Teacher Expectations and Student Achievement (TESA): Feedback

Teacher Expectations and Student Achievement emphasizes that teachers are often unaware of how they interact with students, particularly low income and minorities.

Strand B (Feedback) includes these categories. You can have a team of teachers observe you on the presence of these or you can audio/video tape yourself and then do an analysis.

Affirm/Correct– Do you tell all students equally if they are correct when they answer a question or make a comment?

Praise – Do you praise all students equally if they are correct when they answer a question or make a comment?

Reason for Praise – Do you tell all students equally the standards-based reason that they are correct when they answer a question or make a comment?

Listening – Do you listen attentively to all students equally as they talk to you?

Accepting Feelings – Do you acknowledge the feelings equally to all students?

So how do you apply these in your classroom? How do you use technology to help you? How do you use technology to monitor you increase in these?

© Harry Grover Tuttle, 2007

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Teacher Expectations and Student Achievement (TESA): Giving Student Response Opportunities

TESA has been around since 1973. Many school have it as a key professional development tool since it is classroom based. Its research base states that teachers expect less of certain students (low income and minority), treat them differently in class and therefore those students achieve less.

In TESA other teachers observe you for certain teaching traits that center around equity.

You can do your own self-assessing (or you can audio/video tape yourself):

Under Response Opportunities (Strand A):

Latency – Do you wait five seconds after asking each question and before calling on any student? Do you use wait time for all students equally?

Equitable Distribution – Do you call on all students equally?

Individual Help – Do you provide help to all students equally?

Paraphrasing/Prompting – Do you paraphrase and prompt the question to help student get the correct answer equally?

Higher Level Questions- Do you ask higher level questions equally to all students?

You could create a spreadsheet of the number of times you positively do each of the above in your class and then try to increase the number each week. If you increased by 20% each week, you would soon have high scores in each area. Graph your results and be proud of your students’ increased learning because of your new high expectations for every student.

If you have had experience with TESA, please share them.

© Harry Grover Tuttle, 2007

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