and the lessons being conducted within the classroom.
Observations are also valuable in qualitative studies to provide context to the knowledge gained
through the study so incidents and behaviors which arise can be built upon with further
interviews, research, or study (Merriam, 2009). Observations were a valuable tool for this
IMPLIED AND PERCEIVED MESSAGES 93
dissertation as they added insight to the teacher ideology and instructional intent to establish
academic and behavioral expectations and the reality of what students were receiving through the
daily instruction. The observations were also valuable in identifying the extent to which students
conformed and adapted to the expected academic and behavioral outcomes and how they
reflected the perceptions revealed in the interviews about the messages they receive from the
classroom instruction.
Patton (2002) and Merriam (2009) recommend using observations to pay attention to
actions that match the values and goals the subjects reveal in their interviews as meaningful or
important to their curriculum and assessments. Because it is hard to immediately connect with
what is important with the massive stimuli of a classroom observation, documenting as much as
possible is a valuable technique so the information can be accessed later with more leisure to
digest and reflect on what was occurring (Merriam, 2009). Understanding of physical diagrams
of the seating arrangements as well as decorations or student samples the teacher emphasizes by
placing them on the wall can help in understanding power dynamics or implied values and
expectations (Merriam, 2009). Recording as much as possible in the activities through teacher
statements, student responses, curriculum presented on the board, and the behaviors and
interactions of the students can help establish norms of behaviors and maybe even indicate shifts
in behaviors based on the curriculum (Merriam, 2009). With conversations and instructions from
the teacher, being as descriptive as possible with mannerisms and tones and quoting directly
helps in the analyzation of data to identify messages being sent by the teacher both verbally and
non-verbally (Bodgan & Biklen, 2007; Merriam, 2009).
With the observations, I looked for examples of the ideas Ms. Xavier shared with me in
the pre-observation interview about her image, her understanding of purpose and cultural
IMPLIED AND PERCEIVED MESSAGES 94
awareness, and her attempts with student dialoguing. I did six hours of classroom observation for
the class over a period of seven school days, so I could see the progression of lessons and
establishment of class norms for behavior and academic expectations. I used an observation
protocol with spaces for a summary of the overall observation to help me contextualize each
observation period with my larger overall understanding of the dynamic of teacher and students.
A space for a description of physical space and a seating chart to identify individual students was
used to try and identify the visual and spatial representations of ideology by Ms. Xavier either in
cultural awareness or expected behaviors. I noted the purpose and meaning of the lesson from
what was presented to the students and what I observed. I took notes of the way students reacted
and interacted with the lessons and activities they were given to see if I could understand their
perspectives on the purpose and meaning of the work. I noted specific students, especially the
ones identified for my interview or focus group, to document how they participated in the
dialoguing or activities to compare with the perspectives revealed in their interviews. I noted the
examples of discussion to focus on the way the teacher initiated and interacted with student
dialoguing. I focused on the sequencing of the class to identify any expectations either academic
or behavioral in the way the pacing or activities were designed and presented. My field notes are
a combination of description and reflection for not only an understanding of what happened in
the moment but my thoughts on how what I observed related to my research questions.
Interviews
The interview questions in a qualitative study can gather data from the practitioners
themselves to gain understanding for the research questions (Maxwell, 2013). Good interview
questions will attempt to reach a personal perspective and insight of the subject considered
meaningful and explicit into the situations being inquired about rather than a strict and direct
IMPLIED AND PERCEIVED MESSAGES 95
approach to gathering information (Maxwell, 2013; Merriam, 2009; Patton, 2002). An interview
process allows the researcher to adjust to new insights presented and to build probing questions
that can go into new insights or directions the original theory and research questions may not
have approached. With interviews in this study, I gained insight into the ideology of Ms. Xavier
based on her sociopolitical influences, personal beliefs, and the practical knowledge gained
through her experiences. I also used the interviews to explore the extent of cultural awareness,
culturally relevant pedagogy, and preparation for dialoguing with her students. Through
interviews with Ms. Xavier explaining her teaching ideology and instructional practices, I was
able to analyze the messages she communicated to students through her instruction about
academic and behavioral expectations. Interviews also were valuable with students to explore
their perceptions of what messages they received about expected academic and behavioral
expectations through their teachers’ instruction.
I conducted a 40-minute interview before the observation to get perspective of Ms.
Xavier’s ideology related to her understanding of sociocultural influence, beliefs, practical
knowledge, cultural awareness of the students, and reasoning for the instructional activities she
designed. The pre-observation interview had a semi-structured approach to keep my questions
open-ended and allow for Ms. Xavier to explain her perspective and possibly give stories to add
to the meaning and depth of her responses on the concepts important to my study of teacher
ideology and good instructional practices (Merriam, 2009; Maxwell, 2013). The reason to have
some structure to the interview, rather than a completely conversational form, was to make sure
the interviews were building toward my theories and research questions in a way that took
advantage of the more limited timeframes of the interviews (Patton, 2002). I wanted to make
sure the questions were clear enough to be understood but also avoided leading or being too
IMPLIED AND PERCEIVED MESSAGES 96
focused and taking away the possibility of realizations that developed that could help in the
larger goals of the study and also to offer the opportunity for insights outside my own
assumptions embedded in the research and interview questions (Merriam, 2009; Maxwell, 2013).
I used a thematic category approach to the questions starting with Ms. Xavier’s background and
inspiration and then moved into questions designed to address my research question topics of
academic and behavioral expectations. The questions were tiered into prepared follow-up
questions to allow for refocusing and building off of the previous answers. For the 30-minute
post observation interview, my goal was to bridge the information in the interviews with what I
observed and was more focused on gaining insight into the teacher’s perspective of how the
lessons went and clarified the actions and instructional goals I observed. The interviews were
tape-recorded and transcribed so that during the actual interview time I was be able to be more
conversational and not focused so much on dictating, and so I could focus more of my notetaking
on meaningful points, reactions, and intonations that are also valuable in uncovering attitudes
and beliefs.
For the student interviews, I invited two pairs to a 30-minute interview during their CAT
30 or tutorial period and a group of three students to an interview during the last 30 minutes of
their class period. The interviews were designed for me to gain clarity into what I observed in
class and their perceptions of how they performed academically and behaviorally in the activities
Ms. Xavier gave on the days I observed. I created a series of semi-structured questions in the
same tiered format as the teacher interview to allow for building off of responses. The student
questions were categorized into the student’s view of the school and education in general, their
understanding of themselves as a student, and their experiences specifically in the English class
and period I observed. The student interviews were handled the same way as the teacher
IMPLIED AND PERCEIVED MESSAGES 97
interviews with audio recordings and my notes being more focused on significant points,
intonations, and mannerisms.
Through the methods of interviews and observation in qualitative research, there is an
overall broader scope to a study which allows for nuances and understanding of perspectives and
worldviews that can be extremely valuable in understanding of contexts and developments to
build context for the research questions, and in this study, it was valuable in connecting the
subjects’ views and intentions with the actual practices and actions within the classroom.
Data Analysis
Data analysis started during the fieldwork with the raw data being typed into the
observation protocols with reflective summaries and the teacher and student focus group
interviews being transcribed. The analysis of notes was done through a combination of the
categorizing strategies of coding and theme but also because of the nature of ideology and beliefs
in this study a narrative approach with analytical memos was also used to establish thematic
connections. After the fieldwork, I began the process of working with the data by breaking it
down, finding patterns, and assigning a priori codes to the observation protocols and transcribed
interviews (Bodgan & Biklen, 2007). A priori codes were used because the conceptual
framework had distinct categories of teacher behaviors and student perceptions that needed to be
cross-referenced. Although I was looking for a wide range of possibilities in what a teacher could
be communicating in a classroom about her ideologies and beliefs from personal background,
practical knowledge, and cultural awareness, I tried to narrow the coding and annotation of my
field notes to culturally relevant pedagogy, dialoguing with students, and student motivation.
These were the areas in my conceptual framework needing to be connected and explained to
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enhance my study and theory. The codes assigned to the data were based on the literature
informing my conceptual framework and were labeled into categories and subcategories.
The categories I broke my codes into were teacher perspectives, teacher expectations,
teacher instruction, classroom environment, student perspectives, student expectations, and
student actions. Within these overall categories, I assigned codes to label the reoccurring patterns
of ideas in the interviews and observations. The codes of the subcategories were based off of the
concepts prevalent in the literature I used to develop my conceptual framework. For example, in
the teacher perspective category, I used the code TP: TI to label examples of teacher ideology in
any statements in the teacher interview or any instances in the observations. The code
represented the information was in the teacher perspective (TP) category and that it represented
teacher ideology (TI) based on the definitions presented previously in the literature review and
conceptual framework. The other categories identified in the teacher perspectives category were
teacher beliefs and practical knowledge. In the teacher expectations category, I had codes for
compliance, autonomy, socio-political influence, and cultural awareness. In the teacher
instruction category, I had codes for teacher guided practice, teacher dialoguing, student centered
instruction, prescribed curriculum, adjustments, scaffolding, and examples of immediate
gratification. In the classroom environment category, I had assigned codes for behavioral
expectations, academic expectations, teacher perspective, and student perspective. In the student
perspectives category, I had assigned codes for examples of the dominant culture, empowerment,
cultural relevance, maturity, intrinsic value, and relevancy. In the student expectations category,
I assigned codes for compliance, autonomy, voice, individuality, flexibility, deficit mindset, and
engagement. In the student actions category, I assigned codes for dialoguing, direct teacher
interaction, distractions, and self-efficacy.
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Once I had annotated my notes and coded the information, I developed a coding chart so
that I could establish a method of constant comparisons for Ms. Xavier and her students in the
various categories and look for incidents of similarities and differences (Corbin & Strauss,
2008). I took each of my categories and each of the code labels and charted them so that I could
analyze Ms. Xavier’s teaching perspective reflecting teacher ideology with the information of
what she said in the interview and what she presented in the observations side by side. I used
charts of comparing the interview ideals and observed behaviors for all of the teacher categories.
For the classroom environment section, I added another section to represent the students, so that
I had what Ms. Xavier said and did to affect the classroom environment and what the students
said about the classroom environment and how they acted in it during the observations. With the
student categories, I created a chart where the different categories and the coded topics were
cross-referenced with the 7 students in the focus group and their actions during the observations
and what they said in the interviews about all of the coded topics in the student categories. For
example, the chart would show me Logan’s perspective on dominant culture or I could look for
Kitty’s expectations based on deficit mindset. The charting allowed me to see what areas the
students most talked about in their interviews and what actions were most consistent with each
student during the observations.
Once I had identified patterns of similarities in all the coded and charted information, I
was able to also see the frequency of how often the material in the various categories and labeled
codes appeared. This allowed me to identify the focus areas that would address my research
questions and provide enough support to present my findings with plenty of examples. I then
spoke with my dissertation chair, and we worked on processes of outlining the information and
IMPLIED AND PERCEIVED MESSAGES 100
ultimately developing the topics that became my different findings in the answers to my research
questions.
Limitations and Delimitations
Because of the in-depth nature of understanding beliefs and experiences of multiple
individuals, a narrow sampling size had to be used in this study, there was a delimitation in the
knowledge available and the perspectives that could be shared. Since there was only one teacher
and seven students, many voices from the classroom environment and the educational field in
general were not heard. Assumptions and personal observations of both the teacher and students
about other members of the staff could also not be enhanced because of the delimitation of the
study focusing only on one class. Another delimitation had to do with the time dedicated to
interviewing and observation. To truly understand teachers’ ideologies and students’ perceptions
of the classroom academic and behavioral goals, I would have needed in-depth interviews of
multiple hours and observations of full semesters or units to fully understand a teacher’s overall
process and the students’ overall development based off of their perceptions of the academic and
behavioral expectations they were meant to follow. Student perspectives on teaching presented
another limitation because the students often addressed teachers in a generalized way or talked
about other teachers besides Ms. Xavier in their understanding of their behavioral and academic
expectations. The study was not reflective directly as an analysis of Ms. Xavier’s teaching alone
but included her as a representation of teachers not observed or studied because of the way
students addressed teaching practices overall. Convenience sampling brought up a delimitation
IMPLIED AND PERCEIVED MESSAGES 101
as the findings only applied to one geographical area and although ethnically diverse, may not
have been the teacher or students most representative of the theories I was analyzing.
A limitation in the sampling was not having control of which students would show up for
an interview and the time that I had available to interview them during the day. On the day when
students did not show up for the interview, it caused me to make adjustments to the amount of
students in the group and the nature of the questions I could ask was limited by the length of the
interviews and size of the group. Another limitation to my study was my inexperience as a
researcher. I did not ask some of the necessary follow up questions to identify more detailed and
nuanced perspectives from both the teacher and students about the foundations of their
perspectives and actions. During observations, my lack of experience caused me to spend the
majority of my time focused on my subjects and miss the opportunity to make more generalized
observations of the class as a whole and possible individual behaviors of students not in my
sample that could have been instrumental to my conceptual framework.
Credibility and Trustworthiness
Because validity is relative, qualitative research has to be assessed on the purpose and
circumstances of the study with an understanding of the researchers’ values and expectations that
could possibly influence the conclusions of the study so reflexivity needs to be expressed
through explaining biases, dispositions, and assumptions influencing the study (Maxwell, 2013;
Merriam, 2009). My reflexivity needed to be reflected in the assumptions I would have toward
Ms. Xavier as I may have had the inclination to compare her teaching with my own. As a White
male and veteran teacher of fifteen years serving in schools of multiple demographics and
performance levels as well as with the knowledge gained from my current research processes
could play a role in my interpretations of what I observed in Ms. Xavier’s instruction and in the
IMPLIED AND PERCEIVED MESSAGES 102
student cultural norms and behaviors. These differences could have given me biases toward the
instruction and behaviors I would expect to see in a classroom. My own practical knowledge
from my career could have influenced the interactions with Ms. Xavier and the students during
the interview process as well. During the interviews, Ms. Xavier often related her own
reflections on teaching by asking me about my practice and during follow up questions with
students, I had to be aware of how much I was leading them in questions based on my personal
understandings of what I observed. The temporal nature of the study was another component that
needed to be taken into account to establish the validity of my study (Maxwell, 2013). Long-term
and repeated observations and interviews provide the most complete data about specific
situations to avoid premature suppositions (Maxwell, 2013). To rule out misinterpretation of
quotes or observations, I used a member check with Ms. Xavier in the post-observation interview
for feedback and clarifications and focused on patterns expressed by multiple students to
represent student perspectives rather than emphasizing one students’ view of the teacher and
instruction as the reality of the situation (Maxwell, 2013; Merriam, 2009). The combination of
interviews and observations provided a diverse range of points of view and information and
reduced the chance of bias through cross-checking the data collected and allowing for theoretical
or comparative connections to be handled with more evidence to establish validity (Maxwell,
2013; Merriam, 2009). Through the analysis process, discrepant case analysis was used to
challenge existing literature and theories on the topics of teacher expectations and student
perceptions and allowed for new findings to emerge (Merriam, 2009). During my analytic
summaries at the end of my observation protocols, I analyzed my biases as a teacher with many
years of experience and expertise in the lessons and study areas of the Expository Reading,
Writing, and Composition class. I had to be aware that in my own teaching, I had handled some
IMPLIED AND PERCEIVED MESSAGES 103
of the material differently, and it would affect my biases toward what I observed in Ms. Xavier’s
approach to the class and material. The summaries were a way for me to make personal
connections and create theories for what I was seeing but they also helped me to make sure I was
able to support the viewpoints with the literature and cross-reference the data of all the
interviews and observations before including them in my findings.
Ethics
Observations and interviews raise ethical questions for the researchers and all of those
involved in the study. Participants may feel vulnerable or uncomfortable with lines of
questioning and in observations and interviews those being studied could end up engaged in the
activity or comfortable enough with the researcher to act in ways or reveal things in dialogue
they are embarrassed about or did not intend to reveal about themselves (Merriam, 2009). To
insure an ethical approach, all interviews and observations followed IRB protocols and forms
and the principal was given access to the forms before the teacher or students were engaged in
the research. I approached the interviews in a way to build trust and transparency by using
interview protocols explaining the purpose of my study and exactly what the subjects would be
involved in, and I allowed them to ask questions or express concerns. All interviews or focus
groups were conversational in nature to allow subjects to redefine my understandings, clarify
lines of questioning and ended with the chance to add anything for clarification purposes. Parent
Permission and Child Assent Forms were sent home with the students identified for the focus
groups with explicit explanations of the student involvement. Audio taping and descriptive field
notes were used to accurately interpret any of the information collected. Privacy of the subjects
and the ideas they shared were kept in a secure place. My analysis encouraged theory and
generalizations but also were done with an understanding of personal biases being recognized
IMPLIED AND PERCEIVED MESSAGES 104
and controlled in the findings. The final report used pseudonyms to protect identities and
counteract any possible repercussions from what was reported.
Conclusion
My study sought to understand the beliefs and ideologies teachers have to inform their
academic and behavioral expectations, how those expectations are communicated to students
through lessons, and what the students’ perceptions are of the expectations suggested to them. I
specifically focused on any gaps of understanding in what teachers were trying to represent and
present about their expectations and how students were receiving and being influenced by the
expectations. In depth semi-structured interviews or focus groups and a multi-day observations
of a high school class gave me greater understanding of the ideology and perspectives behind
both teacher and student classroom behaviors and performance.
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CHAPTER FOUR: FINDINGS
The purpose of this dissertation was to investigate teacher ideology and beliefs and how
they guide instructional practices and influence academic and behavioral expectations in
classroom environments. The study also was to investigate the messages teachers send through
their curriculum and how those messages were perceived by students. The previous chapters of
this dissertation discussed problems in the education system of an organizational entropy that did
not respond quickly to shifting societal workplace expectations and student diversity but
perpetuated school and teacher expectations based on established cultural norms of structured
efficiency promoting competition and goal orientation mindsets in students rather than allowing
for student voice to reflect individuality and critical thinking. The previous chapters also
presented the research questions that served as the basis for this study, a review of the literature
on teacher perspectives, instructional practices encouraging teacher/student relationships, and
student perceptions, and the methods of data collection for the study. The data collected from the
study addressed the research questions: What do teachers communicate through their instruction
about what they want their students to learn behaviorally and academically? What are the
messages students are getting through teacher instruction about what they should learn
behaviorally and academically? This chapter contains the findings of the study.
The study was informed by a conceptual framework that explained how beliefs
influencing teacher expectations and student expectations within a classroom environment are
influenced by teacher practices and student actions. Teachers build an ideology of education and
their expectations for students based upon their own beliefs and practical knowledge gained in
their life experiences. Students are influenced by the expectations teachers develop through their
ideology and instructional practices. In turn, their classroom performance will inform future
IMPLIED AND PERCEIVED MESSAGES 106
teacher beliefs and instructional practices. The interplay of the teacher/student relationship
creates student behaviors that either conform to or reject classroom expectations and the
students’ performance and behaviors cycle back and influence teachers’ perspectives by
developing beliefs and practical knowledge, which then affects the student centered instructional
practices, cultural awareness, and quality instruction for engaging students teachers will use for
improving instructional practices in the future.
For this dissertation, I conducted a qualitative study of a single 12
th
grade Expository
Reading and Writing teacher and classroom. I conducted a pre- and post- observation interview
with the teacher, six classroom observations, and three rounds of student group interviews. I first
offer an overview of the teacher and her students to provide context for the findings. I then
present the findings. To maintain confidentiality, all names of the teacher, school, and students
have been replaced with pseudonyms. This chapter will conclude with a cross-analysis of the
teacher and student perspectives and actions.
Ms. Xavier
Ms. Xavier loved teaching and had an enthusiasm for education that could be seen in her
passion about her students, in the reputation both she and her students referenced and the effect
on her students. When describing herself as a teacher, she said,
When I think about it from a reflective stand point, I know that I love teaching. I get
excited. Sometimes, I’ll be in a bad mood, like coming to work, and when I get here, I’m
in a better mood. So, I absolutely love teaching. Now, what I hear from students and
other people on campus is that that shows. So, it shows that I love teaching. I am not
burnt out yet.
She also talked about teaching being the main passion of her life,
IMPLIED AND PERCEIVED MESSAGES 107
I have been a CTE teacher. I have been an English Teacher, and I have been Activities
Director, and I have been an Assistant Principal. And, after that journey, I came back to
teaching, after I started my doctorate. I love teaching a lot more.
Teaching was also a lifelong passion for Ms. Xavier. She said since she was 5 years old, “I was
setting up my stuffed animals and I was playing school. It’s just always been; I never wanted to
be anything else.” She was not inspired by any other motive or experience in her life other than
the desire to want to educate, even describing her own high school experiences as
I was a lousy high school student. I got Bs and Cs. I didn’t even get into a 4-year
university when I graduated. I was not like a stellar student. I don’t have a ton of super,
super positive or super, super negative memories of high school. I think I just ignored the
fact that I was there.
Ms. Xavier’s background of not being a “top student” and going to a community college and less
prestigious university informed the attitude she communicated to her students about not worrying
too much over grades and rankings but caring more about improving themselves. Ms. Xavier did
not have any direct memories of influential moments in her background as a student and did not
believe any teachers had made the impression on her that she wanted to be just like them or
model herself after them. She said that more of her leadership models came from her jobs outside
of education,
I think some of the jobs I have had with supervisors or bosses that really inspired me to
be a certain way, think a certain way and deal with other people in a certain way. It
bleeds into my teaching. That is how I deal with humans, and I specifically teach high
school because I can’t handle younger ones. Um, and I would say that I treat my students
IMPLIED AND PERCEIVED MESSAGES 108
the same way I treat the adults in my life. So, some of the leadership role models I have
had in the past have impacted my teaching but not necessarily directly.
Most of the educational background that had an impact on Ms. Xavier came from seeing
“negative teaching” not as a student but as a colleague in what she observed in their interactions
with students. In her image of herself, Ms. Xavier saw a student centered teacher,
I don’t think it’s about me and I’m not here to serve me. So, this isn’t about my comfort
level. This isn’t about my control. This isn’t about what do I want. I’m here to serve.
They have the constitutional right to be here. I do not. So, for me, I try to be, you know,
I’m somewhat easy going, somewhat friendly, somewhat whatever, but, you know, I’m
not a total push over either.
She approached change of direction in her classroom activities by being reflective of her own
practice and applying the knowledge gained from her own doctoral study. Her study was on the
struggles males had with academic success by making a case study of one of her own classes
made up of entirely male students. She reflected on the study both in her perspective on students
and her approach to academic and behavioral expectations. When asked about the skills she
focused on most in class, she said,
I believe heavily in differentiation but I also believe that it is not a concept that is feasible
most of the time. I believe in it as an idea but when you have 37 kids, who most of them
are in the middle, what you truly do with both ends is a little bit of smoke and mirrors.
When I have the chance, I will take my high end kids and because of my dissertation, the
high end kids are my focus. I feel like they are being completely ignored. Like, “Oh,
you’re smart. You’ll figure it out.” We’re not meeting their needs at all. So, the way I
teach, from what I hear from other teachers, the way that I teach and the fact that I take
IMPLIED AND PERCEIVED MESSAGES 109
one focal point and I hit it a couple of times from a couple of different angles that is
working for my Special Ed kids, for my lower tier kids. So, do I do it thoughtfully,
purposefully, planningfully? No. It seems to work out that way and I’m okay with that.
But, I sit in a lesson plan, “Okay, so I need to scaffold that for these guys and here’s what
I’m going to do.” So, 9 times out of 10 that is more accidental.
She saw herself as a teacher who differentiated based on being aware of different levels of
student abilities in her classroom and approaching the whole class with different instructional
practices rather than focusing on individual students. She also reflected the way her practice is
informed by her practical knowledge in the way she explained the concept of differentiation was
not directly applicable to her classroom and that she did not “thoughtfully, purposefully,
planningfully” approach lessons but worked more off adjustments necessary for helping students
at the high and low ends of the academic spectrum allowing for her beliefs to have more
emphasis in her approach to her students.
Ms. Xavier’s room reflected both a minimalist perspective and an emphasis on her
connection to students. Her room was mostly set up for functionality. There was a table for
turning in work in the middle of the room with a shelf of reading books next to it. A double
rowed u-shaped section of 12 desks was in front of the turn in table and bookshelf in the center
of the room, presumably to promote more discussion and student interaction. Another couple of
rows were attached to the sides of the u-shape and then there three sections of five desks in the
back with one in the center and the two on the side angled toward the front of the room. There
were no assigned seats because students sat in different desks everyday but there were spots a
few students had claimed as their own and generally students were in the same areas every day,
whether it was the middle, side, front or back. The front counter of the room had necessary
IMPLIED AND PERCEIVED MESSAGES 110
worksheets for the activities the students were working on such as outlining formats and
directions for projects and writing and samples of student work as well as sign-up sheets for CAP
30, the homeroom and tutorial program. The front cabinet had senior announcements from the
school, the A-G requirement chart for the necessary credits to qualify for California State
Universities, the school Expected Student Learning Results (ESLRs)that were collaborators,
communicators, critical thinkers, creative and innovative individuals. Around the four corners of
the room were signs saying Strongly Agree, Agree, Strongly Disagree, Disagree to set up a 4
corner discussion activity. On the back wall of the classroom was student project art and
personalized art done to show appreciation for Ms. Xavier as well as some notes written by
students in appreciation of her. There was a small bookshelf in the back of the room with a few
educational books and a framed referral to the dean written for a student who had called 911
during class. Ms. Xavier told me the referral was given to her by the student it was written for,
and she framed it because it was the last one she had written and was a testament to her
behavioral expectations of students figuring out their own behavior rather than relying on
teachers to regulate them. The teacher’s desk was in the far front corner of the room and on the
wall behind it was a bulletin board labeled “Life’s a Journey.” The board had student picture
collages, a Crystal Apple Award Certificate, a Teacher of the Year Certificate and various other
teacher achievement certificates.
Ms. Xavier’s Students
I used the observations of students’ engagement and their reactions to lessons during
class time and the small focus group interviews to define the perspectives of Ms. Xavier’s
students. The Expository Reading and Writing class I observed was representative of the
demographics for Central High, a middle class, suburban school. There were 20 females (8
IMPLIED AND PERCEIVED MESSAGES 111
white, 5 Hispanic, 3 Asians, 2 African-American) and 13 males (8 Hispanic, 3 White, 2 African-
American, 1 Asian). The students generally showed a level of comfort in Ms. Xavier’s class by
being engaged in their work and the tasks they are asked to accomplish, being willing to ask for
questions and clarification, and by a willingness to quickly adjust their performance and
behaviors based on the teacher’s suggestions. Students also were observed to be generally
passive in their approach to the class. During class time, it was not unusual for large sections of
the class to be behind in the tasks they were given and to ignore the materials Ms. Xavier had
prepared for them to help with completion of the academic tasks. During teacher guided
discussions and lectures, students remained in a passive/receptive role. Most class responses
were from females are responsive, while the males are generally quiet. The majority of student
responses during discussion were one word answers to validate what Ms. Xavier was asking for
and not expressions of ideas or viewpoints. When students were allowed time for more involved
discussions in their group work, they appeared really reluctant to do so and reverted to task
completion activities. There were 7 students identified to represent the perspectives of Ms.
Xavier’s students in the focus group; Logan, Scott, Anna, Kurt, Misty, Kitty, and Jean. Logan
was a Hispanic Male who described himself as being “whitewashed” or Americanized. He did
not feel his heritage had a large impact on him and instead focused more on the influence of the
different work ethics of his parents. He spoke of how his parents were the most motivating factor
for him in their separate ways,
I would say my dad had a pretty competitive career. You know, he was always getting
promoted before everyone else, and I think I enjoy that same kind of excelling faster than
other people. My mom is kind of the opposite. She just kind of stays where she is and that
IMPLIED AND PERCEIVED MESSAGES 112
kind of . . . I want to get away from that and so I would say that is one of the few virtues
that like, I don’t know the exact way to phrase it, but being more advanced.
Logan wanted to be an engineer, he was involved in ROTC, and he had taken higher level
classes like Advanced Placement English Language and also Advanced Placement Calculus.
