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Creating High Performance Learning Environments


I believe this teacher holds very high academic performance expectations for her students. She uses a strategy called chiming where one person is chosen as the representative from each group. This shows me that she has high expectations of every single students and expects that any one of them could be the chimer. Other ways I have noticed that she has high expectations are giving each student their own job, putting many constraints on the project, and requiring them to use a lot of detail and proper vocabulary when describing their project. In general, she is challenging each student to improve and be successful by setting her expectations very high, and giving them above and beyond the amount of tools needed to do so.
I think behavior expectations are also very high in her class. Students have an expectation for daily participation and must be an active group member. Students in the class are responsible for acting as an engineer which puts them in different mindset and puts a higher expectation on their behavior as an engineer. 
The norms and procedures that support high student performance are setting clear expectations for being tardy and having missing work, prohibiting electronic devices in class, and a high responsibility bathroom policy. This sets high expectations for each student to be on time, present and extremely responsible. When they come to class, they are engineers which is the overarching goal. Engineers are responsible for their actions and are focused on their goal at hand.


I think the teacher holds high academic expectations in her class. Each student is expected to participate and understand the math facts she is going over and she seems to be switching between different concepts very quickly. She also expects to be able to call on any student to get an answer. The video is short but by the way she engages with her students sets a high academic expectation.
You can tell that behavior standards are very high in this class. Students are expected to be participation and the theater uses a lot of call and response attention getters. At one point, the students are even required to put their hands behind their back, which demonstrates her high behavioral expectations for them to pay attention and keep their hand to themselves, which seems normal for her class.
It is difficult to gauge what the classroom norms and procedures are from the video. It is clear that students are expected to participate, pay attention, raise their hand, and keep their hands to themselves. All of these things would support a high performance environment. 


I was a little confused by this video, but I think I understand what it was aiming for. I believe this teacher holds high academic expectations of her students by using many different teaching strategies, such as call and response and adding in physical memorization tools using hand motions. However, I think I was a little put off because the students didn’t seem to be challenged by the material and the strategies she was using I think would work best for elementary and early middle school. I believe that the teacher in this video does hold high expectations of her students behavior by implementing certain norms and procedures in her class. She holds the expectation that students follow the rules and stay on task, show up on time to class, and treat each other with respect and dignity. These norms and procedures facilitate high student behavioral performance.

Summary

I really enjoyed reflecting on creating a high performance learning environment. At PE, using strategies like chiming would be really great to set the expectation bar higher for my students. We do so much of our class in teams and I think it would really benefit my students to be more focused on concepts and engaging in our lessons. We don’t have a lot of time in each of my classes, so it is important to maximize what we get out of each lesson. I also hold very high expectations of my students in terms of behavior. I require my students freeze with their hands on their knees and equipment at their feet to be sure I have their full attention, similar to the teacher in the Chinese Math Video requiring hands behind your back. I work primarily with elementary students at PE, so setting clear norms and procedures makes our class run much more smoothly. I like that the teacher in the Whole Brain Teaching video had clear rules and included treating others with respect. In my class, safety is the gateway to fun, so I also make sure to go over the rules often and what they should look and feel like.


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