Scott was also a Hispanic male and said he was more Americanized and did not think his
cultural heritage played a large part in his perspectives. He did say, “My parents, they never
really got out of elementary school. So, for me, being able to graduate and go to college will
make my parents proud.” Scott did not see himself as a strong or weak student but as a student
who just tried to get assignments done because, “It’s like part of the process you have to go
through and get stuff done.” He was not motivated by any subjects in particular or any career
goals and his biggest interest was soccer.
Anna was a half White and half Filipina student. She said her background was conflicted
because her Filipina mother was a “stereotypical Asian” in that she “always put this pressure on
me to be a high average student and to be really smart and go to college because neither of my
parents went to college,” and her father expressed to her “grades are important but that’s not who
you are so I know that just because you’re failing A, B, and C doesn’t mean you’re failing as a
person.” She explained her father’s words had a lot of effect in her life it made her feel like she
was not worthless. Anna’s mother also pushed her to avoid the mistakes she had made in her life
because “she got pregnant at a young age, all these things went wrong in her life so she doesn’t
want [her] to end up like that.” Anna said her White father was who she identified with more
because he was “very liberal and very easy going and understands the meaning of everything
rather than what’s on the paper.” Anna did not give her full effort in school and explained it as,
IMPLIED AND PERCEIVED MESSAGES 113
I don’t try in school because I don’t want to. It sounds very like . . . I’m not an anarchist,
I swear, but I just don’t want to do the work they give me because I think it’s useless. I’d
rather spend my time on other things and I’m interested in learning about what I want to
learn about and not learning about what, like ‘the man,’ the government tells me to. It’s
just that most things at school seem kind of useless to me.”
Kurt was a first generation Hispanic male. He explained his motivation came from a
whole family of immigrants, and he said,
Although I’m proud of it, and at the same time, they push you to your limits because, for
example, both of my parents didn’t finish school. My mom only went to like 5
th
grade.
My dad went to like some high school and dropped out because he had to work. And, to
me, it’s like an honor to me to finish high school because none of them did.
He also expressed frustration with his parents because
They don’t really understand. They think As and Bs is everything to them, to us, but they
don’t really understand that grades don’t really matter in how much you pick up in
school. All they care about is getting good grades and nothing else.
Kurt saw himself as an average student who was like everyone else “because everyone else
doesn’t see themselves as smart because of grades.”
Misty was an African-American student who identified herself as Nigerian. She
explained her family as, “it’s like super culture. It’s like about, like my parents are super loving
and everything, but it’s like super structured.” The expectation put upon her was that she was
going to go to college, and it was not even an option but the expected next step in her life; “it’s
like flipping a page in a book, you know, next is college.” She said her whole life her parents had
told her she had to go to college because they wanted what was best for her, and she also said
IMPLIED AND PERCEIVED MESSAGES 114
one of her older sisters was in medical school and the other was in law school, so she was
expected to keep the family going in that direction. Misty wanted to go into medicine and was
more motivated in her science and math classes and excelled as a student when it’s “hands on
active.” She also said she liked to see herself as versatile because, as she expressed it, “I’m not
just a student. I’m still an athlete and I have a job and stuff. So, I’m not just a student. Aside
from that, I’m still a person and a human being.” Kitty said she did not have an identity because
she was “just White” but explained,
My parents raised me to be very independent. So, I don’t really like when people try to
tell me what to do because I like being my own person. I like doing things on my own
and being in charge of myself. I’m headstrong.
She did not identify how she saw herself as a student academically but said she learned better by
doing and was often bored by the repetitiveness and monotony of school saying she’s been
“learning all that stuff since eighth grade.”
Jean was half White and half Mexican, which she explained as, “So, I’ve grown up in a
super close, family based home. So, family’s like super important. It’s also like, we were raised
to be pretty independent.” Her family emphasized that she needed to always have a plan for her
future, even from the time she was a small child, and she saw her parents influence in this way as
being loving but with “tough love.” Jean said, “I see myself as a grounded student because I
know when it’s time to get things done and when it’s time to relax a little bit” because she had to
balance school and work.
For the remainder of this section, I am going to provide the answers to my research
questions. First, I offer the answer to the first research question about the implied messages
teachers communicate through their instruction about academic and behavioral expectations. I
IMPLIED AND PERCEIVED MESSAGES 115
will show that Ms. Xavier’s beliefs reflected the expectations of the dominant Western
Eurocentric culture and reinforced established curriculum and academic expectations. I will also
show Ms. Xavier built academic and behavioral expectations upon her practical knowledge.
Finally, I will show that Ms. Xavier did not reflect culturally relevant pedagogy beyond
reinforcing dominant cultural values. Then, I turn my attention to the second research question
about the perceived messages students are getting about academic and behavioral expectations,
irrespective of racial identity or immigration status, since these criteria were not determining
factors in their responses. First, I will show students expressed frustration with activities they
viewed as repetitive and irrelevant. I will also show students perceived academic expectations as
generally not engaging or student centered. Finally, I will show students valued recognition of
their individuality but did not believe what they valued was emphasized in school.
Research Question One: What Are the Implied Messages Teachers Communicate through
Their Instruction About What They Want Their Students to Learn Behaviorally and
Academically?
Ms. Xavier expressed frustration with grading practices and curriculum she felt was not
progressing students but the messages she delivered to students in her instruction reflected social
political values of the mainstream culture and reinforced the established curriculum. This section
will show she saw herself as a reflective teacher and built her academic and behavioral
expectations from her practical knowledge and that knowledge reinforced scaffolded teacher
guided practice leading to student expectations of self-regulation.
Finding 1: Ms. Xavier Represented a Contradicting Belief of Frustration with Current
Educational Practices and Teacher Behaviors while Reinforcing the Same Established
Curriculum and Academic Expectations.
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My study of Ms. Xavier focused on the role her ideology and beliefs played in the
academic and behavioral expectations she communicated to their students. Her ideology was
based on frustrations with educational practices she had observed and experienced through her
career. A teacher’s ideology, as defined in this study, is a view of reality that appears from a
rational development of values, beliefs, and attitudes from the life and experiences of the teacher
and develops from practical knowledge and socio-political influences (Galindo, 1997). Teachers
may come into the field with pedagogical knowledge of being able to help students but their
beliefs often become compromised by district mandates and curriculum that force a compromise
of teacher expectations that leave teachers less empowered and in a position where they are
unwilling to take chances with the academic and behavioral expectations they establish for
students (Cordiero-Kaplan, 2008; Mehta, 2013; Olsen & Sexton, 2009). Educators attempting to
hold onto more imaginative ideology and break patterns of stagnation often succumb to socio-
political pressures of standardization of the profession through rules and procedures of routines
and clearly prescribed goals (Hargreaves & Shirley, 2009; Heckman & Montera, 2009; Mehta,
2013). Ms. Xavier reflected many of these patterns found in research as she showed an ideology
built of practical knowledge with an awareness that schools were influenced by directives and
social pressures they could not control expressed in contradictions with current educational
practices and teacher behaviors in the way they adjusted to mandates like Common Core without
reflecting good teaching practices in the best interest of the students. While she identified various
problems in the educational system, like standardization over individualization and ineffective
grading practices, it was also evident her ideology was influenced by the same pressures to work
within the standardization of education, as her practice showed a re-enforcement of prescribed
curriculums and grading practices in the school environment. In this section, I will demonstrate
IMPLIED AND PERCEIVED MESSAGES 117
how Ms. Xavier represented a contradiction in the education system by expressing frustration
with current educational practices and also reinforcing established curriculum and academic
expectations.
Frustrations with Current Educational Practices
The practical knowledge that Ms. Xavier gained through her career as a classroom
teacher and as an administrator gave her the view that teachers and current educational practices
were not in the best interest of students. In her interview she explained she was working on an
Education Doctorate because she felt “school as it is right now is a little bit broken,” and she
believed “we need a little bit of reform.” One of the reasons she gave for what was breaking
school was in her observations of how teachers were transitioning to the Common Core. Her
interpretation of what other teachers were doing to accommodate to the mandate was consistent
with research that shows teacher ideologies for academic expectations are based on attempts to
conform to socio-political policies in a way that alienates their students rather than empowering
them (Bartolomé, 2004; Milner’s 2010). Ms. Xavier thought teachers often were more interested
in what would make them comfortable rather than worrying about the needs of their students.
She said, “There’s just so much work for every single class” because teachers were trying to
learn Common Core and new things and
also trying really strongly to not let go of stuff that they’ve done in the past. They’re
trying to do both, and the poor students are just like, “Ok, well, I don’t know what to do
today because it’s totally different than yesterday.”
Here, Ms. Xavier expressed her perception that teachers were trying to comply with
implementing the Common Core but were unwilling to let go of practices they held for many
years. She saw teachers who were struggling with their own needs to balance a mandated policy
IMPLIED AND PERCEIVED MESSAGES 118
and their established practices as hurting students who were feeling overwhelmed with the
amount of work in a single class and with inconsistent expectations.
Another frustration within current educational practices that Ms. Xavier described was
what she referred to as the “spiraling curriculum.” She described the “spiraling curriculum” as
what teachers, especially English teachers, did over and over each year,
We teach them theme since grade, and they’re learning the exact same stuff that I teach in
10th grade, and I’m like, ‘Oh, my God, we teach the same thing for 4 years and it’s no
wonder they’re fricken’ bored out of their minds when they get to me and they’re like “I
already know these things.”
She identified her own frustration with this approach by stating that teachers were teaching and
students were learning the same content over and over again rather than progressing students
through vertical alignment. She also explained her sense that students were bored by the time
they reached her, asserting that they believed they already knew what she was expected to teach
them. Her perceptions of the negative consequences of using a “spiraling curriculum” align with
researchers who suggest that teachers struggle with managing compliance, staying autonomous,
and covering material rather than adjusting to the needs of the students at their grade level
(Anagnostopoulos, 2003; Olsen & Sexton, 2009). Rather than allowing for students to be
challenged to grow each year, she had observed teachers reinforcing established curriculum and
causing the students to lose interest in the curriculum because they already knew it and identified
themselves as having accomplished the academic expectations being put upon them.
Ms. Xavier also expressed frustrations with grading practices because students were
inconsistent in their reactions to grades, she had to emphasize student growth over specific focus
on grades, and she had to redefine the district required letter policy so that it reflected the
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academic expectations of her classroom. Research has shown students’ perceptions of academic
achievement are based on the measurable rewards of the accumulations of points and scores
rather than through more intrinsic rewards of mastering goals and high cognitive functioning,
and they could not identify any reasons why students should be “non-good” students other than a
lack of effort or following appropriate behavioral norms (Bae et al. 2008; Docan, 2006). Ms.
Xavier’s practical knowledge with grades reflected these findings. When asked how much of a
factor grades play in students’ academic expectation of themselves, she said,
I think grades play a huge role, especially on the opposite ends of the spectrum. So, I
have a little girl in sixth period that, oh my God, if she gets an A- on anything, her mother
is going to kill her. Even if it’s a brand-new skill that she’s never learned before, if she
gets an A- her life is over. And, then I have my favorite person in my fourth period class
who’s like, “Well a C is kind of the same thing as an A. If I get a C it’s fine. Like, I could
get an A if I wanted to but it doesn’t really matter.” And everywhere in between. So, I
either have the kids who could do it and grades are not really their thing and it’s not their
focus. They don’t care. They’re just happy to kind of roll along. Then I have the ones
who freak out with anything below an A- which is very parent heavy, not in all of them,
but in most of them it’s very parent heavy.
Her practical knowledge with grading practices revealed some contradictory elements of having
to acknowledge students who are both driven and frustrated with grades. She has students on one
end of the spectrum whose motivation was guided by the need to achieve a certain grade in order
to avoid punishment and students at the other end of the spectrum who associate no value to
grades. Ms. Xavier also implied, in emphasizing that her experience showed students with As
were scolded by their parents for receiving lower scores with activities requiring growth and
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students with Cs not wanting to put in effort just for a higher grade, that students were more
reacting to the grade for their level of success then their skills.
Ms. Xavier also talked about the role grades play in her class and the way she used the
grading expectations of her school and the way she understands grades for effectiveness in her
class. According to Bowers (2011) teachers express a belief that their academic and behavioral
expectations are heavily influenced by standardization and district mandates, but the majority of
teachers’ grading practices actually represent individual standards of expectations based on an
ideology of what is most practical for their classroom efficiency. Ms. Xavier expressed some of
these same beliefs in explaining the grading practices in her classes,
Academically, I try not to make that the focus. Like, if you get an A, I really don’t care. If
you get a C, I really don’t care. If you get the information, that’s what I care about. I am
not an A teacher and I am not an F teacher. I’m really a B, C teacher and my kids know
that. If you want an A, you’re really going to have to, A stands for above and beyond. It’s
really hard to get in my class. We, in Central High, don’t have Ds, so it’s either A, B, C,
F. So, if you can give me some stuff, then show me some growth, you can get the C- out
of me. I’m really more a B kind of C+ kind of teacher.
This statement by Ms. Xavier expressed the contradictions of grading practices. While she said
she really did not care what grades students received, she still used the definition of a grade to
represent success in her class. Ms. Xavier emphasized learning as what she wanted for the main
goal in her class but in the explanation of her grading practices emphasized an average student
will get some things done and show growth, and the exceptional students will show work habits
above and beyond dedication to her class and the work assigned. She elaborated on this concept,
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I tell them flat out I’m a very B, C teacher. If you want an A out of me, that’s going to
have to be you working hard if you want an A out of me. Because you’re not going to just
get an A for just doing what you’re asked. An A truly is above and beyond. So, they
know that from the beginning. I just don’t give out very many As. So, in as far as my
grading policies, I’m very big, especially this year, I’m very big on revisions. I tell them,
“Oh my God, that grade was awful. You did really poorly. Do it again. Turn it back in.
I’m happy to grade it again. That’s fine. I want you to learn the skill.” Because to me if
there is a 7 sitting on the grade book or a 15 sitting on the gradebook, like it’s hard for me
when students fail and I tell them that. Obviously, if they fail my class then they don’t
walk and that’s pretty heavy, but if it’s really bad, fricken’ do it. I want you to know it.
So, it’s not about getting a grade in a gradebook. If you want to redo it, then I will
regrade it, and I will change your grade. It’s fine. Because, to me, it’s not about the grade.
I want you to know how to do this. And, I believe all teachers should do that.
Here, she showed more of an explanation of how she emphasized student growth through
making progress, learning, improving, and revising as more important than scores and grades. By
defining grades as elements of progress rather than success on a final assessment, Ms. Xavier did
move her practices towards Vygotsky’s sociocultural theories of learning encouraged by holistic
teaching of higher complexity rather than activities developed for recall and practice (Au, 2003;
Darling-Hammond, 2007). It is evident in the way Ms. Xavier views grading practices in her
class that she believes students need to be encouraged to focus on their skill improvement over
just receiving a grade, and she tries to encourage them in this way by defining grades as effort to
improve.
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Ms. Xavier’s practical knowledge revealed in her interviews showed a reflection on the
frustrations within the educational practices she had observed from her peers and the experiences
expressed by her students. For her, the combination of teachers implementing practices she did
not believe to be in the students’ best interests, the preponderance of a spiraling curriculum, and
the effects of grading practices on student motivations affected her own views the academic
expectations that would be most appropriate for her students.
Reinforcing Established Curriculum and Academic Expectations
Ms. Xavier’s approach to her class was influenced by her beliefs about what was in the
students’ best interests based on the practical knowledge she gained through her career. Research
has shown teachers identify their beliefs more positively toward guided in-class instructional
activities (Eisenhart et al., 1988; Hess & Azuma, 1991). Ms. Xavier’s practical knowledge led to
her believing more in emphasizing college preparation through established curriculums,
activities encouraged by outside sources as established effective practices, and academic
expectations established through guided writing practices.
Ms. Xavier believed strongly in the established Expository, Reading, Writing, and
Composition (ERWC) course she taught as important for college preparation. The nature of this
course was a prescribed curriculum from the California State Universities to direct students in
the skills necessary for college success. Moss and Bordelon (2007) explained ERWC focused on
teaching argument, reading critically, analyzing text structure, and English Placement Test
preparation by using mostly scaffolding, direct instruction, and modeling. Ms. Xavier expressed
a positive perspective on the course because of her belief in its relevance of moving away from
the traditional English focus area of literature and more towards rhetoric and argumentation in
expository texts,
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I like ERWC in the fact that it doesn’t feel as spiraling. It feels like we really do teach to
mastery in the very short amount of time that we have. In fact, I had a release day today,
so we were talking about the curriculum. We were talking about what it is we were going
to teach. I feel like I’m fortunate in that students who take ERWC typically, not all but 9
times out of 10 are looking for that college like that is going to be their next step. And,
so, right now, for this year, for ERWC, this class specific, my curriculum is based on
what I know they will need next year.
Ms. Xavier believed the class was breaking the patterns of stagnated learning experiences
previously stated in her frustrations with students not being given appropriate curriculum for
their academic and social progression. She specifically felt the class’s prescribed curriculum was
designed for students looking more toward the skills they needed in their future college
preparation. She reinforced this belief in class and often said things to the students like, “I’m
teaching it now because after June 1st, you need to know this.” The implication in this statement
was that the information or lessons Ms. Xavier delivered in class were meaningful beyond just
completing the work for her class. Her understanding of what was best for students was
consistent with Elbaz’s (1981) personal orientation theory on practical knowledge that explained
teachers’ beliefs were a result of needing to integrate and make meaning of their experiences
with the curriculum and teaching practices expected of them in their environment. Ms. Xavier
displayed aspects of this theory because of her investment in the established curriculum of
Expository Reading and Writing that reinforced her beliefs of the academic expectations most
helpful for students in their future through college and beyond. For her, this curriculum was
relevant to the needs of her students because she said she did not “believe in literature for the
sake of literature” or “assignments for the sake of assignments” and the course she taught was
IMPLIED AND PERCEIVED MESSAGES 124
“real world stuff.” Her expression of literature for the sake of literature reflected her earlier
expressed frustration with the spiraling curriculum of teaching the same concepts in English
without clear purpose. Although the concept of “real world stuff” was not clearly defined, her
association of it with the expository curriculum showed a belief that she thought it was more
relevant than a more traditional English curriculum consisting of literature and assignments done
just for the sake of doing them. Ms. Xavier expressed this sentiment as, “We read things in here
that matter.” When she sold the established curriculum of the course to her students, it was with
the emphasis of learning curriculum relevant to their lives.
In addition to working with the ERWC curriculum, Ms. Xavier reinforced academic
expectations of college preparation established as effective practices from sources outside her
classroom, such as her use of the SOAPSToneS (Speaker, Occasion, Audience, Purpose, Subject,
Tone) techniques that came from college professor suggestions and the essay paragraph structure
many districts used based off of the work of Jane Schaeffer. Ms. Xavier acknowledged the
SOAPSToneS were a base for her classroom academic expectations, sometimes, even at the
expense of the prescribed curriculum of ERWC,
College professors really want them to do the SOAPSToneS. So, as opposed to having
them do two articles, two SOAPSToneS, like, okay, get really focused on this one, do the
SOAPSToneS, and then get ready to share it. So, that is a piece as well, and you’ll need
to kind of weave in that presentation piece. So, honestly, it was less about the article itself
and more about the general topics, more about the SOAPSToneS piece, being able to
recognize speaker, author, occasion, and all that stuff. So, that’s practice. We’ve done
SOAPSToneS before.
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In this lesson explanation, this technique established as necessary for college preparation by
professors was a priority academic expectation for her, even at the expense of some of the
ERWC unit materials, the topic of the articles. Ms. Xavier viewed the SOAPSToneS as valuable
solely on what she had heard from college professors about their value was enforced through
academic expectations of continual practice of these skills and their importance in college
preparation or ultimately conforming to the mainstream expectations she believed made students
more prepared for college.
Ms. Xavier’s main academic expectation came through reinforcing the established Jane
Schaffer style writing curriculum through formalized paragraph structure and revisions. Her
academic expectations of writing were using the 7-10 sentence formatted paragraphs with
structured, boxed outlines and thesis statements as can be seen in her following statement
explaining her view on the importance of revision and structured writing for college preparation,
We found that, especially those leaving for college, they are not good at the revision part.
They simply kind of throw up on a piece of paper, turn it in, and never think about it
again. So, a lot of what I’m doing this year, I’m making them do something even if it
doesn’t meet the expectation. Even if it’s not for an effect. Even if it’s not what I taught.
Like, get something on the paper and then I’m going to hold it for you for a while and in
about a week and a half, I’m going to give it back to you. Then, we’re going to talk about
it again. Like, where we are and what are some of the revision strategies, look at your
own work, see if that fits. Revise that and then I’m going to take that back from you again
and then in a week or so . . . So, right now, my academic expectation, and this is going to
sound kinda backwards, is to allow yourself to be bad at it at the beginning. I have a lot
of students, and I’m sure you do too, the perfectionists who refuse to turn it in unless it’s
IMPLIED AND PERCEIVED MESSAGES 126
perfect. They freak out if they do an assignment and it’s not perfect. So, trying to train
them to do something that is difficult. They’ve never done it before. This is your first
time. It’s okay. Get it out. Get it on the paper and then go back and revisit it and revise it.
So, first it’s just kinda like get it out. So, thesis is a good way. I think thesis is something
they’re struggling with and have been all year. I believe it’s really important they get it
before they leave. I started with them in August, obviously, I’ve definitely seen some
growth. So, I started with very basic templates. Here’s a sentence. Fill in the blanks.
Author’s name goes here. Their title goes here. Get their claim here. And, then, we’ve
progressively gotten more difficult. Now, I pretty much ask them, “Okay, we’ve read two
articles, write me a thesis. If I was going to make you write a paper, I’m not making you
write a paper, but if I was gonna, write me a thesis. What would your thesis be?” And, so
now it’s just kind of practicing thesis. So, now what they’re hearing me say, and this has
been this past week, as far as thesis, I’m like “Okay we’ve already decided these things
go into a thesis. Are you putting the author’s name in there? If you’ve got like four
sources, you’re not. So, I’m like, you’ve got to get your idea, it has to be your opinion, it
has to have something to do with the topic. What are the ideas in the topic? And, they’re
continually turning thesis examples in to me. It’s sort of this in and out with all the
different topics we’re talking about. So, I’d say thesis and of course writing in general is
the main academic expectation I have of them. I was having a conversation today with a
colleague, no matter what feedback we give them, and I’ve gone over paragraph structure
pretty heavily since August. And, I’m like, “Folks, hey, you know, it’s 7 to 10 sentences
and we need to do these things.” And, we go over it and over it and then when they write,
IMPLIED AND PERCEIVED MESSAGES 127
they just revert back to what they’ve always done. “Don’t give me a 3 sentence
paragraph. You’ve not developed anything.”
What was shown in this explanation was that not only did Ms. Xavier emphasize revision she
also emphasized many of the guided writing principles and structured writing expectations that
went along with the revision process. The revision process was where she tried to access her
students’ individual abilities to become college ready through their work ethic and willingness to
get better. When asked how effective she saw the revision lesson, she said,
To me, it was very evident, as I was reading, who had taken the time to go through the
draft and truly, truly make the revisions that was very obvious. And, it was very obvious
who had resubmitted their drafts. Maybe they had added a couple of words but they still
had not done what I asked them to do. So, for those that where, there are some of mine
that are very dedicated to becoming better writers and they told me that at the beginning
and they’re dedicated and they’re there, so they’re taking what I have to say and doing it.
I would say that’s maybe 40%. The other 60% is like, essay writing, here’s my draft. I’m
like, okay, so, that was effective for the ones that are into it.
In this case, Ms. Xavier emphasized habits for her students of what she perceived were necessary
for long term writing development connected to college success. For other writing instruction,
she mentioned how students had not reached mastery of the direct nine sentence paragraph
structure from Jane Schaffer that comprised the typical essay structure. She described her
approach to writing technique as using the teacher guided paragraph format to encourage
students’ writing development,
It is my philosophy that if you can write a really solid body paragraph, and you know
how to do that, you can write forever. You can write a 100-page paper if you need to.
IMPLIED AND PERCEIVED MESSAGES 128
You just need a topic. So, they kind of have to figure out topics. But, when they do, if
you can do . . . and I have that very, very structured . . . here are those nine sentences in a
row that it should look like. My hope for them is that once they have that mastered, they
can move past it and have some stylistic choices and do what they need to do but a lot of
them don’t even have that basic structure. So, the box thing, the visual of a box is figure
out what goes in it and what does not go in it. (Emphatically pointing on the table).
You’re really trying to stay on one topic.
The two techniques used in writing expressed by Ms. Xavier were with the intent of students
conforming to expected writing structures as a basis for allowing for student voice to develop
individuality and become more college ready. The two essays I observed Ms. Xavier referencing
also showed her desire for students to conform to her academic expectations. She was
disappointed with their work on the 2017 essays because she said it was evident the students had
not taken the time to make revisions on the drafts suggested by her or the time to go through the
steps of the reverse outlining process she dictated to them,
They’re getting better and better and better, and I try to force thesis practice whenever I
can. So, that one, they’re definitely getting better. I will say the revisions of 2017, I have
done the final grading on those and they still weren’t great. To me, it was very evident, as
I was reading, who had taken the time to go through the draft and truly, truly make the
revisions that was very obvious.
Ms. Xavier made the connection that students’ writing improved most with the students’
individual effort and working through her process of writing success for college readiness. She
was impressed with the students’ approach to their work on the Juvenile Justice essays and said,
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Here’s what I was happy with, the two, actually all 4 days, the writing the thesis one day.
The next day, putting the boxes together, figuring out the evidence, figuring out what’s
going in there, the writing of the draft, and the consecutive writing of the draft the next
day. The questions they were asking me. The questions they were asking each other. It’s
probably one of the few times in my classroom you can see the thinking. You could see
them stop. They weren’t on their phones. They weren’t asking each other about the
weekend. They were like, “they guy who did that thing, did he get . . .” And, they would
pause and like, “Okay, so he got 21 years and the other guy . . .” I was just really happy
with the amount of work that went into it. How they would like write something and they
were like, “I don’t know if this works.” So, they were asking me or asking the person
next to them, “Do you think that fits for this?” I like how they used their Concept Maps.
They went back, and they actually looked at it, and they said, “Okay, I think that will go
there.” I think the Concept Maps went really well with helping them really visualize,
okay this is how you do. . . They have so many sources and so many ideas and so many
things in this unit. How do you take them all and narrow them down and fit them into a
four-page paper? So, I was just really happy with the amount of thinking I was seeing
them do. And, having read their drafts, their body paragraphs aren’t long and they have a
lot of sources in there. So, I feel like they put a lot of energy into it and they were
commenting, “This is really hard.” And, I’m like, “I know.” But, they wouldn’t stop.
They said it was hard but they kept going and I was just really, really happy with it.
The example of the Juvenile Justice essays showed the combination of Ms. Xavier’s main
academic expectations to have students be engaged through guided practices of established
curriculum where they are genuinely trying to gain skills through their work and also her belief
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in the influence of her guided structures to help students stay to conformed writing practices
emphasized by both high school disciplines and the expectations of college professors.
Finding 2: Ms. Xavier used Academic and Behavioral Expectations Based on Her Practical
Knowledge that Reinforced Scaffolded Teacher Guided Practice and Student Expectations
of Self-Regulation.
Ms. Xavier had academic and behavioral expectations that came from her practical
knowledge and her belief that scaffolding and guided practice were most effective for building
student self-regulation rather than building student independence through self-efficacy. Research
suggested that teachers often developed assessment and expectations based on classroom
management and organization even though most teachers identified the importance of practical
knowledge as building pedagogy, knowledge of children, and content knowledge (Fives &
Buehl, 2008). Ms. Xavier’s reliance on scaffolding and guided practice exhibited tendencies
consistent with Hess and Azuma’s (1991) research that showed teachers had an awareness that
depths of knowledge were necessary for student growth but often got caught in the promotional
contradiction of American social ideals emphasizing compliance and promoting individual
initiative. This contradiction encouraged classroom teachers to adopt hierarchical reward based
strategies promoting compliance over encouraging independence and growth and also
encouraged teacher ideology to move toward techniques like teacher guided practice and
scaffolding to present easy steps assuring prompt success and progression of student skills
without high levels of mastery or motivation (Heckman & Montera, 2009; Hess & Azuma,
1991). The advantage of easier steps was to make tasks more manageable so students could grow
confidence and self-efficacy in their ability to perform certain tasks (Rueda & Dembo, 1995).
Corkett et al. (2011), though, argued that presenting easy steps for student work completion
IMPLIED AND PERCEIVED MESSAGES 131
could be detrimental to student self-efficacy because teachers were more focused on academic
performance then raising student confidence and belief in being able to achieve based on their
and ability to improve. Rather than develop approaches to encourage self-efficacy, Ms. Xavier’s
approach was more in line with encouraging self-regulation and having her students utilize self-
directive processes that would allow students to be more proactive with completing their work
and taking the steps to produce higher quality writing (Zimmerman, 2008). Ms. Xavier had an
image of herself being a reflective and accommodating teacher in the way that she would survey
students and in how she had images of herself adjusting her lessons, even though she admitted I
might not have seen it during my observations, but her classroom activities were directed more
by her practical knowledge about the effectiveness of teacher guided practice with scaffolded
classwork, writing technique, to build toward her expectations of student self-regulation.
Teacher Scaffolding and Guided Practice
Ms. Xavier relied on reflective practice to build a practical knowledge that encouraged
her to overuse scaffolding and guided practice. She was cognizant of reflective practice and
mentioned adjustments she made to curriculum based on past experiences. Ms. Xavier expressed
valuing practical knowledge in saying that she was reflective on her practice, “I am pretty
reflective and I will actually even survey them. I will say, ‘Did this work? Did this not work?
What do you still need?’ I make them come up with their own goals,” and she said about
adjusting lessons, “I do that frequently. I picture myself doing it.” The image she reflected was
consistent with Clandinin’s (1985) research that established teachers connecting the theoretical
understanding of practical knowledge and the idea of imagery of their practice as a reflection of
their beliefs and ideology for academic and behavioral expectations with their specific classes
and students. In her view, she used the reflective practice to adjust her curriculum to fit her
IMPLIED AND PERCEIVED MESSAGES 132
specific students’ needs and even stated that she encouraged students to come up with their own
individualized goals that would best suit them. Ms. Xavier’s practical knowledge reflected an
understanding of her students needing to develop independence but also a distrust of students to
be able to complete their work without scaffolding and teacher guided practice, as she
exemplified in this explanation of why she does not give homework,
I don’t give homework in that when I taught before I became an ASB director, they don’t
fricken’ do it. And, so my lesson plans next year were shot because nobody had done it.
And, I was like so frustrated with that, and I was just like “no.” And, watching him
(points to her son who is in the room working on the computer) do sixth grade homework
and I’m just like “Some of this stuff is so pointless.” I don’t believe in busy work. My
dissertation has taught me that, absolutely not. I’ve interviewed my boys. If it doesn’t
have meaning, and if it’s not like going somewhere, and if it’s not important, I’m not
collecting. I don’t want to collect anything. I don’t want to collect your crap. I don’t want
to grade every piece of paper you have. I try desperately to make all of my class, lectures,
notes, whatever it is they’re doing build up to a big assignment. And then, if that big
assignment is late, you’re going to get knocked down late. But, all of the little stuff in
between, I just, if you don’t do it, you’re not going to do all of your big assignment.
You’re just not. You’re going to be missing a source. You’re not going to have any idea
what we’re talking about.
Her practical knowledge with past classes had led her to not trust students to get homework
done, and she developed a belief that homework was pointless busywork because students were
not utilizing it in class. Her view of work that students often did at home or without guidance
also had her adjust her understanding of the work that needed to be collected and graded so that
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she did not collect all work but focused on scaffolding work toward the “big assignment.” Ms.
Xavier showed an awareness of what van Tartwijk et al. (2009) found in their study about the
practical knowledge effective teachers employed in their expected behaviors and how it was
important for teachers to use small modifications when dealing with students who do not achieve
behavioral expectations rather than engaging in power struggles over correctness. She recognized
that the struggle over getting students to complete homework was not as important as creating
purposeful assignments that have relevant connections for students. One of the ways that Ms.
Xavier saw herself creating meaning and purpose was designing her lessons around one focal
point and reinforcing it from different angles and through teacher guided scaffolding. She
devoted a large section of her teaching to scaffolding. She said, “90% of my lessons end up
scaffolded, even if that is not the initial intent.” In this view of her students’ needs, Ms. Xavier
reflected a problem found in research that teacher ideology is typically focused on scaffolding
small and easy steps to assure prompt success and move quickly from one problem to the next
without the need to develop interest, mastery or motivation (Heckman & Montera, 2009; Hess &
Azuma, 1991). Her explanation of the importance of scaffolding revealed some contradictions in
her own ideology,
I do keep repeating that and coming back to it based on the different topics. So, just kind
of a reminder of “Okay, we already covered this so let’s make sure we know where we
are.” And, it’s really my hope, as far as mastery and academic expectation, that between
August and June they get it. I have very few things I expect them to get as I teach it.
Which goes in contrast to my I don’t necessarily believe in spiraling curriculum but I
believe that dropping something and moving on to the next thing is ridiculous. So, I just
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keep kind of coming back to it and add a layer and then come back to the same thing and
add a layer. Which, I guess sounds like scaffolding.
Her explanation here of what she admits was scaffolding builds off of her statement that there are
“very few things I expect them to get as I teach it” and her understanding that her students need
teacher guided practices in order to build their understanding of the material. As she pointed out,
she was contradicting her practical knowledge that spiraling curriculum is what frustrated
students but the consistent scaffolding could cause the same effect if students are not allowed to
build their self-efficacy through independent activities allowing them to grow their abilities and
academic skills. Ms. Xavier’s practical knowledge helped her reflect on the amount of work her
students needed and would realistically complete, and it also pushed her toward the development
of scaffolding and teacher guided practice to make sure the work her students did was efficiently
accomplishing her academic expectations.
Another area in which Ms. Xavier exhibited use of practical knowledge to build
scaffolding and teacher guided practice was in her approach to improving students’ writing
performance. Tharp and Gallimore (1989) explained a teacher’s role was to assist students in the
transition process through assisted performance at the point where students could progress only
with the assistance of an adult. In this process, teachers use Vygotsky’s zone of proximal
development to be aware of the difference between a student’s actual level of development and
abilities and the performance the student could accomplish with mentor guidance (Au, 2003;
John-Steiner & Mahn, 1996; Tappan, 1998). Mostly, Ms. Xavier’s recognition of where her
students were in their writing development came as she saw them struggle to keep their
paragraphs focused. She said,
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I’ve told them a bunch of times this year, their habit of sitting down, looking at the
prompt, going “all right,” starting to type, just putting out there whatever is in their mind,
hitting send and never thinking about it again. That’s not essay writing. That’s crap, and
you need to stop.
Ms. Xavier relied on her practical knowledge of previously graded papers to generalize that her
students had the limitations as writers and decided all of her students needed to be guided into
using a formalized revision processes. It was her belief that her students would be able to gain
independence in their revisions with her guiding them through the process of a reverse outlining
procedure. The reverse outlining process itself was something Ms. Xavier said she believed in
and wanted to reinforce. She reflected on the reverse outlining assignment I observed and how
she used it often, although usually more effectively with peer editing,
I like the reverse outlines. I’ve done the reverse outlines. I know it works. They didn’t
engage in that as much as I hoped that they would. I think adding a peer editing piece to
that would’ve helped. I think that if they had done a reverse outline of somebody else’s,
they would have gotten a lot better feedback on their own. So, if somebody else had said,
“Here’s what this paragraph is about. Here’s what this paragraph is about. Here’s what
these paragraphs are about. Does it match? Here’s the topic sentences,” . . . I think that
exercise would have gone a lot better if they had done someone else. I don’t think that
they see as much in their own work as I hope that they would see. They’re just not seeing
it. They’re like, “What do you mean this sentence doesn’t work?” And, I’m like, “It
doesn’t fit.” Like, even when I point it out to them, they still don’t get it. So, I’ve gotta
get them peer reviews for them to know to make it better. They would have got more out
of it. And, I struggle with making them uncomfortable. I don’t do peer reviews because I
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know a lot of them are so uncomfortable with it. I don’t do more presentations because I
know the high anxiety of stuff. I need to force them and every time that I’ve forced them,
I’ve been very pleased with the outcome and then I tend to forget that, and I’m like, “Oh,
I feel bad for them and they don’t like peer reviews and they’re scared to do it.” So, I
hold back, and I sort of enable them and every once in a while I force them to and they
step up to the plate and they do it, and so I need to be better about not enabling them.
Her explanation of the reverse outlining process she assigned in her class exemplified her
understanding of the function of it and how it can be a valuable process in their writing process
when they are held accountable for it by other students. Her reasoning for the outlines was to
have the students build an understanding of their own writing structure and purpose by going
back and looking at the outline process of their work. Her approach to the students in this
process, as she acknowledged, was more enabling and guided directly by her for the purpose of
effectively using outlines and drafts to force students to examine the purpose of their topic
sentences,
I’m very big and I’ve been touting all year that you write a draft, you put it away for at
least 2 weeks, and then you come back to it. So, I’m forcing them to do that. When they
put their draft away and then come back to it, they see things they would not have seen if
they looked at it the next day. I’m trying to train them to improve their own drafts
without the help of a teacher. So, “Ok, look at your own draft. What do you see in there?
Is there a sentence in there that’s like what am I talking about?” And, half of them do.
They’re like, “I don’t know what I meant here.” I’m like, “Yeah, I don’t either.” So, it is
a timing thing. I try to put stuff away, and they’re going to have to do that in college as
well. If you’re writing a draft, your teacher has moved on and they’re on a new line. You
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have to be able to go back to something after a couple of weeks and fix it before you do
the final submission.
In this explanation, Ms. Xavier uses time as a scaffolding technique as she explains that having
students look at their work after they have been disconnected from it might give them a different
perspective. Her practical knowledge showed a recognition of the value in reverse outlining and
having students examine their drafts and also acknowledged they worked better with the
influence of peers and not just the guided practice of her walking students through the outlining
process but she also presented contradictory expectations for the students writing process in that
she had stated she did not expect students to gain much without her help but also believed they
could understand their writing better on their own after a period of time. Anagnostopoulos’s
(2003) study had shown teachers’ ideology about what was important in their curriculum was
more often guided by standards their students would be judged on and could contradict the
students’ individual interests and developmental needs. Ms. Xavier’s ideology with writing
revision showed an understanding of the importance of students’ individual development and a
stronger emphasis on standardizing the approach all students should take to their revision process
but it also utilized scaffolding and teacher guided practices that did not produce consistent results
or allow for students to develop without her direct teacher guidance.
Student Self-Regulation
Although Ms. Xavier’s practical knowledge led her to believe in providing scaffolding
and teacher guided activities, ultimately she expected her students to self-regulate their academic
and behavioral growth. Research shows practical knowledge can affect classroom management
techniques when pedagogical and experiential knowledge are used to develop academic and
behavioral expectations for students (Connelly et al., 1997; van Tartwijk et al. 2009). Dembo and
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Eaton (2000) explained that self-regulation was an important goal of education in order to
produce individuals who were capable of educating themselves by making their own goals and
the necessary changes to achieve those goals. Ms. Xavier defined the expected self-regulatory
responsibilities of her students’ academic and behavioral performance in similar terms and based
on the societal expectations of college readiness and “adult like” maturity, in other words,
productive and professional behaviors. Her perspective on the need for increased responsibility
connected with the image of herself as a teacher to develop the persona in her class. She said of
her ideology about students revising their work,
I don’t even say they need to fix it. I mean, I don’t really have a preference. I’m pretty
hands off and I think I get that from my mother. If you are failing my class, I will help
you any way I can. Come into my class, I will talk to you, we will revise stuff. I am
happy to help you in any way I can. But, I’m not going to hunt you down and chase after
you.
While Ms. Xavier spoke here about the importance of students having self-regulation and saw it
as a trait within herself to be able to stay separated from her students and allow that process she
did not present self-regulation in a way that would encourage student self-efficacy to strive to be
better. She saw her process as presenting an opportunity and it was up to the students to take
advantage of it. Research explains the most important notion of self-regulation is to not blame
students for their low performance when they have not been taught how to become self-regulated
learners through concise goals and objectives presented through varied teaching techniques and
assessment procedures (Dembo & Eaton, 2000). Based on the success rates Ms. Xavier described
with her outlining and revision processes, it was not clear that students were aware of the process
necessary for them to develop the self-regulatory techniques she was expecting of them. She
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developed her work more around the ideal of optimism for student self-regulation and that they
were at the stage of development where they would be able to figure out how to control their
academic behaviors as she explained below,
I’m an optimist. I’m definitely an optimist. And I need to figure out a way, and I know I
keep harping on the cell phone thing, but I’m really, really hoping and pushing . . . I keep
mentioning and I’ve told their parents, my big thing for cell phones is self-monitoring. It
can’t be me catching you. It has to be you catching you. And, I’m realizing, now that it’s
getting worse and worse and worse and I know it’s not just my room, across the board it’s
getting worse, they can’t. They really are addicted. They can’t self-monitor. And, so I
need to figure out a way to have them more kind of reflective on that. I know that I’m not
the strictest teacher, and I know that I’d probably get more out of them if I were a little
more hard core. And, I think I’m a little more hard core first semester, to be honest. By
February and March, I’m like (shrugs). And, I do try to instill, they’re second semester
seniors. I’m not doing seating charts. You need to figure this out! You, not me, you are
going into the real world in 4 months and you have to monitor your own behavior. So, I
let it slide and we kind of come back to it and reflect on it and kind of talk about why I let
it slide. You need to figure this out. But, yeah, I could be more hard core, but I’m not.
I’ve come to terms with that. When I taught sophomores, I was a little more (bangs on the
table) like this.
Ms. Xavier believed her behavioral and academic expectations were to challenge students by
treating them the same way she would treat adults in expecting professionalism and
responsibility. One of the key phrases of Ms. Xavier’s ideology is “figure it out,” and it related to
both her academic and behavioral expectations. She said she tried to move farther and farther
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away from guided instruction as the year progressed so the students could “figure it out.”
Behaviorally, she did not have seating charts or a specific cell phone policy, and she did not give
referrals because students need to “figure it out” that they were going to be “in the real world” in
4 months and they had to learn to monitor their own behaviors. The concept of having students
figure it out themselves was a rephrasing of the self-regulation concept in the way she expects
students to be able to self-monitor their academic and behavioral needs to make them most
effective in her class beyond the scaffolding and guidance she had already given them.
Another aspect of Ms. Xavier’s push towards self-regulation was shown in her flexibility
with due dates or time restrictions for assignments. Ms. Xavier expressed a belief, supported by
research such as Heckman and Montera, (2009) that teachers develop their classrooms less on
academic and behavioral expectations intent on efficiency and controlling the environment and
more on developing students’ abilities to create awareness for their own developmental needs.
She did not give them specific due dates in order to encourage students to become aware of their
own time management and explained,
I give them three due dates. So, this week they have a project coming in and its
Wednesday, Thursday, or Friday. You don’t get extra credit if it’s Wednesday and you
don’t get in trouble if it’s Friday. It can be any of those three days. Now, on Monday, I
actually have them go through a reflection process: when did I turn it in? Did I wait until
Friday? Did I do it on Wednesday? Have I not done it yet? And, they go through a
reflection process of did they procrastinate. And, it’s not for me and I tell them that. This
has nothing to do with me. I’m not even going to give you a grade for that reflection. But,
by the end of the semester, you will have this list of things that you’ve done, and you
know what you need to work on going into college. Like, is procrastination a problem for
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you? To be honest, with 185 students, I do not have the wherewithal or the follow
through, I’m not terribly anal to, “Ok, your assignment was due on this date. Yours was
three days late so I am going to subtract 10 points.”
Her explanation of not being an “anal” teacher reflected an approach she took from practical
knowledge of students not developing well through hardline conflicts with teachers and also the
importance of students gaining the self-regulation of realizing the benefits of their development
for themselves. She explained that she used a process of pushing her students away from reliance
on her and more toward self-regulation,
As we roll an essay, as we get closer to graduation, I’m trying to push back on them a lot
of their responsibilities. “Did you do it right? Don’t ask me for a grade. Don’t ask me for
my feedback. Look at your own. What feedback can you give yourselves?” So, I’m kind
of setting them up more with rubrics and “Here’s what it’s supposed to look like. Does
yours look like that?” and letting them be reflective on that. We’ll see if it works.
Overall, Ms. Xavier showed academic expectations that reinforced self-regulation in her
expectations of students monitoring their behaviors of things like using cell phones as
distractions and in using reflective and revision processes in their writing development. The
messages of academic and behavioral expectations Ms. Xavier believed she sent to students
about self-regulation were that they should gain more awareness of their own academic needs
through the scaffolding and teacher guided revision process to a point where they could self-
regulate their own revision processes and due dates for the future academic goals but students
were also expected to navigate the contradictory elements of needing to go through the guided
writing process and then also have the autonomy to know when they needed help and what due
date would be best for their academic needs.
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Finding 3: Ms. Xavier Did Not Show Examples of Culturally Relevant Pedagogy beyond
Reinforcing Dominant Cultural Values
Ms. Xavier had a strong grasp of the dominant expectations of college success and
knowledge of literary cannon that she reinforced during her lessons but during the interviews she
did not show awareness of her students cultural backgrounds and during observations, she did
not utilize culturally relevant pedagogy. It is important for teachers to understand individual
students’ backgrounds and abilities rather than imposing dominant cultural values, so they can
address student achievement through affirming cultural identity and challenging the limiting
inequalities the traditional schools perpetuate (Ladson-Billings, 1992, 1995). Teachers are often
unaware of the disconnection between their own academic and behavioral expectations
developed from their own cultural background and experiences and the students’ values that
come from the cultural influences of their communities, and teachers could help students by
combating power dynamics traditionally placed on the student teacher relationship by re-
emphasizing dialogue that would help with understanding of cultural gaps (Rodriquez, 2009).
Ms. Xavier, as shown earlier, explained her background of not having high academic
achievement as a major factor in her approach to setting the academic and behavioral
expectations in her class but she did not acknowledge her students as coming from different
cultural backgrounds or how she understood the impact of dominant cultural values on her
students. Her reflections on her own background and her previous emphasis on teaching what
was relevant and beneficial to students after they graduate reflected Bartolomé’s (2004) study
revealing teachers believed their students’ academic success came from assisting students in
better understanding the dominant cultural values and empowering them through a growth in
abilities rather than reflecting on and denouncing discriminatory academic and behavior policies
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that alienate students rather than encourage. Rather than trying to engage students in actions that
would have revealed their individual backgrounds and struggles, Ms. Xavier’s pedagogy and
practice was observed to reinforce the dominant cultural values of the importance of conforming
students to expected college preparation abilities and reinforcing the traditional literary cannon
as necessary for her students’ cultural awareness.
College Preparation
Rather than focusing on individual students’ needs and culturally relevant pedagogy, Ms.
Xavier built her pedagogy from practical knowledge of what was necessary for students to be
adequately empowered to succeed through college preparation. Her approach to academic
expectations was more in line with Collier and Morgan’s (2007) study done on the college
experience students would most likely have and how they would need to have gained in high
school an independent understanding of the explicit and implicit expectations of professors, as
well as problem solving abilities to deal with school workloads and developed relationships with
their professors. While Ms. Xavier never gave a clear description of what her understanding of
college readiness was through the multiple statements she made about it to me and her students
showed an emphasis on problem solving approaches to longer writing assignments through
scaffolding and self-regulation and developing reflective capabilities to help with meeting
explicit and implicit expectations.
One area of problem solving Ms. Xavier emphasized for college readiness was for her
students to be prepared to deal with long and complex writing assignments. When introducing
her Juvenile Justice essay, she told them, “This is a more difficult paper. You’ve got to get ready
for next year. A college paper, if 10 pages, maybe two full quotes are allowed. You’re doing it a
lot. We need to paraphrase. I’m getting you ready for next year.” One of the emphasized problem
IMPLIED AND PERCEIVED MESSAGES 144
solving skills she expressed was that college students would need to be able to synthesize large
amounts of information and use a variety of citing techniques. She believed in the importance of
this writing style because of her practical knowledge from interactions with former students,
shown when she was introducing one of the writing formats and told her students,
Someday there’ll be a moment you’ll have to write something important. You’ll need to
do a report, resume or something and you’ll look back on this. You’ve already done this
once. We’ll do it again. This is the longest, most difficult essay we’ve done. . . I ran into
a former student last night. She said, “Ms. Xavier, Ms. Xavier, college is exactly the way
you said it was. They tell us to do the same things you always said they would. You’re
doing it right. Keep going.” I said, “Great! I’ll tell my seniors.”
While this is a vague statement for academic expectations, what Ms. Xavier implied was the
techniques shown previously that she had used such as scaffolding writing, developing different
modes of citations, and building longer writing assignments had been useful to past students. She
had developed multiple techniques that she believed helped students succeed in college and
referenced a few during the class periods I observed. She told them at different times, “Use your
green Academic Starter Sheet. Remember that (sarcastic tone), I gave it to you and said, “Keep
this with you always. Take it to college. These starters make you sound smart, and we like to
sound smart.” She also said quickly after that, “Everything we’re doing is on my website. The
PowerPoints and everything. Next year, when you’re at college and you’re like, ‘I don’t know
what to do,’ look on my website.” The techniques Ms. Xavier used of Academic Starter Sheets
and resources on a website for writing techniques could be useful in helping students with what
Collier and Morgan (2007) identified as explicit expectations college professors would have of
students writing abilities coming out of high school and progressing in the dominant cultural
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values of success. She had other techniques I did not observe but she talked about in the
interviews to try and help students move toward more independence with writing longer research
papers as well. She said she told students,
I know that if you are in freshman English and next year you’re going to pay 5 or 10
thousand dollars to be sitting in those classes, you have to be able to do this, and, if you
can’t do this, you’re going to fail that class. So, for right now, it’s how do you do
research, as far as, how do you take the ideas of six authors and put them together in
something that makes sense that is now yours. So, my curriculum, especially, now when I
taught 10th grade that wasn’t true, but for this year, my curriculum is very strongly
influenced by what I know they need for next year and that really controls everything I
do.
Research was something Ms. Xavier emphasized as a major component for college
readiness because of the techniques to develop longer arguments and synthesize sources as she
did with the organizational charts and pre-writing scaffolds for the Juvenile Justice essays. She
did explain she was using curriculum to specifically make her students develop paragraphs with
multiple supporting sources in order to build their abilities toward handling longer writing
assignments more in line with Collier and Morgan’s (2007) about the need for problem solving.
Ms. Xavier also emphasized her students’ problem solving abilities by giving them multiple
assessments at a time to encourage them to balance their work and approach to multiple study
topics at a time. During the observations over the 6 days, the students were working on two
separate essays. Ms. Xavier explained she did this intentionally, “So, yeah, they were working on
two essays at the same time. Being able to juggle ideas. They are going to have to face that in
college. So, being able to complete a draft while you’re working on something else, I think they
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need that.” It was her understanding of college that it was necessary for students to be able to
manage their time and work on multiple assignments simultaneously and that is supported by
Collier and Morgan’s (2007) study showing both students and professors saw that as an
important problem solving skill in college success.
The areas where Ms. Xavier encouraged students to have reflective capabilities to
understand implicit and explicit expectations came in her assigning was in having students work
on multiple assignments and in doing self-reflective practices with their writing. As previously
shown, even though much of the pre-writing work Ms. Xavier had her students do was guided by
her through various smaller tasks leading to the larger essay, when they moved to the evaluation
and revision parts of their drafts. She emphasized the importance of being able to understand the
problems with writing and not relying on a professor by saying, “I’m trying to train them to
improve their own drafts without the help of a teacher.” The concept of students being able to
understand their own struggles and flaws through the reflection process of considering what
made them successful or not successful in their writing fit with Collin and Morgan’ (2007)
emphasis on the importance of understanding the explicit and implicit because students reflected
on the expectations of the assignment were and how well they fulfilled them as part of their
reflection.
Ms. Xavier’s understanding of college readiness was not based on understanding her
students individual and cultural needs but was instead to give them uniformed tools for writing
that would progress them forward in their writing complexity and also teach them generalized
techniques to gain more independence in their writing processes and therefore reinforced what
she understood through her practical knowledge about the culturally dominant perspective
Collier and Morgan (2007) expressed of what makes a successful college student.
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Literary Cannon as Necessary
Ms. Xavier represented the consistent challenge for English teachers with literary cannon
when it comes to culturally relevant pedagogy. An approach to literature in line with Ms.
Xavier’s approach was Milner’s (2010) explanation of teachers developing context neutral
mindsets based on ideology that students could be motivated by teachers to gain interest in
subject matters that are more universal to human nature and not directly connected to their
personal background (Milner, 2010). In line with Milner’s (2010) findings, she showed a lack of
culturally relevant pedagogy by limiting literary instruction to the recognition of what is
basically admired about the story and author rather than reflecting on students’ diverse
background to use the literature meaningful by approaching topics of controversy and interest.
Rather than using culturally relevant pedagogy to create relevance of stories for her students, Ms.
Xavier focused more on creating a relational bond with her students through her “Friday story
time.” She explained it in the following,
I have kids’ books, you know like Goodnight Moon or If You Give a Mouse a Cookie,
and, we have story time; and they, the seniors, love it and it creates an endearing
relationship. The first day, I tell them, “I didn’t get into college and how my motto is to
pay attention to being positive.” I tell them about the little things I enjoy, the pillow and
the coffee are the best things. I still have former students reaching out and being like,
“Ms. Xavier, I just got a new pillow.”
Her understanding of relationships shown here was that students needed a way to relate to her on
a personal level, not so much from how their racial, ethnic, or socio-economic backgrounds were
similar but more how Ms. Xavier was a student just like them and enjoyed the same kinds of
things. Her purpose here ignores culturally relevant pedagogy because rather than recognizing
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what Rodriquez (2009) refers to as the need for teachers and students to engage in more
authentic dialoguing to understand their cultural gaps she expresses an already pre-judged ideal
of what was meaningful for her students based on practical knowledge gained from a few
students who related directly to her and presumably her cultural background. One of the students,
Misty, did bring up the stories without direct prompting in response to a question about what
teachers put effort into in order to help their students. She said about Ms. Xavier,
She’s like genuinely happy and like, if we’re going to read a book. Like, I’ve never met a
teacher that still reads us Kindergarten books. I love that about her. I’ve never had a
teacher like that since Elementary school. I’ve not had a teacher read a picture book and
then she reads it and that intrigues me about her. Because I’m like, your like different and
that’s funny. You’re reading me a second grader book, you know.
What the response Misty gave about the value of the Friday reading time and what I observed
when I saw an example of this showed that it was successful in helping students to like Ms.
Xavier and see her as a different kind of teacher but it was not engaging in a way that would
promote student dialoguing about culture and individual student backgrounds, even though the
possibility may have been there. What I saw on the Friday I observed was Ms. Xavier introduce
the book, “This morning, we have The Little Zebra Who Lost His Strips. I have not read this.
This is the first time I’ve read it, so we’ll see.” She then read the book in an elementary school
style of exaggeration and excitement. Students listened but 3-4 students were not paying
attention, were talking, or were visibly disconnected from the story based on their disinterested
reactions of talking to each other, focusing on other work, and texting. The story was about a
zebra who lost his stripes because he did not bathe and found other stripped things as he looked.
When the story ended, Logan, seated in the back of the room, said, “What was that?” Ms. Xavier
IMPLIED AND PERCEIVED MESSAGES 149
ignored or did not hear the remark and said, “That was short and sweet,” and then put the book
away and immediately moved into the next thing for the day. Based on some of the students’
lack of attention and Logan’s reaction to the story it did not appear to be an appropriate way of
creating relationship with the students in a culturally relevant way. Not responding to Logan’s
comment dismissed possible conflict with students who do not see the story time as valuable or
offering an explanation of why they should see it as valuable. There was an opportunity for Ms.
Xavier to create a relevant experience, even on a small level, of allowing students to express
ways they could relate to the human experiences expressed in the story or relate some of their
background. The intent of the lesson was exactly what she had said of just letting students have
the experience of enjoying a story time the way she did rather than using dialogue to learn
something about her students in the way they relate to the story, could connect the story to
anything themes they were studying in class, or even address the students who did not see the
reading of the story as meaningful.
Ms. Xavier believed she had an understanding of her students’ cultural background when
she previously stated reservations with teaching traditional English curriculum because it was not
relevant for students’ career goals, but she mentioned the need to include references to Western
literary canon as an important aspect of understanding mainstream culture. She presented
segments from the 2005 Keira Knightley version of Pride & Prejudice in the following way,
We did a little sniff of Hamlet. Why did we talk about Hamlet for 5 minutes? It was a
part of the Value of Life Unit. I exposed you to some various references to Hamlet; The
Simpsons, Sesame Street. Why did I do that? To show that everyone knows it. Everyone
knows Hamlet and the skull. I have another clip from British Literature to show
constraint. We aren’t going to do all of it. You could have signed up for British Literature
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if you wanted that. You didn’t. You’re here. If you want to cite it, this is the movie Pride
& Prejudice.
Ms. Xavier emphasized in this introduction that the purpose of knowing Jane Austin’s work was
so students who were from cultures and backgrounds that did not promote the importance of
pieces like Hamlet and Pride and Prejudice could fit into the mainstream culture by
understanding the reference to the piece. As with the storytelling example, she was not interested
in the perspectives her students had toward the pieces but wanted to promote her own
understanding of the value of literature onto them. She also explained her reasoning for
introducing Pride & Prejudice in her Language, Gender, and Culture unit because she wanted
“them to see constraint as a long standing cultural thing. Obviously, Pride & Prejudice is not
current. It’s Victorian Era and it’s not even in America. So, they had to go back and describe
how different people in the movie were constrained.” Her connection for the students was
implying no matter what their individual background and culture was, they needed to understand
the constraints on language, gender, and culture as being well established in Western culture and
something students needed to accept about that dominant culture. The activities students were
asked to do with the reference to Pride & Prejudice were teacher guided recognitions of what
was important in the story for their understanding of how it shows the Western Eurocentric
dominant cultural restraints.
The instructions I saw given to the students were a list of the character names on the
board and Ms. Xavier instructing them to “copy down these names on the board . . . in
your vast world of notes.” She started the clip and then begin to point out characters,
“That’s Elizabeth Bennett, the main character . . . We’re being introduced to the Bennett
Family, there are her many sisters.” The clip showed the girls spying on Mr. Bennett as
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he contemplates matches for them. Ms. Xavier said, “At this point, you’ve been
introduced to the themes of marriage and wealth, which go through the whole thing.
We’re looking at constraints of marriage and wealth.” The movie continues into the ball
scene where Elizabeth meets Mr. Darcy. During this scene, the students are told, “This is
Charlotte, Elizabeth’s best friend. These are all of Elizabeth’s family, and this is
Charlotte. At this point, we’ve been introduced to Elizabeth, Mr. Bennett, the Bennett
Family, and Mr. Darcy.” The movie is stopped after the first interaction between
Elizabeth and Darcy with no teacher directions or statements, and the students put their
stuff away and stand around until the bell rings.
I did not observe what Ms. Xavier did with the rest of the clips from the movie but this lesson
showed Ms. Xavier identifying characters without addressing the patriarchy of the society or
class differences that could have been relatable to students’ cultural understanding of the work.
She also did not engage the students in dialogue to understand their reactions to what was going
on or get their view on the conflicts being presented in the Victorian culture. She either assumed
students could already relate to the cultural society of Victorian England or she did not think it
mattered for students to relate to it other than understanding it was important because she told
them it was. I asked her about what the students were going to use the information for and she
said,
I have an exercise where they take all four sources: the article in the book, the article I
gave them, the article that they shared, and Pride & Prejudice and they had to do some
thesis building. So, I gave them some concept words. They had to do sort of a thesis.
They had to literally cut and paste. So, I cut them out and they had glue. So, here’s Pride
& Prejudice. Here’s some concept words. Fit in which ones, glue them on there. Then we
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had to create a thesis for all four sources and they had to recognize, as they’re writing a
thesis for this unit, they’re not writing the paper but just thesis practice, they had to
recognize they couldn’t really put, like, wealth didn’t really have to do with “Honor
Code.” Gender didn’t really have to do with . . . So, they had to figure out which words to
use and create a thesis that went across all four sources. So, it was really more, not
specific Pride & Prejudice but how does this fit into this overall idea of constraint and
because Pride & Prejudice and “Honor Code” have very different constraints in it, how
do you create a thesis that covers all of that, even the ideas that aren’t covered in those
two.
The intention of showing the movie was to give students’ exposure to a well-known piece of
British Literature and to give them another resource to practice synthesis in their writing
techniques. The cultural elements of the piece were ignored so students were not given a chance
to affirm their own cultural identity by questioning or challenging the culture presented in the
film or the limitations put on them by accepting the Western Eurocentric dominant culture
(Ladson-Billings, 1992, 1995). Ms. Xavier did not do what Milner (2007) suggested and relate
the situation of lack of empowerment or tension in relationships to the students and their lives as
students from backgrounds that are not Eurocentric. This missed relation was apparent in the
perceptions her students had toward the inclusion of the film and their lack of understanding of
the purpose for watching the film. The students revealed in their interviews different views of the
film that Ms. Xavier could have been aware of in her presentation of the lesson, for example,
Misty did not find value in “fictional things that are made up” because she said they were
“important to class but it’s not really important to me.” Whereas, Logan identified as part of his
individual background that one of his main interests outside of school was analyzing movies and
IMPLIED AND PERCEIVED MESSAGES 153
what makes them good or bad. With these various viewpoints toward the concept of film, it
could have been an opportunity to dialogue with Misty about how fictional works connect to life
and relate to non-fiction pieces thematically and a chance to engage Logan in an area that related
to his personal background. Without the students’ interests being addressed, the students were
disengaged while watching the clip. None of the students followed the direct instructions or took
notes during the beginning of the film clip and only one student, who I will refer to as Diana,
who sat in the back, took notes near the end of the clip. What the students received from the clip
could be shown through the interaction Jean and Kitty had in my interview with them. I asked
what they took from the movie. Kitty responded first with, “We watched a video yesterday?” I
reminded her of the title and she said, “Oh, yeah, I’ve seen that movie. I didn’t know we were
supposed to be taking notes on it. I’ve already seen that movie.” In Kitty’s response, she
dismissed the activity altogether because she did not understand there was value to the story or
themes beyond just watching a movie. This implied that she did not see the movie as an
important component in the unit she would later be using in a thesis exercise and instead just
thought it was something for people to watch who had not seen it yet. I also asked if the students
understood why the movie was being shown to them.
The students were quiet for a while, then Jean, who had been absent the day I observed
the video being shown, said, “I mean, cause I had friends that was doing this topic before
we were, and it’s like to show that . . .” Kitty interrupted her, “Oh, wait, it was to show
like how they started out. Like, I forget. She said it yesterday but like . . .” Then, Jean
tried again, “Because we’re doing it on like gender and race and all of that and it’s like
exactly what that movie is.” Kitty added, “How women, like she doesn’t really have
rights, and she gets picked, and they get married off to who they choose.”
IMPLIED AND PERCEIVED MESSAGES 154
The interchange showed the students wanted to find purpose for the film but were having trouble
with a clear understanding of what they were supposed to do with it. Kitty identified the same
theme of loss of empowerment I noticed in the film that was not addressed during class and had
apparently made her own connection to its relevance in the unit outside of what was observably
presented.
The example of Ms. Xavier’s use of Pride & Prejudice showed a lack of culturally
relevant pedagogy in the lesson because there was not an acknowledgement of the students’
background and connection to film or the story other than her statement about how they probably
did not want to watch the whole movie because they did not sign up for British Literature. Even
though an opportunity to address Western Eurocentric cultural restraints was presented in the
film itself, it was not addressed other than as a well-known example of constraint that all
American students should be familiar with and there were not opportunities for students to
dialogue on their views of the cultural restraints or question the acceptance of mainstream
cultural values. Overall, during the interviews and observations, Ms. Xavier showed awareness
of some of what the dominant culture traditionally expected of students both in college readiness
and in literary exposure, and she re-enforced those values but she did not allow for students to
engage or critic in the culturally relevant pedagogy of asserting their own views and experiences
into the narrative of what was valuable for their future. The students were seen by Ms. Xavier as
lacking what was necessary for success after high school without a recognition of the importance
of appreciating stories or knowing prominent pieces of literary cannon but not given a chance to
develop their own perspectives or approaches to successfully handle dominant Western
Eurocentric cultural values.
IMPLIED AND PERCEIVED MESSAGES 155
Research Question Two: What are the Perceived Messages Students Are Getting through
Teacher Instruction About What They Should Learn Behaviorally and Academically?
Ms. Xavier’s students showed affection for her and an appreciation for how she tried to
relate to them through personable interactions and the emphasis she put on giving the skills
necessary for doing well outside of school. They also expressed frustration with academic and
behavioral messages delivered by Ms. Xavier and other teachers that reinforced the need to
conform to rules and expectations that restricted their development through repetitive practices
and activities and subjects they did not see as relevant to their life goals. Students expressed
throughout this study that they were frustrated with irrelevant and repetitive academic work that
encouraged them to comply with basic tasks that were not student-centered or engaging.
Finding One: Although Expressed Toward Teachers in General and Not Specific to Ms.
Xavier, the Students in the Focus Groups Expressed Frustration with Activities that were
Repetitive, Irrelevant, and Emphasized Academic Expectations for Compliance in
Completing Basic Tasks
My study in Ms. Xavier’s class was to examine the academic and behavioral messages
communicated by the teacher and interpreted by the students. The seven students who
participated in the focus group expressed frustrations with what they perceived to be academic
and behavioral expectations of compliance and irrelevant classwork. Research has shown success
in school has been linked to teachers giving academic and behavioral expectations with clearly
defined tasks that lead toward students learning conformed cultural behaviors of compliance and
task efficiency for academic achievement (Brown et al., 2009; Ogbu & Simmons, 1998). Ms.
Xavier's students expressed frustration with having to do tasks for the purpose of compliance and
efficiency in order to have high academic achievement. They also expressed they were grateful
IMPLIED AND PERCEIVED MESSAGES 156
for teachers who tried to present alternative assignments or activities in class that allowed them
to express more of their individuality and focus on their life goals. According to Ellsworth
(1989), for teachers, like Ms. Xavier, to really combat the culturally conformed behaviors of
compliance that frustrate students, they would need to have a strong awareness of the socially
constructed authority teachers have over students and openly engage in dialogue with students on
a more equal level to allow students to express and validate their cultural perspectives. The
students expressed that teachers either were not aware of their authority and disconnection from
students or they were so focused on covering content they did not attempt to try more engaging
activities with their students. This section will show how the students from Ms. Xavier's class
were given expectations of compliance and how the students in the focus groups expressed their
understanding of their experiences in school as being forced to comply with expected behaviors
rather than having an opportunity to express their voices and individuality.
Expectations of Compliance
Expectations of compliance in school have been identified in research as common
patterns and could be observed in the activities Ms. Xavier’s students were given and in the
interpretations of what was valuable about school they expressed in their interviews. Nelson and
Harper (2006) explained teachers' reliance on compliance in school is a result of educational
practices and teacher beliefs being based mainstream cultural models encouraging linear and
product-oriented systems of learning focused on accomplishing tasks rapidly rather than focusing
on learning itself. Researchers also identified the concept of school success was often linked to
learning conformed cultural behaviors for academic achievement rather than encouraging
students’ self-esteem and ethnic identity through higher level problem solving abilities (Brown,
et. al, 2009; Ogbu & Simmons, 1998). With an emphasis on compliance to expected behaviors
IMPLIED AND PERCEIVED MESSAGES 157
and academic tasks, students, like Ms. Xavier's, will focus on getting assignments done with the
sole purpose of moving onto the next assignment and progressing through school rather than
focusing on the growth of their academic abilities and skills. Research would support teachers to
use student centered instructional practices instead to reflect academic and behavioral
expectations based on students’ needs and counteract any negative aspects of the mainstream
culture, but often teachers give into conforming to practices of prescribed curriculums because of
the expected goals designated by school environments, such as reliance on grading structures and
standardized curriculum assessments (Gay, 2002; Paris, 2012; Smagorinksy, 2013; Tharp &
Gallimore, 1989). Ms. Xavier’s image of herself was as a student centered and reflective teacher
not enforcing conformity but adjusting to her students’ needs. She said, “I am a reflective teacher
in that I don’t think it’s about me and I’m not here to serve me. So, this isn’t about my comfort
level. This isn’t about my control. This isn’t about what do I want. I’m here to serve.” What was
more observable in her practice were expectations of compliance in both her academic and
behavioral classroom expectations rather than a reflection on individual students needs and
abilities, as can be seen in her previous explanation of the culminating assignment for the
Language, Gender, and Culture Unit using Pride & Prejudice where the type of exercise she
used to help students with synthesizing sources into a thesis did not reflect students’ possible
ability to make connections between the works but was a way for students to directly cut and
paste concepts into a formulized sentence construct. It is possible some of her students needed
this level of guidance but, as was previously shown, Ms. Xavier more often found a whole class
approach to lessons because of class sizes and material and in this case, students who were
capable of synthesizing and developing a thesis concept on their own were not given that
opportunity through the example of this assignment. Other academic and behavioral expectations
IMPLIED AND PERCEIVED MESSAGES 158
of compliance could be seen in the following narrative of Ms. Xavier’s class when they were
working independently on the organization process for their Juvenile Justice essays.
The class began with Ms. Xavier emphasizing the importance of getting work done by
pointing out the grades were updated to reflect zeros for previous assignments that she
said “is killing you and making you fail.” The students were then instructed to work on
the outlines and drafts for their essay. “Today and tomorrow is writing. Don’t lose it and
staple it to your draft. The draft is 10 points for completion. Don’t start writing until you
know what your body paragraphs are.” When students were talking and not directly.
Today is not.”
Ms. Xavier opened the class with the reference to the grades to give students a chance to finish
the assignments and placed them in front of the room, and also emphasized the importance of
completing the assigned work in the class. The students spent the rest of the period self-guided
with behavioral expectations of silence and academic expectations of compliance to the tasks
necessary for completing the work reinforced by consistent reminders from Ms. Xavier that they
were not supposed to be interacting or dialoguing during this lesson. Her frustration with
students not complying quickly with the expectations of completing their work on these essays
was something she remembered when I asked her about challenges in the lessons I observed,
Well, I got really frustrated one of those days when they wouldn’t shut up. I just, I know,
having watched them enough times, when they just get into the zone of writing, they’re
good, and they can go there, and they can focus, and they’ll be there. Getting them into
the zone, one of those days, I was like, seriously shut the (in a low whisper) fuck up.
What Ms. Xavier emphasized here was the importance for students to self-regulate, as was
explained in the messages she was sending to students, and their behaviors and work ethic but
IMPLIED AND PERCEIVED MESSAGES 159
also an emphasis on limiting students’ ability to express themselves and dialogue with other
students. Students were given specific tasks to complete and were not engaged to express what
they needed to fulfill the tasks or allowed to work through the process in independent ways, so
Ms. Xavier’s frustration with their lack of compliance was a reflection of her interpreting their
talking as not wanting to focus and work.
During the observations, it was clear that Ms. Xavier was reinforcing the mainstream
cultural curriculum and expectations in the way she presented information to the students and her
interactions with them. The following narrative shows the way Ms. Xavier explained writing
structure to her students.
The students were given 18 minutes of guided instruction to establish expectations for an
essay outline and preparation for a draft of an essay for the Juvenile Justice unit. She
introduced the lesson by saying today we are “going to make your brain work.” Then the
students were instructed to get a speech, notes, and everything they had been doing for
the last month and put those concepts into one sentence. She told them there were two
sides to the topic of the essay about punishment vs rehabilitation and the students were
told, “You’re on one of the sides. You can’t be in the middle.” She then put up models of
citations and a graphic organizer the students were instructed to use. She told them when
they start writing they need to use 8 sentence body paragraphs and explained, “The best
writers in the world can’t do it in 3 sentences. I can’t do it in 3 sentences. You’re doing
the thing where you just type whatever comes into your brain. I’m going to make you not
do it. Think of a paragraph as a box. If something doesn’t fit in the box, don’t use it.”
Once the students started their seatwork, she re-emphasized the need for students to
conform to the writing style by saying, as she walked around, phrases like, “Don’t think
IMPLIED AND PERCEIVED MESSAGES 160
outside the box” and “Take out your sources, take out your T-Chart and let’s build some
boxes.”
While students were encouraged to think and design their own topic, students were not asked
during the instructions to discuss possible topics or the overall themes of the essay. They were
told to work with the materials given to them rather than be able to use their own brainstorming
techniques. They were told to use boxes to organize their information and structured paragraphs
of 8 sentences for their writing instead of being encouraged to develop structures to best prove
their points. Her techniques of using their unit notes and activities to build organizational
structures in the boxes and then to use the structured 8 sentence paragraphs allow the students to
synthesize information in efficient ways to accomplish the writing task for their essay. Ms.
Xavier’s words of “Don’t think outside of the box” reinforce that students were not given
instruction to approach the writing with an individual or unique perspective. Ms. Xavier models
the behaviors previously presented by researchers identifying teachers using scaffolds with the
purpose of moving students towards independence and expression but in reality, mostly focusing
on activities that control and guide students toward efficiently completing tasks and conforming
to expected academic outcomes. Another example of her patterns of academic and behavioral
expectations expecting compliance can be seen in the following narrative showing an
introduction to the concept of gender in culture.
The students were broken into groups and asked to either brainstorm lists of stereotyped
behaviors for girls ages 10-15, boys age 10-15, or the behaviors stereotypical teachers
praise. Ms. Xavier was encouraging during this process and supported a table in the back
to think of some things on their own and then complemented them later by saying, “See
you guys know these things.” When the students were done with their lists, they hung
IMPLIED AND PERCEIVED MESSAGES 161
them on the board and Ms. Xavier began a guided discussion. Ms. Xavier began reading
the lists instructing the students to listen for similarities. She asked, “What’s my point?”
A student answered, “They don’t match.” Ms. Xavier repeated, “They don’t match,” and
immediately moved on to, “Let’s look at some of the words. I know I’m cherry picking.
Let’s look at girls, organized, organized, organized, and again. Let’s look at boys,
rambunctious, rowdy . . . If I’m a teacher, which is my better student?” A few students
respond with “girls.” She then said, “How do boys learn these behaviors? I have a son.
Do I, do we, teach our boys how to be more active? Why are boys more active? It’s the
biology of being a boy. Some will connect it back to the hunter/gatherer aspects. It comes
down to, boys are active, they don’t do well when they are told to sit down and shut up.
When I ask students to sit and shut up, like I am now, who struggles? 70% of all Ds and
Fs in the country are boys. Here at Central, 70% of Fs are boys.” At this point, an
African-American boy in the back speaks out in a joking tone, “They be lying” and is not
acknowledged. This unit is how biology affects our behaviors. I will add pieces to the
wall, like I did in the back (above the computers). You will come up with a project,
essays if you really like them. But, it’s an art project. I need you to get your books and
bring me my markers. Turn to page 112, you’ll notice there’s nothing on there. I need
you to write on it “War on Boys.” This is a short video, like 5 minutes. It’s a little hokey.
You’ll take notes on it. There’s lots of balance – ethos, pathos, logos.” The video showed
how boys have been restricted in school environments that discourage activity,
competition, and aggression. After the video, the students were told, “Capture your
thoughts on this. These are your sons, the boys you may settle down with.” The students
IMPLIED AND PERCEIVED MESSAGES 162
were given about a minute. “This is an example of what we’ll talk about. We’ll start
today with boys in school and tomorrow we’ll move on. It’s a quick unit.”
The opportunity for students to work in groups and come up with concepts was and
encouragement of individual thought and possible place for students to voice individual
viewpoints but the teacher guided discussion was typical of the types of discussions that occurred
in the classes I observed. Students were encouraged to respond to her statements but mainly in
one-word responses. Student input was often redirected or guided to the point Ms. Xavier was
building, in this case boys being stereotyped. For example, with the lists the students were asked
to build about stereotypes, the students were not asked to explain their lists, give reasoning for
the attributes they identified or offer commentary. They were directed by her “cherry picking” of
concepts that emphasized the point she was leading to about gender stereotyping in school. The
message students received during this lesson could be seen in how the students remembered it.
The students enjoyed the opportunity for individual input in the brainstorming activity but also
recognized the discussion was designed to guide them toward the purpose Ms. Xavier had
developed for the lesson. During the interviews, Logan said he liked the brainstorming method of
the lists and saw it as “kind of clever to have us start with what do you think about this, get all of
our ideas out there and then narrow it down, and he said it was “more engaging than what we
normally do in class.” Logan liked the chance for students to express their thoughts in groups
and felt more engaged with being able to get some ideas. Scott’s view was the brainstorming was
nice but added, “she was just kind of making it her own instead of how we were like at first, how
we thought about each other, then that is how it seemed.” He reflected on how the unguided
thought process students were given in the charts was really just redirected into what Ms. Xavier
wanted them to see and was not really about them expressing what they thought of boy and girl
IMPLIED AND PERCEIVED MESSAGES 163
stereotypes. This was an example of a consistent pattern in Ms. Xavier’s lecturing or discussion,
which was a guided process of not allowing students to express unique ideas or express areas of
interest and need for them but more of her conforming and guiding the discussion toward
prescribed ideas of what would be valuable in the discussion from her expertise.
Another aspect of compliance displayed in Ms. Xavier’s class with the emphasis on the
SOAPSToneS method of close reading and the students' response to the lesson it was connected
to. The concept of SOAPSToneS was previously introduced as part of her academic expectations
for college preparation. When observing a 6-minute guided lesson to reintroduce the concept to
students it is evidence of how she reinforced ideas of students conforming to a practice that they
would later describe as repetitive.
“College Freshmen professors repeatedly say for us to talk about SOAPSToneS, so we
said okay. I know you’ve done this before. I know we do it all the way through at our
school.” She then wrote each of the letters for the acronym on the board and asked the
students to call out what they know. They identified subject and occasion and she called
out, “Check you out. Look, you know stuff.” After going through each of the other aspect
of SOAPSToneS, she instructed them to “Highlight as you go. Read before
SOAPSToneS. Read before SOAPSToneS.” While passing out different colored articles
for the students to respond annotate, she said, “If you have a white paper go to page 122.
First you read, then highlight, and then do SOAPSToneS. Yellow paper, red first then
SOAPSToneS. You will read this, then you will discuss it with others. Tomorrow, you
will share the articles with others who have not read it. So, you’ll get to experience both.
Focus is what is constraint. Focus is what is constraint. Focus is what is constraint. She
then went to the board and wrote constraint. Then, in defining constraint she said, “Give
IMPLIED AND PERCEIVED MESSAGES 164
me some words for constraint. I am a constraining voice. What am I doing?” A student
responded “suppressing.” She wrote it on the board. Another student said, “limiting,” and
another student said, “keeping from success, holding back from something good,” and
another said, “restraint.” At this point, Ms. Xavier had put these concepts on the board
and said she liked the concept of restraint and then told the students to think about this as
they read.
The lesson started off with Ms. Xavier acknowledging the students were reviewing a common
structured activity with the only reasoning being because colleges think it is important, and they
were praised for correctly recalling the different elements of the acronym. The students were
then given explicit instructions of steps to do in their reading process and told to focus only on
the concept of constraint as they read. She acknowledged during this exchange that the
instructions she was giving them were constraining and used herself as an example to have the
students produce synonyms for the concept. The students, in a way, expressed their own
understanding of being asked to conform to expectations by calling out that they were being
"limited", "suppressed", and "restrained." The students were told to think about this as they read
but not asked to share their opinions about it as a class. They were told they would be able to
explain their ideas in the groups. The following narrative shows what happened during the group
work the next day.
Ms. Xavier split the students into two halves based on the articles they had read. One half
stayed in the classroom and the other half went into a side room. The students were then
quartered with two groups in each of the two rooms. She told the groups, “The object of
the game is to have all of the same answers. That way, when other people come in to talk
to you, they will all get the same information.” During this period, only the groups in the
IMPLIED AND PERCEIVED MESSAGES 165
side room and guided by Logan and Anna, who were asking questions and producing
topics about gender stereotypes, were really having back and forth discussions. Most of
the groups were focused on completing the task of taking down the SOAPSToneS from
one another. Ms. Xavier noticed the students were mostly copying and said, “Don’t copy
verbatim. Talk, ask questions.” The majority of the students did not make any noticeable
adjustments. Two minutes later, Ms. Xavier reinforced, “Discuss the article. Make the
others want to read it.”
The academic expectations introduced in this lesson were to produce the same answers and be
able to explain them to the other groups. The students had also prepared for this activity by the
labeling of the SOAPSToneS. The majority of the students who were copying things verbatim
were acting on the academic expectations given to them to conform without question to what
was asked of them. In reflecting on this lesson later, Ms. Xavier recognized the academic
expectations she communicated to her students and her intention for the lesson were not aligned
and said, “I’m not sure if I would set that up more ahead of time. I think I would maybe have
more discussion questions that I would give them as opposed to just share your SOAPSToneS.
So, yeah, I was actually not happy with the little groups at all.” As she acknowledged, if she had
wanted discussion, having guiding questions for discussion would have been helpful for them
than focusing on the conformed task of SOAPSToneS. She did also admit, as was previously
explained in her reasoning for SOAPSToneS as college preparation that the activities connected
to them are more about knowing the process of the acronym and not really about the concept of
the articles. This example of the SOAPSToneS lesson showed the students viewed academic
expectations as conforming to tasks, even when they were given options to voice their opinions.
IMPLIED AND PERCEIVED MESSAGES 166
For the students, work about compliance to forms and structures, like SOAPSToneS,
were often labeled as busy work. Jean and Misty both commented that they sometimes were just
going through the motions with their work. Jean said, “I think sometimes, because it’s just like
busywork, I’m like whatever,” and Misty said, “with busywork, I just, I tend to kinda push that
off sometimes because we’ll be in class, and she’ll give us an hour to read this and annotate it.
And, I’m like, okay, SOAPSToneS takes like 3 minutes, so I just kinda wing it.” A disconnect
between Ms. Xavier and the student about what was meaningful with their work was evident in
the SOAPSToneS lesson. The students did not express a frustration with not being led enough in
the activities as Ms. Xavier had interpreted it but more with the lack of challenge or uniqueness
of the activities with the two articles on constraint. Jean and Misty represented a viewpoint
expressed by most students interviewed with the frustration with academic expectations that had
become stagnant because students were not being asked to challenge themselves with building
their writing or argumentation skills but only asked to reinforce tasks they already felt
comfortable in completing.
Students Felt Forced to Comply to Academic Expectations
The students in the focus group not only viewed many of their academic expectations as
limiting their capabilities, they also felt they the academic and behavioral expectations forced
them to passively comply and not have a chance to express their individuality. The view
expressed by Ms. Xavier’s students was consistent with research that showed the common
classroom did not allow students to feel comfortable with self-expression and 90% of classroom
activities were encouraging conformed behaviors of work completion, even though positively
identified classroom environments encouraged chances for respectful student expression as the
main emphasis (Anagnostopoulous, 2003; Matsumara et al., 2008). In fact, teachers often viewed
IMPLIED AND PERCEIVED MESSAGES 167
discussions with students as disruptive and challenging to their authoritative position, so they
tended to develop academic expectations that encouraged students to accept authors’ or teachers’
perspectives rather than develop critical interpretations of their own (Anagnostopoulous, 2003).
The students in Ms. Xavier’s class could be observed and expressed in their interviews
understandings of academic and behavioral expectations that limited their voice, forced them to
comply with tasks, and moved them toward being assessed on how well they conformed to those
expectations.
The behavioral expectations of Ms. Xavier’s classroom were seen by her students to
encourage a positive relationship between them and her but they also expressed her expectations
limited student voice. Both through the observations and the interviews with students, a positive
environment could be seen in Ms. Xavier’s class. An example of this was when her students
were working on organizing their Juvenile Justice essays and a Hispanic student referred to in
this paper as Bobby asked for help multiple days and asked Ms. Xavier to read through his thesis
and was in encouraged with her response of it being “A great one for this topic.” Through
examples like this it can be seen that she had created an environment where students were
comfortable asking for feedback and help and with the other observed interactions it was clear
she would push individual students and groups to complete assignments and activities.
It was evident during the observations that students felt comfortable and encouraged to
work with Ms. Xavier in completing tasks they were given but they did not feel as much comfort
in discussing or expressing their own viewpoints, which they made clear, was not something
exclusive to her. The students expressed in the interviews their reluctance to speak up had been a
product of long term conditioning. Anna best described how students felt in classroom
environments when she described an impacting experience on her student voice. She explained,
IMPLIED AND PERCEIVED MESSAGES 168
I think it starts in Elementary school with the clips. Like, move your clip down if you
stand up and like . . . ugh, I'm having flashbacks. I remember in 1st grade, I was so
excited about getting something right, I stood up and I was like, "Christopher Columbus
is the answer!" And, I had to move my clip down, and that like, I'm not even kidding, that
stunted like how I participate in class. Now, I'm over it, because like, if I have my
opinion, I'm going to share it, but for the longest time in Middle School, I refused to raise
my hand. I refused to answer anything because I like thought that was wrong and I like I
thought I was wrong for that, but I was excited about learning something and get
something right and I was reprimanded for it . . . In Elementary school, the clips force
students to not engage but teaches them to sit and be quiet. Students develop a resistance
to wanting to speak up to avoid betting reprimanded. Students are punished for acting
individually by making them move clips and being told to just sit down, shut up, and
listen.
Anna’s story exemplified the struggle students had with voice and how they were often silenced
for the sake of efficiency in progressing students through material in the class. The experience
she had was having her excitement about a topic stifled and controlled, and it made her fearful of
showing the same desire to participate in the future. The concept of student voice being stifled
was seen to a lesser extent in Ms. Xavier’s class but there was an example of Anna having the
same level of excitement for the subject area be stifled in the interests of efficiency as can be
seen in the following narrative.
On the day previously referenced when students were given chances to talk through
articles in their groups, Anna was vocal and leading her group in discussion. Her article
was on gender roles, and she was raising critics on the way men are stereotyped into
IMPLIED AND PERCEIVED MESSAGES 169
behaving in certain ways and was developing a debate with Logan, a fellow student
identified in this study. Ms. Xavier walked in on the debate and listened for a minute to
hear what they were saying and then told them to return to the room for the next activity.
While Anna, as she explained in her quote, did not seem shy about voicing her opinions anymore
and she was not directly reprimanded for speaking up, she was also not given much time or
opportunity to explore an issue she was interested in and passionate about. The content of the
articles was inspiring a discussion about a meaningful topic for the students but Ms. Xavier, as
she previously explained, was more focused on them completing the task of the SOAPSToneS
and preparing for the next activity and cut off the natural progression of the discussion. The
academic and behavioral expectation of complying with the necessary tasks was something the
students were aware of and built into their feelings of not being able to express themselves. The
other student involved in the dialogue with Anna, Logan, was one of the most vocal students
during the interviews about his frustrations with not being allowed to be independent and have
his voice heard. He said an ideal class for him was a class that allowed for discussion rather than
just completing activities,
If they allow you to discuss things, you can be more open. You can kinda like discuss
ideas with people. In Gov class last semester we could like freely talk to each other and
like, “Oh, what do you think about blah, blah, blah?” and they’d be like, “Well, this . . .”
When it’s more of like sit down, read the board and write, you kind of just get that
narrow focus and you don’t really expand on it at all.
When asked to clarify how he saw his role in Ms. Xavier’s class, he said, “It’s more sit and be
passive.” Logan expressed instruction that was more meaningful for him was when students were
given an opportunity to be free and open in their discussions without specific goals other than
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engaging in dialogue. In Ms. Xavier’s class, he understood the purpose to be more complying to
task completion than the academic expectations Ms. Xavier had previously described of
progressing students toward success outside of high school. The subject of students being forced
to be passive and not allowed to build their own responses or interests was echoed by a few of
the students in the focus groups. When Scott was asked about what teachers want students to
accomplish in their classes, he said, “I believe they want the class to do good but they don’t
really matter. It’s not about the grades but it’s about what she wants the students to learn.” Later,
when asked about what teachers expect of students, he said,
Most teachers are really strict, so you just expect to sit down and listen to them. While
other teachers are like, just come to class and relax a little bit and they talk to the class
and interact with them, so like they have a good time in learning. I don’t expect much,
don’t expect that too much.
Scott expressed the academic and behavioral expectations he understood in Ms. Xavier’s class,
and with teachers in general, was to be passive and accept whatever was being presented to them.
He said he had experienced some teachers who were more open to interacting with students
outside of the common practices of strict environments but it was not something he expected to
be a common experience in school. All three of these students felt school in general and also Ms.
Xavier’s class was not encouraging their independent voices but more encouraging them to
conform to academic and behavioral standards guided by individual teachers’ needs for class
management and progressing through curriculum.
The expectations of both the students in the focus group and those previously expressed
by Ms. Xavier were to develop students able to problem solve and think critically but the student
felt academic expectations guided them to conform and complete scaffolded activities. Even
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though the students acknowledged the conformity of the guided assignments, not all of them had
a negative perspective on those assignments. When asked about the scaffolding techniques and
writing structures Ms. Xavier was shown promoting previously, Kitty said, “breaking it down
makes it easier to fill out your essay, easier to focus.” Anna also expressed this sentiment, “I like
how she gave us three separate days to organize everything out and it was super easy to write
everything.” Misty said, “I think [the guided assignments] get repetitive sometimes but I think
it’s that it’s like so we won’t forget, you know, it’s like do this, do this.” Jean followed her
statement up by saying, “I like the repetitiveness because the kind of learner I am, I think it
works. I understand the steps and understand why it’s repetitive. I think it works for everybody.”
These girls expressed the steps were helpful in making things easier for them and helping them
focus on the academic expectations of getting it done but did not express how the techniques
developed the goals of expanding on their writing process and critical thinking. Other students
expressed thoughts about how they saw the academic expectations of the guided writing steps
helping with their progression as writers. Logan’s perspective on the steps they were given was
that they were helpful at first but then students were not allowed to progress and they lost their
meaning. He said,
I think the first time we did it, like at the start of the year, I enjoyed it because she’s
giving us a template. But, then forcing us to go through each and every step the same way
every single time. I think it’s kind of like, insulting almost. If you teach us once, if we ask
you for help yeah, but forcing us to do it every time . . . I know like, I know like my
group back there were all kind of like blow it off.
Logan understood the academic purpose of scaffolded steps giving guidance but also explained if
students do not see a progression of skills they were building, they would become disengaged by
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focusing on compliance. Scott explained his understanding of the writing process as, “the kids
around me want to try something else but they don’t want to because like how she’s just like do
it step by step. She’s just like this is important because it’s the perfect way to do it like it’s the
only way to do it.” He expressed that not only did students feel frustration with the lack of
opportunity to progress their writing but they also were confused by the presentation and purpose
of structured writing. Rather than the academic expectations of structured writing being
understood as a basis for strongly developed writing, the students saw it as restricting their voice
and forcing them into one conformed process approved by Ms. Xavier. Logan also expressed
there was a confusion that resulted in the way the academic expectations of conformed writing
were presented to students. His understanding of the way paragraph structure was introduced
was,
She places a lot of emphasis on there’s not like a structure for how many paragraphs and
stuff but then she tells you, you guys have got to do this structure for it. It’s like, you say,
“Oh, it’s not a 5 body paragraph” but then you say we have to add like 2 more body
paragraphs.
He pointed out that teachers introduced the concept of students learning to break away from
structured writing but the academic expectations given to them were to conform to structured
paragraphs. Kurt voiced similar confusion,
The way [Ms. Xavier] said to write the essay kind of confused me and many of my peers
I sit with. Because, at the beginning of the first semester of this year, she told us that the
thesis had to have three points to write about and it was only 5 paragraphs, the essay.
And, then, at the beginning of this semester, she told us to forget about everything. What
she said confused me and many others because we didn't know what to do.
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He explained that in both the paragraph shaping and the thesis development, students were
confused because of the mixed academic expectation messages they were receiving about relying
on conformed writing structures without a clear understanding of when and how to progress
beyond them. Logan also voiced frustration and confusion with the progression of writing in
high school,
We learn the same thing, basically every year. Except they tell us what we learned last
year, what you were preparing for this year, is now wrong. (Scott agreed). Yeah, so we
learn how to cite things one way only to be told that’s wrong in 11th. It seems like, you
know, we don’t really need that at all.
Logan’s confusion and frustration here was with not being given a clear progression of
academic expectations in writing from one grade to the next. He felt students were given
different understandings of what made a good paragraph or how to correctly cite from year to
year rather than understanding a clear progression of the development of their writing. Overall,
the students expressed the scaffolded steps helpful if they just conformed and followed them
because it made the writing process easier to finish and accomplish but, even though they were
told they could have freedom of expression in ideas and structure, they were ultimately told to
conform and write in the traditional formatted writing style to make sure their writing was
completed in a way that fit with the conformed expectations of academic writing.
The students’ views of having academic expectations of conforming also showed in the
way they understood how they were assessed. Logan and Scott, through their interview
interchange, expressed the way they understood academic expectations and how they were
assessed. Logan started off by saying he did not focus on scores he received because he did not
“really like being graded on how submissive I am to what the teacher’s telling me to do.” When
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asked specifically how he felt he was doing with the work in the Expository Reading and Writing
class, he expressed a general feeling of what he thought of the importance of work given to
students and how they were judged,
I would say that I’m probably doing a lot better in this class because it is less homework
and just filling out pieces of paper. It’s more actual thinking or writing. So, normally, I do
fairly bad in English classes . . . it’s not just homework. It’s like, worksheets and just
papers. It’s not like, expressing what you believe or think on whatever topic. It’s more
just like well, here’s a sheet about gerunds. Well, what the heck is a gerund and why do I
care about it. Like, I took AP English last year and to me it was like completely useless.
Logan’s explanation of his general feelings about English classes showed the academic
expectations had developed into expecting to fill in sheets and complete assignments and it had,
in the past, caused him to perform worse. His devaluing of the assignments he was given caused
him to lack motivation and the ability to see a greater purpose in the activities he was
completing. When Logan had said students did not get the chance to express themselves, I
brought up how they were given discussion times in groups to brainstorm ideas on stereotyping.
Logan had a different understanding of the academic expectation of group work and said, “She’ll
like put us in groups for things but then I feel like once we go and do our own thing, it’s like
‘Hey, let’s talk for 10 minutes and hammer it out in the last 5,’ so it’s not really . . .” At this
point, Scott interrupted and jokingly said, “That gets you a B.” The interchange first showed
Logan’s perspective that the group discussions did not have any value because whatever ideas
the students developed were done to quickly conform to the academic expectation of completing
the assignment even if it was putting something together last minute. When Scott interrupted, he
added how students rushed their work at the end of assignments without having defined purpose
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so they can get Bs for just conforming to the expectations of what they were supposed to
accomplish. Logan and Scott’s understanding of what they got rewarded for in the academic
expectations given to them also coincided with the students’ understanding of what was expected
with their writing as can be seen in this section of their interview.
I brought up with Logan and Scott an instance in my observation where Ms. Xavier had
praised the students for achieving academic and behavior expectations she had set out for
the 2017 essay assignment, and she told the class, “I have to say, I’ve been a teacher for a
long time. Watching you this last Wednesday and Thursday made me warm and fuzzy. I
was so impressed. I watched you work so hard. For the first time in my career, I’m
excited to read your essays.” I asked Logan and Scott what they thought impressed her
with their work on those days. Scott started by saying, “I think it was because most of the
time we just talk in class and we just slack off. For her to just see everyone just looking
down at their paper and writing things down was a big piece of it.” Logan added, “I was
kind of more motivated though by the fact that it was due at the end of the period . . . it
was like a crunch time thing. It wasn’t necessarily . . . we’re like putting in the effort
because we believe in what we’re writing about.” Scott then added, “It’s more like, just
get it done.” After I clarified the statement as they thought academic success was just
doing what they were told, Logan responded, “the essay I wrote in there. I actually wrote
about the point that I disagreed with. Just because she stacked like . . . we had 7 sources,
6 of them were pro.”
The two students explained their understanding of academic expectations were to be efficient at
doing what was expected of them, whether it was sitting quietly and focusing or writing about
the expected perspectives of the authors presented to them during the curriculum. Logan’s
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interpretation of the writing assignment in the Expository Reading and Writing class contradicts
what was previously referenced with Ms. Xavier and Moss and Bordelon (2007) as one of the
main academic expectations of the course. It was explained that the course was necessary for
developing students’ critical thinking skills with more relevant and meaningful curriculum.
Logan saw the course as not encouraging critical thinking but encouraging them to conform to a
certain perspective presented in the unit. He explained with the Juvenile Justice unit,
I enjoy the topic but, at the same time, I feel like it was completely guided in one
direction the whole time. They basically built it to only defend the one side . . . Like,
they’re giving us the option but they’re not really giving us the option. Pick your side but
you can only choose this one.
Scott backed up this idea by saying, “there are only a certain amount of sources and most of
them are one side.” Both Logan and Scott did not see the Juvenile Justice unit as encouraging
them to voice their individual thoughts but rather presenting limited resources that led them to
only one option of complying to the units guided theme. In general, the academic and behavioral
expectations Ms. Xavier’s students expressed encouraged them to learn how to comply to
formatted writing and perspectives, and they mostly felt they were discouraged from open
expression in favor of completing work in steps that made it easier and more succinct for them to
complete their assignments.
Finding Two: Students Perceived Academic Expectations and Teacher Practices as
Generally Not Engaging or Student Centered.
The observations of Ms. Xavier’s classroom and the interviews with the focus group of
students addressed the complexity of the concept of engagement in school in acknowledging the
frustration with grading practices and the lack of intrinsic value and motivation. Researchers
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presented the different understandings students and teachers had toward what was relevant or
important in classroom environments with teachers seeing relevancy and motivation as lower
priorities than covering content through effective classroom management and students
developing a view of school as irrelevant and unrewarding (Fives & Buehl, 2008; Valenzuela,
1999). The disconnection teachers and students put on the importance of motivation causes
students to disengage. Students innately understand school environments are not directly
engaging and beneficial to them with many students seeing the academic expectations and
content as too simplistic and below their intellectual capabilities of individual thought but also
reluctant to challenge academic and behavioral goals they believed were established and
successful and instead focusing on their own individual inability to understand what was best for
their academic advancement (Halx, 2014; Romanowski, 2003). The academic and behavioral
goals for students were engrained in their perceptions of school to the point where they were
more likely to question their own abilities than the academic and behavioral goals being
presented to them. Greene et al. (2004) found the academic expectations and teacher practices
valuable to students were those that had relevancy, intrinsic value, and built toward self-efficacy
rather than assignments viewed as task completion and for the purpose of performance rankings,
like grades, to compare them to other students. What was found in studying Ms. Xavier’s class
was the students had an understanding that what they were learning and being graded on was not
relevant or intrinsically valuable but they saw no alternatives but to give into the academic and
behavioral expectations in order to advance the academic goals they had for themselves.
Frustration with Grading Practices
Despite Ms. Xavier’s attempts to redefine grades, as previously shown, to deemphasize
their importance for doing well in her class, what the students revealed about their understanding
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of the academic expectations of grading was a disconnect between what their grades reflected
and what they were learning. The focus group of students expressed the same perspectives on the
results of grading practices that were previously identified in the research of student voice: lack
of motivation, defiance, disengaging, and negative messages about focusing on the extrinsic
rewards of grades and credits rather than mastery of the material or development of skills (Bae et
al. 2008; Docan, 2006; Givens Rolland, 2012; Sambell et al. 1997). Logan said of classwork in
general, “We learn for a grade and then that grade leads to the next one.” He expressed the
frustration of feeling that the only purpose to work in school was to earn grades and progress to
the next level. His understanding of the influence of grades was consistent with research that said
when teachers give academic expectations with the goal of immediate gratification through
grading procedures, they de-emphasize purpose and meaning for students and may see student
motivation decline (Ames & Archer, 1988). Logan labeled his understanding of the general
academic expectations in his academic experience as learning solely for the ability to achieve a
certain grade. Kurt expanded on this idea by saying,
I don't like the idea of grades because I had never got an F until this year, senior year.
And, I freaked out. I didn't know what to do because I had never got an F. And, because
of that, I started trying really hard in that class than other classes and that brought my
grades down. And, I feel like they're not useful because one student could be an F student
and one could be an A but on the final exam, the F student could get the A and the A
student could get an F, so they're not useful at all to, I guess, calculate the intelligence of
students.
Kurt was frustrated with grading practices because he said they took away his ability to just
focus on learning and content. At the beginning of this explanation, he gave the example of being
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so focused on a grade in one class that it affected his engagement and progress in his other
classes. His explanation of the understanding of grades not being a true reflection of students’
was also shown in Sambell et al.’s (1997) work that found traditional forms of assessment were
ineffective because they were perceived by students as arbitrary and irrelevant with the purpose
behind them being the assessment rather than the learning and they even caused students to see
unfair practices in grading that were not beneficial to students. Kurt’s explanation of how grades
affected him points out how the academic expectations of grades is devalued because students
could show mastery of the content despite their overall grade in a class or they could have a high
grade in a class and not show competency in the content. Kurt also mentioned how grades were
misinterpreted by parents. His parents, who were first generation Hispanic and not educated, did
not know how to talk to him about school other than grades. I asked him if he thought his parents
understood what he learned in class and he said,
My parents, they don't really understand. They think As and Bs is everything to them, to
us, but they don't really understand that grades don't really matter in how much you pick
up in school. All they care about is getting good grades and nothing else. Like, that's my
only job in the family is to get good grades, to go to school and that's it. Other than that,
their job is to help us, to support us with money, give us a home. Other than that, they
don't really understand the concept of learning itself. All they care about is the grades.
He expressed here that the academic expectations of grades can distract from the importance of
learning. His parents do not understand his progress with learning or developing; all they
understood was what a good grade was and what a bad grade was. Kurt’s perception of academic
expectations ended up defining the way he saw himself as a student because of his experiences
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with being labeled by his ability to achieve certain grades and not by how much content he was
mastering, which he showed when I asked him what kind of student he was,
I see myself as an average student, like anybody else, because everyone else doesn't see
themselves as smart because of grades. I feel like grades basically define the person you
are in school. Because, if it wasn't for grades, everybody would be the same. Everybody
would feel smart, and they would have some knowledge that others wouldn't. But, I feel
like grades define the person you are in school.
His frustration with grading was in the way he labeled himself as on an average student because
that’s what his grades reflected rather than seeing himself as smart because of the content that he
knew and understood. His statement that everybody in school would be the same without grades
emphasized what Bae et al. (2008) found was a result of the emphasis on grades and how it
changed student perceptions because they began to judge most of their academic merit off of
quantitative accumulations of points and scores rather than through engagement in high cognitive
functioning, and they could not identify any reasons why students should be “non-good” students
other than a lack of effort or following appropriate behavioral norms. Anna also explained this
same frustration with how grades label students’ abilities. She said of the importance of grades,
They give me anxiety attacks. Like, I'm like failing all my classes. I've like, never been a
stellar student but I know I'm smart. That doesn't define me as a person, but still like it
holds such an importance to like colleges. The only reason I'm trying to get that grade is
because I want to do extra-curricular activities, and I want to have certain things. I have
deals with my mom and stuff, like I don't really care about grades. I don't care about what
number my GPA is; I just want to like . . . it doesn't matter to me. It's just . . . it feels very
condescending, I think because it just really makes me angry that people think they're
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smarter than me. Like, my sister is stupid, like she's not street smart at all but she's like a
4 point something student and I'm not; so, it's just like such a difference just because your
grade point average is high doesn't mean anything.
Her frustrations were similar to Kurt’s in that she did not want to be labeled by her grades. She
expressed she did not see an outlet for her intelligence outside of grades and also voiced grades
matter to her because the cultural emphasis on them for college admissions and to be eligible for
school activities, two things that were important to her. The emphasis on grading as a dominant
cultural academic expectation was causing frustration for students but the overall perspective
seemed to be a helpless submission to these practices rather than a belief in any alternatives that
could lead relevance in learning beyond grading.
Relevance
The focus group students echoed Ms. Xavier’s previously stated emphasis on the
importance of academic expectations needing to conform to college expectations and life after
high school. Multiple students made reference to the only purpose of classes in high school being
to progress to the next step of college. Logan spoke about the relevance of school being tied
completely to college readiness by saying, “school is relevant for people going to college but not
for others,” and Scott reemphasized that by saying, “classes are to get to college and the reason
you need [high school] classes is to graduate and go to college.” Jean said, “there’s constant
reminders we are doing all of this in college.” Misty expanded the concept of college academic
motivation by tying it into career goals and saying,
School means you get paid more and get more respect. Everything in school is going
towards college. People are going to college, which is why they do the work. Not all
schoolwork is going to be relevant, even in college you take core classes, so it’s all going
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to your degree or what you’re doing in life but your interests make it more relevant.
ERWC has nothing to do with my life but I still have to do it to go to college.
The emphasis on college was the most common sentiment students expressed about the
relevance of the academic expectations of school and the work in Ms. Xavier’s class. Misty’s
statement that ERWC had nothing to do with her life represented the students were either not
accepting the skills and content of their courses as relevant to their lives or teachers were not
explaining why their courses mattered outside of college preparation. The students also
expressed what was most important for them was not just college success but gaining skills for
their future. Misty explained the importance of school as, “Knowledge is the key to power. There
are Blue Collar jobs, if you don’t go to school, but when you have education, you get paid more
and get more respect. It plays a role in everyday life.” She also explained her frustration with
how the intrinsic value of future skills translated to academic expectations in school.
Okay, so we have like 6 classes. So, if you want to be like an actor or like a doctor or like
this . . . all 6 classes aren’t going to be like, your English class isn’t going to be about
doctors, like your Biology class is. So, of course, it’s not all going to be relevant. But, I
think that even in college you have to take core classes. You have to do it. So, it’s
obviously all going towards your degree or whatever you’re doing with your life. But,
sometimes you’re not going to have interest in it because it’s not really relevant to . . .
like, I want to be a Pediatrician. ERWC has nothing to do with that. Obviously, I still
have to do it because it’s part of the motion of going to college and furthering my
education.
Misty’s understanding of school was a series of steps necessary for progressing in life but the
individual parts and skills students gained through their academic work was not meaningful in
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the long run and did not have purpose beyond the completion of tasks. She had accepted the idea
of the skills of English and her ERWC class as not being relevant to all professions, and it had
made her think that many of the lessons were not relevant other than progression through life.
Both Logan and Misty reflected the findings of Halx (2014) that even students that did
not exhibit enthusiasm for their classes and knew the lessons were not helping them learn were
not critical of the educational system in which they were involved. Many of the students in the
focus groups did not have a long-term understanding of the value of education beyond their
immediate goals of getting through the educational system they had accepted but they did
emphasize the skills they thought they needed to progress with their lives and how that played a
role in the relevance of school curriculum. Logan said he did not “really see importance in what
we learn,” and when asked about what would be important topics for him, he said they would
need to be “life skills kind of things. If they taught us like that and then somehow connected it
with like writing something or doing something, I feel like there would be more motivation if we
had something to like ground it in first.” Scott and Kurt had a similar view as Logan on the
importance of school. Scott said about most assignments, “I don’t see most of them being helpful
in life. It’s like part of the process you have to go through and stuff. . .. what would be helpful
would be like being able to buy a car or housing and how not to end up with a big debt” and
those things would be important to him because “we know we would, like later in life, like use
it.” Kurt backed up this sentiment and said, “We would be motivated to learn it because we
would be like, okay I need to learn this because it’s going to be helpful later on.” Ms. Xavier’s
students reflected Nieto’s (1994) findings that students did not see the curriculum as a relevant
connection to their lives and were only motivated by progressing in school. Logan even said
directly about his future aspirations that he wanted to be an Engineer and that “means having to
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do school before doing your own thing.” So, it was not school itself or the curriculum that was
meaningful to the students but the process of acclimating to the demands of the mainstream
culture that would give them a job or things they would want as an adult. Kurt expanded further
on students’ understanding of the importance of assignments and school in general,
I think they're not important, like the assignments that are given to us because things we need to
like know after graduating writing checks, and, I don't know, doing resumes for jobs. And, those
are things that, like in English or Math, they don't teach us. In AVID, there were so many people
that didn't know how to write checks the right way or do resumes for jobs. And, it's one of the
skills that I feel like the school's missing. All schools because all they teach is what's required
and I feel like, if they left the requirements out, if they did something the teachers thought was
more useful than what the school is telling them to teach, I think that would benefit everybody.
Not just, like the students, but the teachers and the workforce and the managers. Like, knowing
that like people, like high schoolers who have graduated know what they're supposed to do when
they go apply. So, I think like, requirements that the district gives to the teachers, I think that
some should be left out, and the teachers should teach what they think is useful.
Kurt’s explanation shows a frustration not only with the relevance of the assignments but also
some understanding of the restrictions on teachers from the mandated curriculums. He
recognized a similar sentiment Ms. Xavier expressed previously about academic and behavioral
expectations often being about teachers trying to conform to expectations rather than doing what
is in the best interest of students progressing. The view of relevance shared by the students in this
section suggested student perceptions of successful academics and behaviors were not connected
to an understanding of what is best for their academic development or teachers’ initial intent,
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and, as researchers have explained, teachers need to be more cognizant of creating learning
activities relevant to student expectations and life goals (Greene et al. 2004; Halx, 2014).
Another aspect of the relevancy of the academic expectations established in school can be
seen in the students’ approach and understanding to completing classwork. As the students
previously expressed, they already knew how to do a lot of the assignments they were given so
they either rushed through them to get them over with or “blew them off.” In order for students
to stay actively engaged, research has identified the important aspects of student preferences in
classroom environments as relatable and relevant lessons for their maturity level and cultural
experiences (Dart et al, 1999; Romanowski, 2003). The students in the focus groups showed a
lack of seeing the relevance of their assignments for their maturity level and experiences. Scott
said,
I just sit down and when she assigns something, I just get it done and then after I can get
on my phone or work on everything else. Like, you have homework in other classes it’s
something you’re not going to get done at home so you just want to knock everything out
so I can get to the next assignment.
Scott reflected the lack of understanding in the relevance of the academic expectations given to
students for the work they were assigned. His purpose for completing assignments was to get
them done so he could do something else. One of the main reasons he gave to why he did not put
much emphasis into his assignments, particularly in Ms. Xavier’s class, was because of repetitive
assignments. He said, “It’s good that we’ve done it but if you do it over again and just doing the
same process people would just end up not wanting to do it because like ‘oh, it’s the same thing
again,’” and Logan confirmed this by saying, “Yeah, once you keep doing the same pattern, you
put in less and less effort cause it’s like ‘oh, I know what this is.’” Scott and Logan both
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expressed that not only do they not see the overall relevance of many of their assignments but the
assignments were not challenging them or pushing them forward to a level that is appropriate for
their capabilities. Jean and Anna previously expressed the concept of busywork with
SOAPSToneS but they also saw other work as not helping them progress to the appropriate
academic level. Jean said her approach to work reflected her understanding of the task and
whether it justified her prioritizing it over other work. She said about assignments,
when we annotate articles and stuff, we do it all the time so it’s busy, because it’s not
something I’m learning for the first time, so I’m like . . . I think sometimes, because it’s
just like busywork, I’m like whatever, but I think sometimes in like prioritizing, like,
where things need to be. Oh, I have to do this class that’s due.
By explaining how she sometimes did not do her work in Ms. Xavier’s class because it was a
skill or concept they had done repeatedly, and, in that case, she would prioritize other work
suggested that there was not a relevance to the work other than completion and, as long as she
knew it could be completed, she devalued the impact of the assignments. Anna also explained
how she judged the amount of effort needed for assignments based on her view of the importance
of them,
I feel like you're really just trying to accomplish the task, especially for the time that is
given. Except for in English, because I like writing a lot, actually. So, like, when I'm
writing an essay, I'll take my time with it, because I'm interested in it. But, like with
Math, I'll just zoom through it, and I don't care if it's right or wrong. Like, I just want
something on the paper and something to turn in to get the credit.
She explained her approach to work that she considered busywork was frustrating because the
work was not useful and that affected her effort. She explained about the classwork,
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I feel like ½ of it is just busywork. I don't think I need to learn about certain stuff. I'd rather learn
about real world issues because that's what like really matters to me. Like, I don't really care
about sin and co-sin, I really want to know about what's happening with Syrian refugees.
For Anna, the relevance of the lessons effected the amount of effort she puts in to the work and
most of the work she did not count as valuable enough for her goals. The lesson I observed that
best showed the students approach to work they did not see as relevant was the one with
SOAPSToneS that was previously referenced. Ms. Xavier used this day to re-emphasize the
importance of the SOAPSToneS technique for future college skills. It was one of the techniques
students had previously said they were really familiar with and had lowered their effort levels.
Misty explained about doing this work, “with busywork, I just, I tend to kinda push that off
sometimes because we’ll be in class and she’ll like give us an hour to read this and annotate it.
And, I’m like, okay, SOAPSToneS takes like 3 minutes, so I just kinda wing it.”
On this day, Ms. Xavier introduced the exercise in a way that emphasized the importance
of following the established steps and techniques, “Step 1 is read. Highlight as you go.
Read before SOAPSToneS. Read before SOAPSToneS. Those are yours to keep. If you
have a white paper go to page 122. First you read, then highlight, and then do
SOAPSToneS. Yellow paper, read first then SOAPSToneS.” When handing out papers to
SOAPSToneS, I noticed Kurt laughed with Scott.
Based on things expressed in the interviews, I assumed Kurt was amused because he knew what
the activity that was coming. The lack of student engagement was evident throughout the lesson.
They were given 25 minutes to work on the activity. During this time, Anna and an Asian female
student were the only students I observed who both annotated the article and worked on the
SOAPSToneS. 5 students were disengaged the whole time, only 4 students did the SOAPSToneS
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activities at all and 2 of them were done with 10 minutes left of class. The students exhibited
lower engagement on this day than any other day I observed. I attributed the lack of engagement
to the fact the students were doing activities they were familiar with and skills they had mastered
or practiced consistently. The content of the articles was not emphasized in the instructions, only
the tasks and a concept of constraint that Ms. Xavier said should be the focus of their reading.
The overall class period, including the first 15 minutes of teacher guided lessons was a passive
period for the students of just following guided and structured instructions.
The SOAPSToneS lesson was contrary to what the focus group students said was
necessary for them to be engaged in a lesson. They saw more relevance in activities that were not
only challenging but also interactive. Both Misty and Kitty expressed the importance of direct
interaction with the lessons in their focus group interchange. Kitty expressed it by saying, “write
these notes down on the board. I don’t get anything out of that, I feel like that doesn’t help me
with anything. Just writing it down. Just like writing words without applying it.” She said,
instead, she wanted to be more involved, “I like to, like, do and I don’t like to just sit and do
things. I learn better that way, by doing.” Misty explained the importance of involvement by
showing what encouraged her to be involved in the class.
I’m like a hands on student, you know. Like, when [Ms. Xavier] makes us get up and do
activities, like Strongly Agree, Strongly Disagree, and when she makes us get up and do
those activities, I’m like all for it. I’m like jumping. I like doing stuff like that because
it’s like hands on active and don’t like, don’t get me wrong, I do like sitting and writing
but it’s boring sometimes so I like more hands on.
IMPLIED AND PERCEIVED MESSAGES 189
Misty also explained how most of her classes were not engaging because they did not allow her
to be interactive but she did have some different experiences in Ms. Xavier’s class. She
explained the difference of this class for her,
Most of the time, I’m just on Instagram or Twitter, trying to get out of this class for like
45 minutes. But, with [Ms. Xavier], she’ll do like Ted Talks. I love Ted Talks. I can sit
there and watch them all day. So, she’ll do Ted Talks and then she’ll talk for a little bit
and she just like knows how to . . .
Misty trailed off here but the sentiment she expressed was when she was given more direct and
relevant lessons it helped her want to complete tasks. Both Kitty and Misty expressed in this
section that they needed to be actively engaged in order to be motivated and most of the time in
school they were asked to be passive. Ms. Xavier’s students showed and explained that relevance
in the activities and lessons they were working on was strongly affected by whether or not they
saw the lessons as appropriate for their life goals and their academic engagement and abilities.
Intrinsic Value and Motivation
In Ms. Xavier’s class, intrinsic value was also connected to student motivation for both
the content of the class and school in general. Research has identified classroom environments
supporting intrinsic value instead of assessment goals allow for students to build self-worth
through motivation rather and the key element of intrinsic value was the students’ abilities to
internalize the material they learn and apply it socially and psychologically to their lives outside
of school (Bae et al. 2008; Givens Rolland, 2012; Tharp & Gallimore, 1989). The focus group
students mentioned their understanding about English or current content they saw as valuable.
They liked the Juvenile Justice unit they were currently working on in Ms. Xavier’s class
because of the interest and relatability of the topic. Misty explained having those kind of
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relatable topics helped with her motivation in English, “When we do lessons like this, like Social
Justice, obviously, like that’s a big controversial issue in the world today, where a kid should be
like, with that, I’m like hands on, I’m like, okay this is serious.” Her intrinsic motivation in the
unit came from her seeing the importance of the topic in her daily life and that developed
motivation for her to get engaged. Kurt explained Ms. Xavier’s role in helping students to be
motivated,
For English, she explains why it's important, and I feel like if it's interesting, and it's a
concept you need to know to graduate, like Juvenile Justice or the social issues that go
around, I'm pretty sure one would be willing to, like, pay attention and put in work in
order to be successful out of school.
There was some motivation from students in subject areas they understood would be valuable for
them to understand outside of school. The understanding of the justice system they saw as
applicable to their lives and therefore the curriculum was given an intrinsic value and motivation
for them.
Outside of this unit, the students were not as focused on the intrinsic value of the
curriculum in English as the important skills they could gain in the subject toward their future
goals. Scott explained English could be important for writing because “You get to know how to
write properly and then you have to use it later in life, so to write a resume or write a letter or
recommendations or something like that.” Logan explained he understood some of the skills that
were beneficial had to do with advanced communication,
Learning to like articulate your ideas seems really important. Like when we do the
arguing of one side of something whether it’s gun control or should teens get life without
parole. That to me is the most important. Being able to voice your own opinion is very
IMPLIED AND PERCEIVED MESSAGES 191
important. To me, like writing the Precis, following just . . . here’s an outline, fill in every
sentence. To me, that’s useless.
Scott and Logan both saw an intrinsic value in communication skills for their life goals. Logan
showed understanding of how English promotes communication but also the frustration the
subject area may cause with academic expectations that are more completing of assignments than
formulating communicative ideas. He represents how, if students were able to see the value of
the skills they were learning, they were more likely to be motivated than if they saw the tasks
they were given as only serving the purposes of the academic expectations of the teacher or
class.
The students had various opinions on the intrinsic value of English as a subject,
especially in comparison to other subjects. Misty explained English was more repetitive to her
than other subjects,
In Algebra class or math class, you have to sit there because you’re learning a new lesson
every day because like Prop Stats I’m like (makes a motion indicating focus), every day
because it’s always something new, so I have to like go through like practice, practice,
practice, come into CAT 30 and do it, but like, with English, it’s very repetitive,
sometimes. Like, you should know how to annotate, you should know how to highlight
and write what it says underneath, ethos, pathos, logos, like you should know all that
stuff.
Her frustrations were similar to what Ms. Xavier expressed previously about spiraling
curriculum but Misty also implied the tasks were not valuable to her because they were not
challenging or progressive. Misty also explained a lot of the work in English caused her to lose
focus, “If we’re doing that ERWC book, I may be thinking about what I’m doing this weekend
IMPLIED AND PERCEIVED MESSAGES 192
or what I want for dinner or like, it just depends on what we’re doing.” Her motivation was not
from the academic expectations established by her teachers but from her understanding of what
the activities were and if they were going to help her progress or if they were repetitive. Her
view of Math and English was different than Anna and Kurt though. Anna expressed that her
favorite subject was English, and she felt the subject motivated her more than others because she
understood the purpose. She specifically said of Ms. Xavier and other English teachers,
Whenever she gives us an assignment, I know why, and she describes it very well, I
think. And, all my teachers have in the past too. Because why we need it and why it’s
important, because I’m interested in it. But, like math, I don’t care about that. Like, I’m
not gonna, like I’m gonna do my taxes, but I don’t see myself going to have a job where
I’m going to need math. And, sometimes when I’m given assignments, and I’m like, yeah
that’s cool, I’ll take an interest in it and I’ll learn it, but if I’m not interested in it, then my
brain refuses to like soak up the information or regurgitate it.
Anna’s conflicting view from Misty was a result of the differing intrinsic values they assigned to
the different curriculum and the way that affected their perspective of what was valuable for their
future. She also explained understanding the importance of a subject area affected her
motivation.
I don't really care about sin and co-sin; I really want to know about what's happening
with Syrian refugees. I want to get involved with bigger stuff, like, I feel like, if you're
going to make students go to school and legally, like, go to school and like sit her for 6
hours you have to teach them the importance of outside things. Cause, right now, as
teenagers, everyone's trapped in their little bubble. Everyone thinks they're invincible.
Everyone thinks their world is their world but there's so much more to it and there's so
IMPLIED AND PERCEIVED MESSAGES 193
much more people that need help, and we could help if we were just taught, like, the right
things, and I don't think we're being taught the right things right now.
Her explanations of why English was more meaningful to her than Math was an example of how
students transferred intrinsic value in their lessons to the motivation to work harder or with
purpose. She saw English as valuable because it gave her skills that were meaningful to her, like
being able to understand people and society better, more than Math, which she saw as only about
memorizing formulas that were not applicable in society. Kurt backed up what Anna said with a
similar viewpoint on the intrinsic value of certain subjects,
For math, I'm in AP Calc and most of the stuff we do isn't related to what one would do
after high school. Like graphing. I'm pretty sure, no one will be graphing circles after
high school. But, other than that, other subjects, when they assign something, I feel like
it's important after graduation for one to know and for one to, I mean, other people with
the same interests as you, you could start conversations and meet people and stuff like
that.
Kurt explained that he had not really understood Math and so it had not had the same intrinsic
value for him but he also tried to see school, in general, to be valuable in human interaction.
Misty, Anna, and Kurt all expressed the concept of their intrinsic motivation being connected to
how the skills and knowledge they were gaining would be applicable to their life goals. They
saw different subjects as valuable based on the goals they had set for themselves and their
motivation coordinated with valuing the alignment of the curriculum and their goals.
When talking about motivation, Logan identified that it was not the subject itself but the
way material was presented in class that gave certain subjects more intrinsic value for students
than others. He said,
IMPLIED AND PERCEIVED MESSAGES 194
When a teacher doesn’t explain what you’re doing but the reason behind it. Like, we’re
learning in Calc the derivative of e to the x is e to the x and he kind of said like that’s it,
and I asked why, and he actually took the 10 minutes to show every single step in
between. And, I feel like a lot more of his students, like, when a teacher goes out of his
way to explain the reason behind something instead of just explaining what it is we really
get like a better grasp of it.
His explanation of a valuable experience for him in his Calculus class showed that students in all
subject areas were more motivated when they understood the purpose and meaning of what they
were learning. When academic expectations were not clearly defined beyond the tasks that need
to be accomplished, students did not see as much value to those tasks. Logan and Anna
supported this concept in their explanation of themselves as students. Logan said,
I like to think I’m pretty smart but I don’t like to do a lot of . . . A lot of it I feel is kinda
like useless, so I don’t do as much work as I probably should be doing . . . normally to
me, it’s just like hitting the wicket.
He explained his intelligence was not the factor in his success in school but it was whether or not
he felt the work had intrinsic value for him, was worth his time, and would progress him beyond
just earning credits. Anna also expressed this thought process,
I think I'm smart but I don't, like I've heard this a million times, I'm smart but I don't
apply myself and that's because I don't want to. It sounds very like, I'm not an anarchist, I
swear, but I just don't want to do the work they give me because I think it's useless. I'd
rather spend my time on other things and I'm interested in learning about what I want to
learn about and not learning about what, like "the man," the government tells me to. It's
just that most things at school seem kind of useless to me. So, I'd rather invest my time in
IMPLIED AND PERCEIVED MESSAGES 195
something that means something to me . . . sometimes when I’m given assignments, and
I’m like, yeah that’s cool, I’ll take an interest in it and I’ll learn it, but if I’m not
interested in it, than my brain refuses to like soak up the information or regurgitate it.
Her explanation reflected the same sentiment as Logan of assignments not carrying clear
intrinsic value but she also included the concept of feeling forced to learn things without an
understanding of the purpose or reasoning. Both Anna and Logan expressed they saw themselves
as capable of being strong students but they were uninspired by the academic expectations they
encountered throughout high school. Scott also felt uninspired often by the assignments he was
given and said, “most of the time, no. I don’t see most of them being helpful in life. It’s like part
of the process you have to go through and stuff.” While Logan and Anna were consistent in
voicing their frustration with the academic expectations of school and how they did not build
intrinsic value or motivation, Logan saw teachers trying to do things to raise interest for students
but he said it was misguided and, like Romanowski (2003) had established, typical of age
inappropriate context,
A lot of the times they do kind of like silly stuff to try and get people interested. I don’t
think . . . Applying it to something is the most important thing. Like, you need this
because this as opposed to like just do it. Just do it for the next thing. If you tie it into
something or you make us invested it makes us motivated to do better.
He understood it was not the activity that was important to students but the purpose and skills
applicable to life that was going to motivate them. Anna’s understanding of school was that it
had the possibility of benefiting and inspiring students but the goals of school were often
misguided and disconnected from what would intrinsically motivate them.
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I think school is kind of b.s. because, if people like, I don’t know, I’m kind of stuck in the
middle. Because if people don’t want to learn, I don’t think . . . they shouldn’t be forced
to have to. Especially, like, we live in a country where we are granted a free education
and people don’t take advantage of it. I see everyone saying f-this, f-that like they think
school is stupid. If you don’t want to be here I don’t think you should legally be required
to be here. That’s not fair to the people who want to be here and want to learn and who
are disrupted by those who don’t give a crap. So, I think it’s kinda stupid how school
starts so early. Like, our brains aren’t functioning to work that early. I don’t think it’s
right how we have to go from switching gears from learning English for an hour to
learning about the human body for an hour. And, other than that, I like learning. I like all
the stuff that I’m . . . all the information that I’m offered. And, I like to take advantage of
that because I know that some people in the world aren’t that fortunate as I am to have
that opportunity to.
Anna’s understanding of school expressed that students were put in situations where they were
forced to comply and be motivated rather than given the chance to be excited about the intrinsic
value of learning itself. Her academic struggles and defiant attitude was consistent with what
Valenzuela (1999) found about student rebellions and resistance that developed with the
disconnection they felt between the education environment and their individual experiences and
needs. All the students in the focus groups expressed similar concepts of how students were
unmotivated because they did not see a direct application or importance of the things they were
learning, either because it does not connect to their future goals or teachers were not fully
explaining why their academic expectations are important and meaningful for students outside of
you need these grades and credits and you need to be prepared to do well in college.
IMPLIED AND PERCEIVED MESSAGES 197
Finding Three: Ms. Xavier’s Students Valued Recognition of Their Individuality through
the Teacher Being Relatable and Interacting with Them, but Believed What They Valued
Was Not Emphasized in School.
The focus groups students identified the importance of developing independence and
identity and the expectations they had of Ms. Xavier in helping them progress in those areas.
Culturally relevant pedagogy encouraged the need for teacher flexibility in academic and
behavioral expectations based on more collaborative relationships between the teacher and
individual students to encourage students to gain confidence in their own identity and abilities
(Cummins, 2009; Ladson-Billings, 1995). Ms. Xavier’s students expressed their need for
acknowledging their individuality through flexibility in behavioral and academic expectations
and with a desire for more dialoguing in class.
Flexibility
Ms. Xavier’s students expressed the importance of teachers to have flexibility in their
own actions in order to motivate and guide students with a more flexible understanding of
individual student needs as part of their academic and behavioral expectations. Research shows
that students expressed a desire for teachers to be flexible in their approaches and make the
classroom environment a place for discovery of knowledge related to relevancy and age
appropriate expectations (Dart et al. 1999; Romanowski, 2003). Scott expressed the belief that
both teachers and students would gain more motivation with flexibility and said, schools should
“make the teacher get out of the, you know, teacher box. Oh, like I just have to teach the class
this and this. You know, do something interesting. Make it interesting, like the topic.” It was his
view, and the view of Kurt earlier, in expressing teachers were stuck by curriculum mandates,
that teachers who were willing to break from their lesson plans or from the assigned tasks for the
IMPLIED AND PERCEIVED MESSAGES 198
day were more likely to have a greater impact on student needs. Their understanding of the
importance of flexibility mirrored Pajares (1992) study that found teachers benefit from
flexibility and had more effective classroom management when their expectations were based on
a series of evaluations of the individuals, the context, and the situations specific to the class.
Anna explained the need for individual flexibility more from an overall educational environment
stand point,
You gotta get rid of the chairs. Like, we need better furniture. Cause I feel like if
something feels like a jail it's not going to be fun and if it's not fun than like people are
age aren't going to stick to it. There not going to wanna be there. So, making the
environment just like warmer and better and also learning stuff that doesn't have to do
with like, everything is just so cookie cutter, I don't know how to explain it. I want to
learn about the nitty gritty. I want to learn about the things that are happening in the
world that are important not just like b.s. that I'm being taught here . . . I think in
Elementary school, I think it's like sit down, shut up, and listen. We're 5 year olds. Like I
want to go kickin, I want to play on the swings, I want a free environment. Even now, I
can't even sit still, like we finish something and I'm on my cellphone doing weird stuff. I
don't think it's right to make kids just sit down for, to just make kids shut up and listen.
It's not what we're meant to do.
Anna proposed solution to the lack of individuality in school were similar in concept to Scott and
Kurt in the way she wanted teachers to not feel so restricted with how they constructed academic
and behavioral expectations. She expanded the concept to also include how students do not have
a sense of belonging or welcoming in an environment that is restricting and uncompromising to
their individual needs. Anna also brought up how the need for flexibility fits with curriculum,
IMPLIED AND PERCEIVED MESSAGES 199
If schools really want to see a change and they really want to see students really get
higher grades, they shouldn't have a curriculum that's just general. They should have an
individual, like individual classes picked for everyone.
She reflected the earlier sentiments of frustrations students had toward curriculum not directly
addressing the skills they needed for their future or their current needs in skill development and
interests that affected their desire to complete the work were a result of students and teachers not
having the flexibility to work within their individual needs. Anna’s generalized explanations of
the importance of a flexible environment and curriculum did not apply directly to her
experiences in Ms. Xavier’s class but they showed a student belief in the need to be seen as
individuals rather than a part of the “cookie cutter” machine they often viewed as their
experience in school.
Besides the flexibility the focus group expected in academic expectations and classroom
environments, they also expressed a desire for more of what Cummins (2009) identified as
transformative pedagogy and teachers having a greater understanding for the personal struggles
their students were going through and how their work ethic was often forced to fit in school
parameters rather than what was most useful for their individual development. Kitty explained
the concept most directly when talking about what was helpful in a students’ school experience,
“A lot of teachers that are more understanding about, like you not understanding stuff and it
being harder for you to get things done because of like medical issues or just because you don’t
get it.” Many of the focus group students saw themselves as being punished for life events that
were out of their control and not given chances to adjust and correct themselves. Kurt elaborated
on the inflexibility of class environments by focusing on school policies toward behavioral
expectations,
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Middle School you're trying to find yourself and how you want to treat others and behave
but other than that Elementary School, like [Anna] said, teachers you to sit down, be
quiet, pay attention, do your work. But, after that, it gets worse I guess. Like what she
was talking about, earlier. Like the Zero Tolerance Policy. Like, one mistake can lead
you to do others. I feel like teachers and principals need to understand that one mistake
can't ruin . . . does not mean you're a bad person and it doesn't mean your whole life's a
mess, but you gotta understand that mistakes happen, like the only way to deal with them
is to like actually face them with the student and not with like any other law enforcement
or like any other thing like that.
He expressed that the rules and policies enforced on students were not usually helping them
correct their behaviors or helping them deal with individual struggles but were more used as
punishments for not falling in line with the expected behavioral expectations. Misty also
expressed the need for individual flexibility to help students but she explained it through the
concept of balance. She said,
I think it’s like about balance. Cause like the teacher . . . the kinda student that I am, like
my brother, for example, he needs a teacher to like hold his hand and do that stuff but
then I’m kinda more like hard core, like tough love kinda teacher, you know, so I think
just a matter of balance, like the teacher that knows how to, you know, expect enough
from you but know like it’s time to stop pushing and cut you some slack. So, I think it’s a
little bit of balance from the teacher.
In using the example of her and her brother, Misty explained that individual students have
different needs for what will motivate them and help them accomplish their academic goals for
progressing forward in high school and achieving their future aspirations. What can be implied
IMPLIED AND PERCEIVED MESSAGES 201
by her concept of balance what Elbaz (1981) suggested in teachers using their practical
knowledge gained from educational experiences to understand the needs of their individual
students and use that as the base of what reasonable academic and behavioral expectations were
for students to achieve their goals and how to best support them.
The students expected Ms. Xavier to be flexible with her academic and behavioral
expectations and they acknowledged that she was more flexible and understanding of individual
student needs than most teachers. Misty expressed appreciation for Ms. Xavier having a flexible
attitude and making academic and behavioral adjustments for her when she had to miss class.
Misty explained,
last week, I was going through some stuff, and I emailed her, and she’s just like such an
understanding teacher, you know, she’s just like, “oh, come into CAP, like come in here.”
I think that she knows, like, even though I was going through stuff, she was like, you still
have to do the essay. So, that’s like the balance I’m talking about, you know, even though
I’m struggling with what I’m going through at home, like, I still have to do the essay. So,
it’s a matter of that balance. She’s good with balancing that.
Misty’s appreciation was not only with Ms. Xavier’s understanding that Misty was individually
going through some hard times and needed support but also that Ms. Xavier knew Misty would
have to keep up with her writing skills, no matter what, and so there was an attempt to balance
the emotional and academic needs to help Misty progress. Kurt also commentated that he
appreciated the way Ms. Xavier built relationships with her students,
I like the way she lectures. She tries to fit in with us with how we act. And, it's enjoyable
at the same time because everybody laughs, talks, and participates. Unlike other classes
IMPLIED AND PERCEIVED MESSAGES 202
I've been in. Like, I think this is one of the classes the teacher fits in and tries to like be
friends with everybody.
He expressed more that she tried to relate to students personally rather than adjusting to the
background and needs of her individual students but it was still seen as more of an effort to
connect to students than the average teacher. Scott also showed appreciation for teachers in
general who tried to be flexible and connect individually with students. He said,
For me, I’d say like, them reaching out to you. Most of the times, kids, just stay quiet but
then some teachers look at your work and they see that you’re struggling and they
actually go up to you and reach out to you.
He expressed that it was important to him to have teachers reach out and adjust to their students
but he did not have that experience as often as he would want with Ms. Xavier. He identified
more confusion over her relationship to the students, “Like, sometimes she’ll be like, ‘Okay, you
can talk and stuff’ and then other times it’s like, ‘just sit down and be quiet and do your work
and stuff.’” He also explained, with writing, he did not feel his individual needs and skills were
being recognized. He said, “I don’t know but for her, writing more than 5 paragraphs is a big
thing. But for me, like last year, I had to write more than just 5 body paragraphs. I had to write a
20-page paper. So, for me it was just like pages of simple things.” His frustrations with Ms.
Xavier was that he did not feel she had a good understanding of his experiences and capabilities
in the academic expectations she had for writing and he did not see an adjustment being made for
him. Scott’s explanations of his experiences with Ms. Xavier showed how the balance in the
student teacher relationship was hard to establish with appropriate academic and behavioral
expectations. Scott appreciated teachers who reached out to students and individually interacted
with them and during the classes I observed, he was a student who received more individual
IMPLIED AND PERCEIVED MESSAGES 203
attention than most others. On the day when the students were working on charts and outlines for
their Juvenile Justice essay, Ms. Xavier approached him twice to try and encouraged him to fill
out the chart more thoroughly. Also, on the day they were working on gender stereotypes, Scott
was in the group she encouraged to have good ideas for their list and also specifically designed
groups to help him with the article annotations. Despite this attention, Scott’s overall perspective
on Ms. Xavier’s class was that she did not understand his capabilities as a writer or his ability to
have strong discussions with his peers. Overall, students expected Ms. Xavier and other teachers
with their classroom environments to be flexible to their individual needs and they showed
appreciation when Ms. Xavier attempted to do that in her classroom.
Lack of Dialoguing
As was previously established, Ms. Xavier did not engage students in much dialogue
during her classes and the students recognized this and voiced a desire for more opportunity to
share their individual viewpoints. The students’ desires for dialogue were in line with how
Cummins (1986) explained quality instruction for engaging students was a result of productive
and empowering interactions rather than reinforcing the dominant power dynamics of teachers.
Research also encouraged educators to use their dialogues not only to change power dynamics or
empower student voices but to emphasize care and validation through open-ended, co-
constructed dialogue (Noddings, 1995; Tappan, 1998). Ms. Xavier mentioned little about
dialoguing and only raised the concept when talking about her group lesson. She spoke of the
intent of the group discussion to encourage students to be more comfortable speaking in front of
each other but she also mentioned she did not think student dialoguing worked well without
more specific guiding discussion questions. Heckman and Montera (2009) explained dialogues
could be a valuable way to approach curriculum not only in giving students ownership but in
IMPLIED AND PERCEIVED MESSAGES 204
teachers gaining greater understanding of students’ levels of knowledge and cultural and
individual needs. Her group discussion lesson was not designed to allow students, even those like
Anna and Logan who had a natural inclination for dialogue, to be on a collaborative level to
speak up and given their own interpretations. As Scott and Logan both previously expressed, the
class discussions were often where Ms. Xavier reinforced her dominant perspective on readings
and topics. Research suggested developing academic and behavioral expectations around student
centered instructional practices to counteract negative aspects of the mainstream culture rather
than conforming to prescribed curriculums, and while Ms. Xavier was aware of the restraints of
the prescribed or what she called “spiraling” curriculum and did attempt student centered
practices, her classroom was still focused strongly on the defined curriculum of the Expository
Reading and Writing course and was dominated by guided instructional practices rather than the
student desired opportunity to express their voice through dialoguing (Gay, 2002; Paris, 2012;
Smagorinsky, 2013; Tharp & Gallimore, 1989).
Ms. Xavier’s students expressed their desire for dialogue in their previous criticisms of
the forced conformity in her class when they explained they were encouraged to sit and be quiet
and judged to be successful when they focused completely on getting work done. Logan had
specifically mentioned how his Government class was more encouraging and engaging because
they were allowed to discuss issues with each other, and it was not a situation where they were
passive and just writing down what they were told was important. During my observations over
the 6 days, there were 3 major lectures/discussions Ms. Xavier held with her students, and they
were not encouraging of authentic or original student voice in dialogue. When students were
addressed, they were asked to give direct answers or to confirm what Ms. Xavier was saying.
The following example of Ms. Xavier introducing the concept of stereotypes for her Language,
IMPLIED AND PERCEIVED MESSAGES 205
Gender, and Culture Unit was consistent with the students’ understanding of discussions in her
class. Ms. Xavier started with the charting stereotypes activity previously discussed. Looking at
it from a dialoguing perspective, the students were given 10 minutes to discuss and create a list
of stereotypes for girls, boys, and students. There was an attempt to allow students to brainstorm
and discuss but it was not a significant amount of time for students to really explore the issues of
how or why there are stereotypes and what may create them. Instead, with the amount of time
given to them, it turned more into a task of completing a list of attributes. When Scott and Logan
were asked about this activity and whether it was a meaningful dialogue for them, Scott said,
“Well, there is a big gap between how boys and girls are but that’s kind of like common sense.” I
clarified his statement and asked if he felt the idea was interesting but they were not allowed to
explore it, and he said, “No, we didn’t. I don’t think so.” I asked if Ms. Xavier often gave them
time to discuss in groups. Logan and Scott said they were given time but it was more formulaic
than an opportunity for them to really express their voices and develop greater understanding of
their own identity and thoughts on subjects. Scott said, “It’s kind of what we usually do. She
kind of switches around the group work. Like we’ve done this like 4 times or 5 times already.”
Logan added on, “Yeah, it’s kind of the same like pattern of how we do assignments. In the
group, and then she’ll like tell us something and then we’ll get in a group again for a timeline or
some other useless thing. And then we have to write.” The discussion on gender stereotyping
was previously presented as an example of students being asked to conform to expectations and
it is also a good example of the lack of dialoguing during discussions. The charting assignment
was an opportunity for Ms. Xavier to develop dialogue and discuss a relevant and interesting
topic for the students but the discussion that it ended up introducing was more guiding the
students to a pre-conceived concept, as shown below.
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“Let’s see what we have. I have three posters, listen for similarities (teacher reads the boy
and girl lists, does not ask for student explanations or feedback).” When reviewing the
lists, the students started to vocalize and Ms. Xavier told them, “I’m not asking for a
debate,” quieting their input. “Third group, this is what stereotypical teachers, not all
teachers, what teachers typically request and praise (read the lists). “What’s my point?”
Student answered, “They don’t match.” She repeated, “They don’t match,” then
dismissed the comment.
What was most clearly seen in this discussion was the lack of true dialoguing and student voice.
There was an opportunity to have a genuine discussion about why students identified these
stereotypes or how they saw the stereotypes as having an impact on their lives; instead, students
were immediately told that the lecture was not a debate. Student input was either in direct
response to a question or an affirmation of what the teacher was introducing. Multiple comments
by students were not acknowledged. While the students picked up information from the lecture,
like Anna quoting the failing rates of boys as an indication of inflexible school structure, students
were not allowed a chance to express their understanding of the topic and Ms. Xavier did not
allow for a discussion that would have given her more insight into her students’ perspectives.
The students also showed an internalizing of expected behavioral expectations of not being
allowed to voice their own opinions or thoughts. Ironically, this was something Ms. Xavier
identified when referencing herself as a teacher who requires them to “sit still and shut up.”
Whether seeing the class positively or negatively, students did not think they were being allowed
to create ideas or express their voices. Logan expressed the lack of encouragement for individual
voice most directly. When I asked him if students in Ms. Xavier’s class were given a chance to
think about the stereotypes rather than just listing them, he jumped in with,
IMPLIED AND PERCEIVED MESSAGES 207
kind of open it up to if students disagree with each other or back up what they say, I feel
like it’s more important if I can disagree with a girl over their views. Where they say,
“Oh, I think this” and I can like, actually express my opinion and they can like come up
with something intelligent back to say. I feel it’s a lot more than, “Okay guys, write this
down and I’ll tell you what I think about it.”
Logan had expressed a desire to allow disagreements in the class to be heard. He felt he would
have gained more from the lesson by engaging other students in a debate about the role of gender
in society rather than just being asked to write down Ms. Xavier’s perspective on the topic.
The discussion Ms. Xavier conducted about the SOAPSToneS concept was another example of
the lack of dialoguing in the class. The lesson, as previously explained, was essentially a review
session, but again, looking at it from a dialogue perspective, it is evident how little voice the
students are given in the process. The following is the narrative of the 15-minute interaction with
the students not previously addressed,
Ms. Xavier went to the board with the SOAPSToneS letters and asked students to call out
what they know. As they identified Subject, Occasion, and others, she said, “Check you
out. Look, you know stuff. You’ve memorized it but when it comes to doing the stuff . . .
not so much. Some struggle with occasion. What is occasion?” A student answered,
“What’s going on?” “Yes, what’s going on in the world. Occasion is when David Brooks
says, ‘This is bugging me, I should write about this.’ Audience is not everybody.
Purpose?” Another student answered, “Why.” “Yep. Why? Subject?” Multiple students
answered, “What it’s about.” “Yeah, what it’s about. With tone, don’t say it’s
informative. Speaker?” A student answered, “Someone fed up with the school system.”
“Yes. Someone who has experienced struggle and is wanting to write about it. Why
IMPLIED AND PERCEIVED MESSAGES 208
would we assume he’s a male?” A student answered, “His focus.” “His focus on people
struggling in school. But, I’m doing a study on struggling boys and I’m not male. As a
girl, I haven’t experienced this. I have constraints, ooh, there’s that word. We’ll come
back to it. Purpose? I’ll give you a clue, page 7.” After 30 seconds of letting students
look, “Boy crisis. Boy crisis is the thing. I brought up yesterday that 70% of all Ds and Fs
are boys. At Chap, 70% of Fs are boys, that’s a crisis. Audience? (She did not wait for an
answer) Do not give me everybody.” A student said, “Teachers.” “For an educated
audience. Where was it published? New York Times. Is that only for New York?” A
majority of the class answered, “No.” “No. What is an Honor Code? I’m a teacher. I
don’t know. I agree with Sierra that he wants teachers to probably read this. Is it for more
than this country?” A student answered, “Education world.” “Yep. Education world. Not
everyone. Definitely parents, teachers, the American Public, anyone interested in the boy
crisis. There is a group with that focus. Purpose? Why?” A student answered, “To bring
light to the subject.” “I agree. Why does he use Shakespeare? He uses Henry V, why?” A
student answered, “It’s timeless.” “Yes. How many people know Shakespeare?” They all
raise their hands. “If I went across the hall and asked how many people knew
Shakespeare, how many would answer? How many in any class?” Multiple students
answered, “Everyone.” “Everyone. It’s timeless. That’s why we’ll read it later this
semester, everyone knows it. Tone? Tone is not easy. Look for tone. If you figure out
tone, you’ll have to give me words. Students spend 30 seconds looking in the article for
tone and then start talking to each other (not about tone). “What do you think? The front
of the room has been helpful. How about the back?” No response. “Anyone back there?”
No response. “Back of the room is all looking at the floor.” Asian female in the front of
IMPLIED AND PERCEIVED MESSAGES 209
the room responds with a quote from the article about aggression. “Good, I like that
word, aggression.” A white female in the back adds a line about frustration. “Yes.
Aggression, frustration, what else? We talk a lot about it in ERW. Sarcasm. There’s
sarcasm. Turn to the back page and look at “testosterone fueled Cretan.” What is a
Cretan? Take it out of context. What is a Cretan?” 10 second pause. “Positive or
negative?” Most of the class responded, “Negative.” “Alright, time to do it on your own.
The majority of Ms. Xavier’s interaction with students throughout this discussion was to ask
them questions with direct answers and then to either affirm their answers were correct or
redirect them toward a correct answer. Through the transcript, multiple students were involved,
but other than the cases where multiple students responded simultaneously, only 4 students in
total spoke, so it was really a rotation of the same few students, mostly seated in the center rows,
speaking. The majority of the class did not engage in the discussion. They were not necessarily
encouraged to speak up and express themselves. Not only did Ms. Xavier not give students an
opportunity to express their own views or understandings of what was being presented to them in
the material, on a few occasions, she corrected them before they even had a chance to go in an
individual direction, like when she immediately redirected them about audience. The lesson was
an example of how the students were engaged by being asked questions but true dialoguing was
not encouraged because the students were not given a chance to openly discuss their views on the
topics or debate the topics openly. As previously stated, Ms. Xavier reflected irony during the
discussion in having students acknowledge her as an example of constraint and eliciting the
students to label her as suppressing, limiting, and restraining. The students did not recognize
these same concepts when they were interviewed about the discussion later. Misty, Kitty, and
IMPLIED AND PERCEIVED MESSAGES 210
Jean were asked if they felt they were involved in the discussion process and they all answered
yes and then elaborated.
Kitty said, “I feel like she doesn’t make it too long to where we get bored . . . a lot of
teachers lecture for so long that you just don’t want to listen to them anymore or you get
confused on what’s going on like you don’t have a good grasp . . .” Misty finished the
thought for her saying, “It flows. Like, it just keeps going,” and Jean wrapped it up
saying, “Yeah, the lectures are always different.”
These three students, when responding to their engagement, focused on the length and
development of the lecture rather than their own interaction and ability to contribute to the
lecture. The students did not show any knowledge of discussions that included continual
dialoguing between teachers and students as described in research. In fact, Ms. Xavier explained
herself as being a good lecturer for similar reasons as the students, “I tend to be pretty animated.
I’m pretty good, I’m not like a boring lecturer. Still, lecture does not keep them.” The statement
by Ms. Xavier was interesting in the way it contrasted what developed at the end of the
SOAPSToneS lecture. Here she was explaining that her lecturing did not keep students’ attention
long even though she was amusing; and yet, both she and the students earlier identified her as
someone who constrained and limited them. A disconnect of understanding dialogue was evident
when both the teacher and students saw the academic and behavioral expectations of a discussion
as keeping the time short and making it amusing rather than an opportunity to explore ideas and
new perspectives on topics of interest.
The last major lecture I observed was after students had annotated some of the articles in
the Language, Gender, and Equality unit and they were directed to have discussions in small
groups and it serves as another example of the lack of students experiencing dialoguing in Ms.
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Xavier’s class. As previously explained for this lesson, the class was divided into segments of
groups inside the classroom and segments of groups outside of the classroom. Ms. Xavier was
directly involved in the discussion with the groups inside the classroom, and I had her clarify that
she had divided the groups and the group in class was a “lower” group and the group outside of
the class was a “higher” group. The discussion with the “lower” group about an article on the
constraints of incarceration, went as follows,
“At this point, if you have your white papers, go out to the pod. If you have a yellow
paper, come up to the circle in the front and we’ll be able to chat. The object of the game
is to have all of the same answers. That way, when the other people come in to talk to
you, they will all get the same information. So, right now, we need to compare and find
answers. Go!” After a brief moment of quiet, Kurt said he thought the speaker was
showing an opposing perspective, presumably meaning a contrasting perspective; and an
Asian male referred to in this paper as Jimmy addressed the diversity aspect of a
speaker’s occasion, in other words, he spoke of bias in the author’s perspective. Jimmy
also addressed the Zero Tolerance policy in the school as a connection and something
that was helpful to correcting minority groups. Ms. Xavier said, “I’m only hearing Jimmy
talk, which is great, I like it when Jimmy talks but you all have good work. You all have
good ideas to share. What happened to make this gentleman want to write this
information down?” There were no responses for 30 seconds. “I’ll call on people, if I
have to. I don’t want to. You’re second semester seniors.” There were no responses for
15 seconds. Ms. Xavier called, “[Emma].” Emma commented on how the occasion of the
article was addressing what would work to fix problems with incarceration. Ms. Xavier
said, “Kurt, audience.” He responded with “teachers and educators outside of the
IMPLIED AND PERCEIVED MESSAGES 212
classroom.” She said, “I agree. He wanted to get them to see this. [Wanda], purpose.” Ms.
Xavier did not hear the answer but left it with her adult Student Service helper who was
in the room as she went to check on the group outside of the classroom. [Wanda]
responded by making a statement about the purpose of the article showing schools are
like prisons, and she added that she thought this was wrong. The Student Service helper
did not engage in the debatable topic but made a statement about how she appreciated the
creative viewpoint, and then she called on [Hank] to share his purpose for the article. He
said incarceration was a set up for failure. Ms. Xavier then returned without any
knowledge of the previous concepts raised and said, “What do we feel about tone?
Sarcastic? Conservative?” Multiple students said “sarcastic”, one said “frustrated.” She
responded, “I agree, and he should be frustrated. This is a frustrating topic. Move on to
the questions. I’ve heard a couple of these in your responses already. Who’s being
constrained? That’s an easy one. Who’s constrained?” Multiple students responded “the
school system.” She said, “Right, see I knew when you warmed up. 2nd and 6th period
had trouble with the idea of constraint too. How does this impact what’s being
restrained?” A student responded, “they can’t do anything right.” At this point, Ms.
Xavier went into the other room to hear some of the discussion with the “higher” group
and then brought all the student back in.
During the days I observed, this was the time when I saw her most try to engage the students in
individual thoughts but most students were still interacting with her in a direct response type of
action. There were multiple times in this discussion where interesting discussion topics were
brought up by students, such as Zero Tolerance policies, an author presenting conflicted
viewpoints, school being imprisoning, and the correctional system being ineffective. None of
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these topics were responded to or given a chance to be thought out and discussed among the
students. They were acknowledged as correct responses to labeling of SOAPSToneS. With an
opportunity for content that could develop strong dialogue among students allowing them to
express individual opinions and different backgrounds on a relevant topic to their lives, they
were guided instead to completion of a task of finding answers. Anna explained her views about
the class lectures being limiting,
Whenever she does lectures and stuff, I like, I just wish we had more time to discuss with
others. Cause, if one person is just talking at me, I'm not going to . . . I'm going to get
tired of that. No offense to her, I love her, but I'd rather learn from other people too. Like,
even now, I've learned more about you (motions to Kurt) and more about your views on
school and I've gotten a new perspective on things and I'd like to see other people’s
perspective rather than just what the book says or the teacher says.
Anna identified what was shown in these observations of discussion in Ms. Xavier’s class. The
students were not given chances to express their viewpoints on the concepts or issues presented
in the lectures and through the affirmation process of interaction she has with her students, there
was really only one voice that was being presented and heard. Anna felt she learned a lot by just
going through the 20-minute interview and listening to Kurt express some of his feelings about
school. She wished the students were given more of a chance to work off of each other and get
new perspectives. What became evident in this study was that the students had a desire to
express their individuality through dialoguing but the academic and behavioral expectations they
were used to during discussions put them in the position of responding with simple answers and
looking for validation from Ms. Xavier on whether or not their responses were correct.
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Whether directly referencing Ms. Xavier or not, students in her class generally felt they
were not heard in discussions or asked to participate. Some of the students liked that they were
not forced to engage in long discussions but they also had a view of lectures as purely for
informational purposes and the quicker they were over the better. The students who were aware
of the ability to discuss and express student opinions were generally frustrated that the majority
of their experience with discussion in class was to accept whatever the author and teacher had to
say without a chance of explaining their backgrounds and perspectives on the topics. In the case
of dialoguing, the academic and behavioral messages Ms. Xavier sent students was to cooperate
with her and give her the answers she was looking for, and the students were interpreting those
messages as the reason to speak up in class was not to voice an opinion but to give an answer so
the lesson could progress or be wrapped up.
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CHAPTER FIVE: DISCUSSION, IMPLICATIONS, AND RECOMMENDATIONS
This dissertation investigated the teacher perspectives guiding instructional practices and
how ideologies and beliefs influenced academic and behavioral expectations in instruction. The
dissertation also investigated how the messages teachers sent through their curriculum and
instruction were perceived by the students. The following research questions guided my
dissertation study: What do teachers communicate through their instruction about what they want
their students to learn behaviorally and academically? and What are the messages students are
getting through teacher instruction about what they should learn behaviorally and academically?
To answer my research questions, I did a qualitative study using convenience and
purposive sampling. I used a convenience sampling of the geographic area, grade level, and
subject field and purposive sampling to focus on demographics and subjects most relevant to the
literature specific to my research questions in selection of the school and, after two periods of
observation, in selecting students for my focus group. I selected a specific high school and a 12
th
grade English teacher at that high school. I picked a high school that had a diverse population
and was ranked high in statistical achievement for its district. I choose a teacher with a strong
reputation in her school for being effective in her student relationships and instruction. I chose
students of diverse backgrounds, success levels, and participatory involvement in the class. The
teacher and students aligned with my conceptual framework as they showed that teachers build
their expectations from the beliefs and practical knowledge gained through their life experiences
and teaching experiences in the classroom to set up the academic and behavioral expectations for
their students who were then influenced by the amount of culturally relevant pedagogy in
instruction, their teachers’ expectations, and their abilities to perform to those expectations. The
data I collected to answer my research questions included a pre- and post- observation in-person
IMPLIED AND PERCEIVED MESSAGES 216
interview with the teacher, 6 days of observation in the same class and 3 in-person focus group
interviews with students consisting of 2-3 students. The data collected for this study provided me
with a teacher’s beliefs and ideology in developing academic and behavioral expectations for her
classroom, the messages that were being sent to students during instruction about academic and
behavioral expectations, and the students’ understanding of the messages they were receiving for
academic and behavioral expectations. Thus, I had 6 findings. First, Ms. Xavier’s beliefs
reflected a contradicting frustration with teacher behaviors and current educational practices and
reinforcing these same established curriculum and academic expectations through her
instruction. Second, Ms. Xavier built academic and behavioral expectations based on her
practical knowledge that reinforced scaffolded teacher guided practice and student expectations
of self-efficacy. Third, Ms. Xavier did not show examples of culturally relevant pedagogy
beyond reinforcing dominant cultural values. Fourth, although expressed toward teachers in
general and not specific to Ms. Xavier, students expressed frustration with activities that are
repetitive and irrelevant with an emphasis on academic expectations about compliance in
completing basic tasks. Fifth, students perceived academic expectations and teacher practices as
generally not engaging or student centered. Sixth, Ms. Xavier’s students valued recognition of
their individuality through the teacher being relatable and interacting with them individually, but
believed what they value was not emphasized in school.
Summary of Findings
Ms. Xavier loved teaching and was passionate enough about her students that she gave up
out of the classroom positions, including as Assistant Principal, to teach. She also was passionate
about improving her teaching practices and the education field in general and was finishing up
her education doctoral dissertation on the academic struggles of male students during my study.
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Much of her teaching beliefs and ideology came from negative teaching experiences with her
colleagues and the impact she perceived those experiences had on students. Ms. Xavier saw
herself as a unique teacher who was reflective, caring, and dedicated. She also believed she
differentiated herself from the common struggles of teachers who were inflexible and
unresponsive to their students’ needs. Her practice and views on the academic expectations of
what would be most appropriate for her students was a combination of teachers implementing
practices not in the students’ best interests, the preponderance of a spiraling curriculum, and the
effects of grading practices on student motivations. Her ideology, built off of the practical
knowledge of her interactions with colleagues and pressures to work within the standardization
of curriculum and practices, led to believing more in efficient instruction, reinforcing established
curriculums through an emphasis on the relevance of college preparation, and established
academic behaviors associated with effective practice. The majority of academic and behavioral
expectations Ms. Xavier presented to her students was based on teacher guided practice she
developed based on the practical knowledge she gained throughout her career in her approaches
to scaffolded classwork, structured writing technique, and expectations of student self-regulation.
In the picking of reading materials and augmentation materials, it was evident Ms. Xavier was
pushing for students of all backgrounds and ethnicities to adopt to mainstream cultural
expectations. There was evidence of colorblindness in the lessons presented and the relational
connections she made in lectures and that the students often appreciated were reflective of the
mainstream culture she came from. Much of the focus of her class was on scaffolding tasks that
would lead to larger assignments but the content of the class and the students’ ability to engage
with it was de-emphasized. There were multiple days when students were asked to explore
articles or view videos that were not referenced the next day or even at the end of the period.
IMPLIED AND PERCEIVED MESSAGES 218
Purpose and reasoning for activities were not always clear other than the tasks that needed to be
completed. Her approach to progressing through activities without building student connections
could be explained by something she mentioned about what she admired in her colleague that
taught the same course as her. She said she thought this teacher was able to get more of the
Expository Reading and Writing curriculum done and cover grammar techniques more
effectively. She even said, “They hate her for it, but she still pushes through and they probably
learn a little bit more from her than they do from me. And, I will continue to strive in that
direction.” Ms. Xavier reflected that building relationships with her students was something that
was getting in the way of progressing through the prescribed curriculum of Expository Reading
and Writing and covering lessons such as grammar. She saw the model of one of her colleagues
as successful instruction, noting that while she did not develop relationships, but was much more
efficient in covering content. The importance of her relationships with students and whether or
not they would respond positively or negatively to the work and assignments she gave was
expressed often by Ms. Xavier and could be seen as a determining factor in how she set up
academic and behavioral expectations.
The perspectives of Ms. Xavier’s students were seen through the observations of their
engagement and reaction to lessons during class but were also be represented by 7 students who
were interviewed in pairs or a small focus group. The students in the focus groups from Ms.
Xavier’s class expressed their understanding of their experiences in school as being given
expectations of compliance and feeling forced to comply with expected behaviors rather than
having an opportunity to express their voices and individuality. In observations, it was evident
students were given specific tasks to complete and were not encouraged to express what they
needed to fulfill the tasks or allowed to work through the process in independent ways. Most
IMPLIED AND PERCEIVED MESSAGES 219
students interviewed were frustrated with academic expectations that had become stagnant
because students were not being asked to challenge themselves with building their writing or
argumentation skills and only asked to reinforce tasks they already felt comfortable completing.
The students in the focus group not only viewed many of their academic expectations as limiting
their capabilities, they also felt they were asked to be passive and not given a chance to express
their individuality. The students in Ms. Xavier’s class could be observed and expressed in their
interviews and awareness of having their voice limited by the activities, being forced to comply
with tasks and being assessed on how well they conformed to academic expectations. The
students expressed in the interviews that their reluctance to speak up had been a product of long
term conditioning from the beginnings of their school experiences and felt school, in general, as
well as Ms. Xavier’s class, did not encourage their independent voices but more encouraged
them to conform to academic and behavioral standards guided by individual teachers’ needs for
class management and progression through curriculum. The academic and behavioral
expectations Ms. Xavier’s students perceived encouraged them to learn how to comply to
formatted writing and perspectives, and they mostly felt they were discouraged from open
expression in favor of completing work in steps that made their work easier and more efficient.
The students also expressed that what they learned and were graded on was not relevant
or intrinsically valuable but they saw no alternatives but to give into the academic and behavioral
expectations in order to advance the goals they had for themselves academically and after high
school. The emphasis on grading was a dominant cultural academic expectation frustrating both
Ms. Xavier and her students but the overall perspective seemed to be a helpless submission to
these practices rather than encouragement in finding relevance for learning beyond grades.
Students showed and explained that relevance in the activities and lessons they were working on
IMPLIED AND PERCEIVED MESSAGES 220
was strongly affected by whether or not they saw the lessons as appropriate for their life goals
and their academic engagement and abilities. All the students in the focus groups expressed
similar concepts of how students were unmotivated because they did not see a direct application
or importance with the things they were learning, either because it did not connect to their future
goals or teachers were not fully explaining why their academic expectations are important and
meaningful for students beyond the need for grades and credits to be prepared to do well in
college. Finally, Ms. Xavier’s students expressed their need for acknowledged individuality
through flexibility in behavioral and academic expectations and a desire for more dialoguing in
class.
The case study of Ms. Xavier’s classroom illuminated the victimization of both the
teachers and students from the bureaucratic organization models of education that produce
standardized rules and procedures of routine work assessed for task completion and efficiency
(Heckman & Montera, 2009; Mehta, 2013). Ms. Xavier struggled with patterns of repetitious
curriculum and teachers moving through material without acknowledging the students’ needs but
also fell into the same patterns of using established curriculum and instructional techniques she
had been told were effective. She even expressed admiration for teachers who were able to get
through work more effectively at the expense of alienating their students by saying she would
“continue to strive in that direction.” The influence of the school culture around her and the
educational system in general had guided her away from her instincts of what students needed
and more towards fitting in with mainstream expectations. Her acknowledgement that effective
teachers were those able to dictate to students what was necessary for their advancement was
expressed also in her understanding of the mainstream cultural values of college readiness and
literary references being things the students needed to accept rather than question with critical
IMPLIED AND PERCEIVED MESSAGES 221
thinking, and her scaffolded work was also more dictatorial than developing of growth patterns
through guided instruction (Romanowski, 2004). Mrs. Xavier’s students acknowledged and
accepted their role in this factory style model of passively progressing through the system by
efficiently producing the standards for their grade level without seeing applicable purpose and
getting work done just so they could move on to the next assignments and the next grade level
(Heckman & Montera, 2009). They were not being encouraged to develop self-efficacy of
guiding their own learning and meaning through flexible grading practices and were influenced
instead toward self-regulation of understanding how to best accomplish the standards and tasks
put before them to be indoctrinated into the bureaucratic systems of efficient production. The
combination of both her and her students accepting their roles as components of a system
perpetuating mainstream Western Eurocentric values and efficiency over critical thinking reflect
the problems in educational environments of creating stagnant curriculum and behavior patterns
of conformity rather than individual thought and expression.
Implications and Recommendations
It was expected in this study to see a classroom environment where teacher practices
influenced student perspectives and actions, and then student actions having an influence on
teacher expectations and further activities in the class. Ms. Xavier’s interpretation or her
students’ was that they struggled with the academic and behavioral expectations and workloads,
and she communicated this through the scaffolding, teacher guided lessons, and tasks, which
were only given during class because she did not trust her students to do the work without direct
instruction. Her students received the message from her instruction and that of other teachers that
their academics activities were prescribed, repetitive, and irrelevant busywork given to them with
low or unclear expectations and, in their view, it caused them to produce work below their
IMPLIED AND PERCEIVED MESSAGES 222
capabilities. Based on these findings, in this section, I will discuss implications and
recommendations for practice, policy, and future research.
On implication for policy and practice is the recognition of the struggle teachers have in
adjusting to new curriculum mandates in ways that are beneficial to students. Ms. Xavier’s
thoughts were that teachers tried to add mandated curriculums like the Common Core without
making adjustments to their previous practices, and it was causing their students to be confused
about their academic expectations and overloaded with work. Her analysis of teachers trying to
adjust to new material, while keeping their established curriculum, implied teachers were
focused more on their ability to comply with the new policies and be comfortable doing it rather
than adjusting to their students’ cultural and academic needs. She, herself, was building lessons
on the older Expository Reading and Writing curriculum and more established practices like
scaffolding and formatted essay structures rather than promoting the speaking and critical
thinking emphasis of Common Core. The negative effect of academic and behavioral
expectations emphasizing compliance, rather than critical thinking and growth, is the students
can recognize the lack of emphasis on their individual needs, if they are seeing mandated goals
from standards and teacher guided practice, rather than working on improving their individual
skills and deficiencies in a subject area. The students in the focus groups addressed this by
bringing up how misaligned the classes were from subject to subject and from grade to grade.
The recommendations for practice and policies would be that teachers need to move toward
different approaches with curriculum that would model and promote actions of independence and
growth in students rather than the consistent past behaviors of using hierarchical reward based
strategies reflecting prescribed behaviors of compliance (Hess & Azuma, 1991). Professional
development needs to emphasize practices, like structured writing and scaffolding, as techniques
IMPLIED AND PERCEIVED MESSAGES 223
building towards student self-efficacy to be able to produce work independently by moving away
from teacher guided modeling. Teachers need to have greater emphasis on vertical planning and
conducting surveys and interviews with students to determine their needs in instruction rather
than emphasizing prescribed curriculums given to them by districts or administrations. Kurt even
brought this up when he said teachers should be able to break out of their “teacher boxes” and
teach what they see as most important for students. Ladson-Billings (1992) suggested teachers
move beyond district curriculum mandates to introduce additional materials that would even
encourage students to question the validity, reliability, and logic of curriculum and determine for
themselves what is most valuable for their academic advancement.
Another implication and recommendation for practice is recognizing the importance of
reflective practice. The findings of this study emphasized the amount of disagreement teachers
and students can have in what is best for their academic growth and the importance of teachers to
really understand the difference between their ideology and their actual practice. Grossman et al.
(2010) used teacher logs to reveal that teachers believed they were doing tasks differently than
what was observed by researchers or understood by students. They found, overall teachers
thought they spent much less time on direct instruction and direct task completion exercises than
they really did (Grossman et al., 2010). In this study, Ms. Xavier’s exhibited a reflective nature
as a continuing practice in her teaching, as could be seen by evaluating the effectiveness of
essays and recognizing the need for adjustments discussion questions and peer editing processes
to more directly engage the students but she also reflected Grossman et al.’s (2010) findings in
that she saw herself as wanting to be a student oriented teacher with limited lecturing and what
was observed were long sections of lecturing on most days and very little student self-guided
work. The recommendation from these findings would be for teachers to develop reflective
IMPLIED AND PERCEIVED MESSAGES 224
practices that are accurate to the activities that are done during class time and to be aware of the
students’ needs in order to create student centered instruction. The development of student
centered instructional practices is important in creating social climates and critical components
more engaging and applicable for students by directing instructional practice to focus on the
learner rather than the dominant Western Eurocentric culture’s prescribed curriculum
(Smagorinksy, 2013; Tharp & Gallimore, 1989). Teachers relying solely on practical knowledge
of past student actions and/or techniques being introduced through professional development are
limited in their practice unless they are also provided with examples of good practice for
breaking restrictive student behavioral and academic achievement patterns.
An additional implication and recommendation for practice is the need for students to
have a chance to discuss or write about their own cultures and any disconnection or clashes they
may have with what was presented in the curriculum. With the examples of literature used in Ms.
Xavier’s class, while it may be true that exposure to works like Hamlet and Pride & Prejudice
reflect knowledge expected in our dominant Western Eurocentric culture, the relevance to
students of the works would be stronger if they understood the universality of the stories and
could relate them to the situations they are going through in their own lives. Unfortunately,
Anagnostopoulos (2003) found it was typical of teachers to cover standard material through
conventional and narrow definitions of reading literature and avoiding themes of race or social
privilege that the student’s may be able to connect to their life experiences and create more
meaningful and lasting learning. Ladson-Billings’s (1992, 1995) writings developed the theory
of culturally relevant pedagogy based on three criteria: students must experience academic
success, students must develop and maintain cultural competence, and students must develop a
critical consciousness to challenge the status quo of the current society. The students in this study
IMPLIED AND PERCEIVED MESSAGES 225
expressed challenges to the status quo but also frustration in not being supported in their
challenges and being forced to comply with expected social behaviors. They often were resigned
to school being a place you progressed through so you could go to college and that was
consistent with Halx’s (2014) findings of students being loyal to the school structures that had
been unsuccessful in previously helping them to achieve but not exhibiting enthusiasm for the
classes and the lessons they knew were not helping them learn. The recommendation for policy
and practice would be for teachers to adjust their curriculum based on culturally relevant
pedagogy and allow for student engagement through dialoguing. According to Romanowski’s
(2003) study, what made curriculum interesting and relevant to students were the lessons that
connected to existing curriculum or pop cultural references they could relate to and through
relevant class discussions where they were allowed to voice their own opinions and
understanding. Teachers are encouraged to use dialoguing as a main component of reaching out
to students in a way that builds relationships of understanding and encouragement through
gaining a better awareness of their students’ community activities, cultural knowledge, and
engagement (Heckman & Montera, 2009). By allowing greater student voice in the classroom
and relaxing the expected academic and behavioral outcomes, teachers could engage in a
transactional curriculum where the students and teachers feed off of each other’s knowledge and
close the disconnection in the cultural gaps between teachers and students that encourage power
dynamics where students feel pre-judged and impotent in their educational abilities (Hatt, 2005;
Rodriguez, 2009).
One of the key policy implications resulting from this study would be re-examining the
grading system as it was something that both the teacher and students felt was not a good
reflection of what was valuable with instruction and learning. Because of different
IMPLIED AND PERCEIVED MESSAGES 226
understandings of what grading accomplishes, teachers and students are often not aligned in their
goals because of the competitive nature of academic success and the students who struggle are
often lost in failed competition rather than encouraged through pathic learning and cooperation
(Hatt, 2005). Both Ms. Xavier and her students explained seeing grades as more harmful than
helpful in promoting healthy academic expectations. Ms. Xavier saw grades as encouraging
parents to put unnecessary stress on their students and making students worry more about the
scores they were receiving than the growth in their abilities. She tried to counteract the stress by
having lenient due dates and allow for revision and growth in her assessments. Students
expressed that grades were not an accurate representation of their abilities and really were just a
form of labeling encouraging them to be judged by their parents and their peers. They also
expressed the importance of flexible teachers like Ms. Xavier in allowing them to feel successful
and supported in their academic goals. The recommendation would be for teachers to encourage
students with grading practices which allow for leniency rather than traditional practices of
believing hard lines on standards and grading procedures are acts of care in preparing students
for higher expectations (Noddings, 1988). Policies need to encourage and allow teachers to
present alternate assignments and assessments for the students more beneficial in challenging
power dynamics that effect student engagement and experience in school (Benson, 2008;
Rodriguez, 2009). Leniency and flexibility is important for teachers to develop so students see
purpose and meaning in their assessments and students’ perceptions of academic expectations are
more aligned with the goal orientation of skill mastery and learning rather than immediate
gratifications of grading (Ames & Archer, 1998).
There are implications of further research to determine the exact nature of balance
teachers are developing between policy mandates and existing practices. This study was limited
IMPLIED AND PERCEIVED MESSAGES 227
in only having one teacher subject and a true comparison was not made between Ms. Xavier’s
practice and the practices she described observing in her colleagues. Research into the
establishment of teacher expectations would also be beneficial. Ms. Xavier expressed
understandings of college readiness and expected common cultural knowledge but it was not
clear where these expectations were established. Research identifying where secondary school
teachers gain their understanding of necessary behavioral expectations and cultural knowledge
necessary for their students to succeed would be beneficial in clarifying why these expectations
are important to reinforce. It would also be beneficial to compare the messages students were
receiving between multiple teachers about their academic and behavioral expectations since it
was the students’ tendency to generalize their teachers and classes in their reflections on school.
Further research needs to be done with teacher reflective practices. Ms. Xavier was able to
recognize when lessons needed to be adjusted but there was a disconnection between her
perception of the importance of her lessons and assessments and the students’ perception of what
was important in what they were learning and doing. A finding of the study that needs to be
explored more thoroughly is the need to have teachers gain more awareness of the difference
between the image they have of themselves and the realities of their practices in the classroom
and the messages students are receiving about what is important in academics. It is suggested,
with a more thoroughly developed study, that researchers explore the study of practical
knowledge through more personal and interactive ways for teachers to express their ideologies
with constructs such as image, drawing, and fieldnotes (Black & Halliwell, 2000; Clandinin,
1985; Elbaz, 1981). These practices would allow teachers to explore their practice in less
evaluative ways and more through general reflection of the realities of their instructional plans
and the expectations they are communicating to their students. The students expressed frustration
IMPLIED AND PERCEIVED MESSAGES 228
with expectations of compliance, repetitive curriculum, subjects and materials that were not
applicable to their lives, and grading practices that were discouraging rather than encouraging.
Further research needs to be done on the impact of curriculum and grading practices more
directly aligned with individual students and specific classes and the impact it would have on
student motivation and confidence in progressing themselves academically.
IMPLIED AND PERCEIVED MESSAGES 229
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IMPLIED AND PERCEIVED MESSAGES 239
Appendices
A. Research Design Matrix
What do I need to
know?
What type(s)
of individual
(e.g.,
principals,
students) will I
need to
interview?
What type(s) of
settings (e.g.,
classroom,
teachers’
lounge) will I
need to
observe?
What is my
sampling
strategy? (Use
Maxwell pp. 98-
99 to specify
your goals).
Possible people,
settings, events,
and processes to
sample.
Who are the
gatekeepers?
Who will I
need to speak
with to obtain
access? From
whom do I
need
consent?
What are my
relationships
with possible
informants and
the
implications of
these
relationships?
RQ1: Teacher
Perspective – What
do teachers
communicate
through their
instruction about
what they want
their students to
learn behaviorally
and academically?
Secondary
English teachers
preferably in a
high
socioeconomic,
high performing
and a low
socioeconomic,
low performing
context.
Teacher lounges
or classrooms,
convenience of
the teacher.
Purposive,
representative of
teachers in each
environment,
convenience of
geographically
local
1 English teacher
from a high
socioeconomic
setting and high
performing school.
1 English teacher
from a low
socioeconomic and
low performing
school.
Principals giving
me access to
their school.
Teachers being
willing to open
up or give up
the time for the
protocols
designed.
Guidelines for
observations.
Hopefully,
nothing more
than colleagues
in the
profession. I may
be too
sympathetic to
positions they
are involved in.
RQ 2: Student
Perspective – What
are the messages
students are getting
through teacher
instruction about
what they should
learn behaviorally
and academically?
Ideally
interviews with
students in the
classes of the
teacher subjects
about their
perspectives.
Observations of
students in their
interaction with
the teachers.
Documents
showing the work
and assessments
students have
completed.
Representative of
students in each
environment and
of different levels
of performance,
convenience of
geographically
local, selective
groups of
students for the
purpose of
gaining
perspective.
5 students from
each class
observed
interviewed
individually or in
focus groups.
Students
representative of
different
performance levels
in the class.
School and
parent
permissions for
student
participants.
Time limitations
for meeting
with students.
I will not have
personal
relationships
with the
students but I
may be
sympathetic to
them if my work
with the
teachers is not in
line with current
research on
good
instructional
practice.
IMPLIED AND PERCEIVED MESSAGES 240
B. Teacher Pre-Observation Interview Protocol and Questions
Thank you for agreeing to let me interview and observe you. I appreciate your time and hope the
experience will be helpful to you as well.
Before we get started, I want to provide you with an overview of my study and answer any
questions you might have about participating. I am currently enrolled in a doctoral program at
USC. The primary purpose of this study is to understand the difference between academic and
behavioral goals teachers develop and how students perceive those goals. My study is designed
to include interviews with teachers and students and observations. I am interested in
understanding teacher ideology through personal beliefs and experiences. I am also interested in
student perceptions about classroom environment, grading, and motivation.
I want to assure you that I am strictly a researcher. What this means is that the nature of my
questions (and observations) are not evaluative and your participation is completely voluntary
and can be stopped at any point. I will not be making any judgments on how you are performing
as a teacher only observing interactions between students and teachers. The findings will be
published as dissertation by USC but I will conceal the identity of you and the school. I will also
protect any of the interview recordings and will remove your name from any personal reflections
or student work you give me.
I am happy to provide you with access to my final paper if you are interested in discussing the
findings. Do you have any questions about the study before we get started? If you don’t have
any (more) questions I would like to have your permission to begin the interview. I have brought
a recorder with me today so that I can accurately capture what you share with me. May I also
have your permission to record our conversation?
IMPLIED AND PERCEIVED MESSAGES 241
Teacher Pre-Observation Questions
1. Would you start by explaining why you wanted to be a teacher?
a. What in your life inspired you towards teaching?
b. Were there any experiences you had as a student yourself that lead to your
inspiration to teach or the goals you have as a teacher?
c. If you think about yourself teaching, what image of yourself comes to mind?
Would you describe an experience you have had as a teacher that epitomizes
how envision yourself as a teacher? What did you do? What did the students
do?
d. How does this image of you as a teacher influence your daily teaching?
2. How do you set academic expectations for your students?
a. What would you say are the main factors for your academic expectations?
i. How much of a part do curriculum standards play in your academic
expectations?
ii. How are your academic expectations reflective of the academic
capabilities of your students?
iii. Do you have any academic expectations that are not based on
academic performance, such as late policies for assignment deadlines,
make-up work or extra credit?
1. If you have academic expectations like these, what is the value
you see in them?
b. How do you establish your academic expectations?
i. Think back to a recent example of your set up of academic
expectations. What would I have heard you say to your students?
c. When do you try to set up your academic expectations? Is it at the beginning
of the year? The beginning of a unit? or The beginning of assignments?
i. What is the reason for setting up the academic expectations when you
do?
d. How do you ensure that your students know your academic expectations for
them?
i. What would be an example from a recent class that you think
demonstrates their awareness of your academic expectations?
e. What role do grades play in your academic expectations for your students?
i. How do you talk with your students about grades?
ii. What do you emphasize with grades when talking with your students
about them?
iii. How, if at all, do you expect students to use their grades in their
learning process?
1. What would be a recent example of students using their grades
in a positive way in your class?
IMPLIED AND PERCEIVED MESSAGES 242
f. What role does student voice or dialogue play in your academic expectations?
i. How might you assess students in their ability to contribute to
discussion?
3. How do you set behavioral expectations for your students?
a. What would you say are the main factors for your behavioral expectations?
i. Are there social or cultural aspects to your behavioral expectations?
ii. Do you think the cultural demographics of the school have an effect on
the type of behavioral expectations that are set as far as supporting or
combating certain cultural values from the community or home
environment?
b. What would be an example of you setting behavioral expectations?
i. Think back to a recent example. What would I have heard you say to
your students?
c. When do you do that? For example, was it something you did on the first day
of class? If so, how?
d. Why do you choose to set up or emphasize behavioral expectations when you
do?
e. How do you ensure that your students know your behavioral expectations for
them?
i. What would be an example from a recent class that you think
demonstrates their awareness of your behavioral expectations?
f. How does student voice and discussion work within your behavioral
expectations?
i. What are the expectations you have for students contributing to class
discussion?
1. How do you set these expectations?
2. What is an example of students following through with your
expectations?
ii. What are the expectations you set for students working with groups or
in collaboration with each other?
1. How do you set these expectations?
2. What is an example of students following through with your
expectations?
4. Was there anything I missed in my line of questioning you would like to bring up on
these topics that you feel is important?
IMPLIED AND PERCEIVED MESSAGES 243
C. Observation Protocol
Name of Observer Date Time
Trent Hall
Location Study
Brief Summary of Observation
Physical Space
Define the physical
space.
Physical
Layout
Visual
representations
of cultural,
academic, or
behavioral
expectations
Utility: What is the
purpose of
event/setting?
Participant reactions to
the environment
Other
IMPLIED AND PERCEIVED MESSAGES 244
People/Participants
Who are the
participants taking
place in
observation/event?
How many
participated?
Demographical
information:
Racial
Ethnic
Gender
Class
What was each of the
specific participants
doing?
Group
interaction
Individual
actions
Passive
participants
Active
participants
IMPLIED AND PERCEIVED MESSAGES 245
Purpose of the Class Period
Why is the class
objective?
What are the student
tasks?
What are the positions
of the various
participants involved?
Power
dynamics
Roles
Was there any
discussion? Why? In
what format?
What is being
discussed?
IMPLIED AND PERCEIVED MESSAGES 246
Sequence of Events
Beginning
Middle
End
IMPLIED AND PERCEIVED MESSAGES 247
Observer Role
What am I doing?
What is my role
throughout the
observation?
Describe some of my
interactions with other
participants
throughout the
observation.
How did my
interaction/presence
affect the observation
participants?
Other
IMPLIED AND PERCEIVED MESSAGES 248
D. Post-Observation Questions for the Teacher
1) What were the academic goals and class activities you were emphasizing for the days
I observed you?
a) Were these lessons building upon any previous standards or skills established
before my observations?
b) What is your assessment of how effectively the lesson I observed went?
i) Why do you think this?
ii) What do you usually look for in gaging whether or not students are gaining
understanding of the academic purpose of the lesson I observed?
iii) What was your assessment of student engagement and behavior during the
periods I observed? What made you think this?
2) What was most successful about your lessons in the class periods I observed?
a) Could you give me an example of what you observed that was successful during
the period?
3) What was most challenging about delivering your lessons in the class periods I
observed?
a) Could you give me an example of what happened that was challenging during this
period?
4) If you recall, did you make any adjustments to your lesson or activities during the
period I observed?
a) What do you think these adjustments did for the lesson?
5) What adjustments or reinforcements do you feel you will need to make for your
students to meet your academic expectations in future lessons?
6) What adjustments or reinforcements do you feel you may need to make for your
students to meet your behavioral expectations in future class sessions?
IMPLIED AND PERCEIVED MESSAGES 249
E. Child Assent/Parent Permission Form
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
CHILD ASSENT AND PARENTAL PERMISSION FOR RESEARCH PARTICIPATION
Study Title:
EXAMINING IMPLIED AND PERCEIVED MESSAGES SENT THROUGH TEACHER INSTRUCTION
ABOUT ACADEMIC AND BEHAVIORAL EXPECTATIONS FOR STUDENTS
Researcher: Trent Hall
IRB Study Number:
I am from the University of Southern California and I am asking you to be in a research study. The
research study is to learn more about how the world works and why people act the way they do. In this
study, I want to analyze if there is a disconnection between what teachers emphasize as important in
academics and classroom behaviors and the messages students are receiving about what is important in
their behavior and academic success,
What I am asking you to do?
I will be observing you in your classes as your teacher instructs you and you go through your normal
classroom activities. I will ask you to participate in either an individual interview lasting no more than 30
minutes or a focus group discussion with 4 other students lasting no more than 1 hour about your
understanding of academic and behavior expectations and your experiences in school and with your
teacher.
I would like to audio record you during the interview or discussion, to make sure what is shared is
accurately recorded and represented.
Do I have to be in this study?
You do not have to participate in this study. It is up to you. You can say no now or you can even change
your mind later. No one will be upset with you if you decide not to be in this study.
Your grades and your relationship with your school, teachers and classmates will not be affected if you
choose to not participate in the study or if you choose to stop participating at any point.
Will being in this study hurt or help me in any way?
Being in this study will bring you no harm. There are no direct benefits to you for participating in this
study. It will hopefully help us learn more about the interaction between teachers and students.
What will you do with information about me?
I will be very careful to keep your answers to the interview answers private. Before and after the study I
will keep all information we collect about you locked up and password protected.
If you want to stop doing the study, contact Trent Hall at trenthal@usc.edu. If you choose to stop
before we are finished, any answers you already gave will be destroyed. There is no penalty for
stopping. If you decide that you don’t want your materials in the study but you already turned them in,
just let me know.
IMPLIED AND PERCEIVED MESSAGES 250
Agreement:
By signing this form, I agree to be in the research study described above.
________________________________________________
Printed Name
__________________________________________________________ ____________
Signature Date
Your child is being asked to take part in a research study. This form has important information about
the reason for doing this study, what we will ask your child to do, and the way we would like to use
information about your child if you choose to allow your child to be in the study.
Why are you doing this study?
Your child is being asked to participate in a research study about the differences in the way teachers
introduce academic and behavior expectations and how students view those expectations.
The purpose of the study is to analyze if there is a disconnection between what teachers emphasize as
important in academics and classroom behaviors and the messages students are receiving about what is
important in their behavior and academic success
What will my child be asked to do if my child is in this study?
Your child will be asked to participate in either an individual interview with the researcher lasting no
more than 30 minutes or a focus group discussion with the researcher and 4 other students lasting no
more than 1 hour about his/her understanding of academic and behavior expectations and their
experiences in school and with their teacher.
We would like to audio record your child during the interview or discussion, to make sure what is shared
is accurately recorded and represented. The researcher will keep these tapes in a safe in his home and
they will only be used by the researcher in coding information and for example statements of views
shared through the research process. The tapes may be sent to an impartial, hired transcriber who will
only take the audio form and transfer it to a written form and give it back to the researcher. Your child
will only be recorded if you and your child give permission.
What are the possible risks or discomforts to my child?
To the best of our knowledge, the things your child would be doing in this study have no more risk of
harm than the risks of everyday life. The child may be asked questions about their understanding of the
teacher or class which could make them feel uncomfortable with sharing if they feel they are saying
something to make a teacher or student look unfavorable and they can refuse to answer any questions
making them feel this way. If your child is part of a focus group, every effort will be made to have the
group be respectful and understanding of views, but other students will interact with them and may not
agree with what your child says and there could be possible disagreements affect comfort levels or
reputation.
IMPLIED AND PERCEIVED MESSAGES 251
What are the possible benefits for my child or others?
Your child is not likely to have any direct benefit from being in this research study. This study is
designed to learn more about interactions between students and teachers. The study results may be
used to help other people in the future.
How will you protect the information you collect about my child, and how will that information be
shared?
Results of this study will be published by the University of Southern California as a doctoral dissertation.
Audio recordings will be kept confidential to the researcher and the possible hired transcriber. The
transcriber will not keep the data and the researcher will only possess the data for 3-4 months while it is
being analyzed and developed into the final paper. Your child’s name and the names of the school and
other people involved in the study will be kept anonymous. Child abuse or neglect is not a part of the
study but since the researcher is a Mandated Reporter, if your child tells us about child abuse or neglect
we will report that information to the appropriate authorities.
What are my child’s rights as a research participant?
Participation in this study is voluntary. Your child may withdraw from this study at any time -- you and
your child will not be penalized in any way or lose any sort of benefits for deciding to stop participation.
If you and your child decide not to be in this study, this will not affect the relationship you and your child
have with your child’s school in any way. Your child’s grades will not be affected if you choose not to let
your child be in this study.
If your child decides to withdraw from this study, the researchers will ask if the information already
collected from your child can be used.
Who can I contact if I have questions or concerns about this research study?
If you or your child have any questions, you may contact Trent Hall at trenthal@usc.edu.
If you have any questions about your child’s rights as a participant in this research, you can contact the
following office at the University of Southern California:
OPRS Office for the Protection of Research Subjects
University of Southern California
3720 South Flower Street, Third Floor
Los Angeles, CA 90089-0706
Phone: (213) 821-1154
Email: oprs@usc.edu
Parental Permission for Child’s Participation in Research
I have read this form and the research study has been explained to me. I have been given the
opportunity to ask questions and my questions have been answered. If I have additional
questions, I have been told whom to contact. I give permission for my child to participate in the
research study described above and will receive a copy of this Parental Permission form after I
sign it.
Optional Study Elements
IMPLIED AND PERCEIVED MESSAGES 252
Consent to Quote from Interview
I may wish to quote from the interview with your child either in the presentations or articles resulting
from this work. A pseudonym (fake name) will be used in order to protect your child’s identity.
Initial one of the following to indicate your choice:
_____ (initial) I agree to allow my child to be quoted in the research findings for this study.
_____ (initial) I do not agree to allow my child to be quoted in the research findings for this study.
Consent to Audio-Record Interview
Initial one of the following to indicate your choice:
_____ (initial) I agree to allow my child to have their interview or focus group recorded.
_____ (initial) I do not agree to allow my child to have their interview or focus group recorded.
__________________________________________________________ ____________
Parent/Legal Guardian’s Name (printed) and Signature Date
Parents, please be aware that under the Protection of Pupils Rights Act (20 U.S.C. Section 1232(c) (1)
(A)), you have the right to review a copy of the questions asked of or materials that will be used with
students. If you would like to do so, you should contact Trent Hall or Julie Slayton to obtain a copy of
the questions or materials.
IMPLIED AND PERCEIVED MESSAGES 253
F. Student Focus Group: Protocol
Thank you for agreeing to talk with me today. I want you to know that I think everything you
have to say is important, in fact, my study is looking at the importance of student voice in school,
and I am here to learn from you.
Before we get started, I want to provide you with the topic of my study and answer any questions
you might have about participating. I am currently enrolled in a doctoral program at USC. This
study is for my dissertation and it will be published by the university for people to learn from and
allow me to become a doctor if I do my job well. The primary purpose of this study is to
understand the difference between academic and behavioral goals teachers develop and how
students see those goals. My study is designed to include interviews I have done with your
teacher, observations of the class, and this focus group for students. I will be mainly interested in
student views about the classroom environment, grading, and motivation. Because I am
interested in the student perspective, the student voice is a necessary part of what I will be trying
to show in my writing. My theory is that students and teachers are not always connected in their
views of what is important or what needs to be given priority in class and work time.
Our discussion should take about an hour. I know you have homework, extra-curricular
activities, and family obligations, and I will respect your time but am also really appreciative of
your willingness to share your thoughts and experiences with me. During this process, there will
be no right or wrong answers. I am interested in knowing about your perspectives and ideas. I
will be recording the conversation so that I can review it later and be absolutely certain that I
capture your ideas exactly as you present them and represent them in the most direct way
possible. I hope you will feel comfortable to speak freely about your experiences and opinions,
and I will hide your identity and the identity of any teachers, students, or anyone else who
happens to come up in the discussion, but my findings will be published by USC and will be
accessible to everyone. I ask everyone to be respectful of what everyone else has to say, again,
all opinions are important for me and there is not a correct way of answering or viewing the
topics which will come up. Do you have any questions or concerns before we start?
IMPLIED AND PERCEIVED MESSAGES 254
G. Student Focus Group: Post-Observation Questions
1. Tell me about your view of school?
a. In your view, what are the things teachers most want you to accomplish in your
classes?
i. Are you generally aware of the purpose for the assignments and activities you
are given?
ii. How do you generally feel about the purpose and usefulness of the activities
or assignments you are given?
iii. How well did you understand the importance of the assignments you were
given in this class?
b. Do you feel school is meaningful and relevant for you? If so, why do you see it as
meaningful? If not, why don’t you see it as meaningful?
i. Is there anything you can think of that would help to make school more
meaningful or relevant for you?
c. In your view, what behaviors do you think teachers expect of you while you are in
class?
i. Do you think these behaviors are important or reasonable expectations for
students?
d. What have been the most important traits in your teachers to help you succeed in their
classes?
i. Can you explain a time when a teacher did something that was specifically
helpful to you?
2. Tell me about how you see yourself as a student?
a. When you are sitting in class, what do you usually focus on?
i. Are you focused on the lessons?
ii. Are you focused on things outside of class?
iii. Are you more focused on completing lessons or understanding what you are
learning?
b. What will help you most become the best and most focused student you could be?
i. Is it something teachers can do that they are not already doing?
ii. Is it something schools need to change overall about classes or school work?
c. What role do grades play in your motivation for doing well in school?
i. What do you see as helpful about grades in your learning?
ii. Is there anything about grades or grading that doesn’t help you learn?
d. What are the values your family and culture have emphasized for you?
i. Do you feel these values are conflicted or supported at school?
ii. Do you see your values and the values of your family in the work you are
given in school?
IMPLIED AND PERCEIVED MESSAGES 255
iii. Is there anything you think school or teachers could do to reinforce the values
you have learned at home?
3. Explain your experience in your English class.
a. What are your feelings about English as a subject?
i. Do you usually do well in English? Why or why not?
ii. Do you understand what is important about what you learn in English?
iii. Do you see the importance of doing the activities or assignments in your
English class?
1. What is important about them?
iv. How do you feel you have been performing so far in this class?
1. How do you know if you are doing well or poorly?
b. In your understanding, what was the purpose of the lessons I observed?
i. How do you think you did in meeting your teacher’s expectations for those
periods?
ii. Was there anything you or your teacher could have done during those lessons
that would have helped you to understand more or do better on the
assignments?
c. How did the lessons and activities I observed in these periods relate to previous things
you have done in this class?
i. Would you say you were any more or less involved in the lessons I observed
than you usually are?
ii. Was there anything specific about these lessons that were more or less
engaging for you?
iii. What would help you either become more involved in your lessons and
activities in this class or continue to be encouraged and engaged?
d. How did the lessons I observed help you in learning or doing better in the class?
i. If so, what was helpful for you specifically?
ii. If not, why do you think these lessons didn’t help you?
iii. What could you learn from your experiences with the lessons and activities in
these periods that will benefit you in your future?
4. Was there anything I missed in my line of questioning you would like to bring up on these
topics that you feel is important?
Abstract (if available)
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Asset Metadata
Creator
Hall, Trent Anthony
(author)
Core Title
A case study about the implied and perceived messages sent by one teacher through instruction for academic and behavioral expectations of students
School
Rossier School of Education
Degree
Doctor of Education
Degree Program
Education (Leadership)
Publication Date
09/25/2017
Defense Date
09/05/2017
Publisher
University of Southern California
(original),
University of Southern California. Libraries
(digital)
Tag
academic expectations,behavioral expectations,dialoguing,OAI-PMH Harvest,student compliance,student perspectives,teacher beliefs,teacher ideology
Language
English
Contributor
Electronically uploaded by the author
(provenance)
Advisor
Slayton, Julie (
committee chair
), Carbone, Paula (
committee member
), Samkian, Artineh (
committee member
)
Creator Email
trentanthonyhall@gmail.com,trentcarmenhall@verizon.net
Permanent Link (DOI)
https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c40-433966
Unique identifier
UC11264318
Identifier
etd-HallTrentA-5755.pdf (filename),usctheses-c40-433966 (legacy record id)
Legacy Identifier
etd-HallTrentA-5755.pdf
Dmrecord
433966
Document Type
Dissertation
Rights
Hall, Trent Anthony
Type
texts
Source
University of Southern California
(contributing entity),
University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses
(collection)
Access Conditions
The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the a...
Repository Name
University of Southern California Digital Library
Repository Location
USC Digital Library, University of Southern California, University Park Campus MC 2810, 3434 South Grand Avenue, 2nd Floor, Los Angeles, California 90089-2810, USA
Tags
academic expectations
behavioral expectations
dialoguing
student compliance
student perspectives
teacher beliefs
teacher ideology