Making expectations explicit is actually pretty difficult (but that’s OK!)

Another post reconsidering common teaching advice

I have been working with some colleagues to conduct a literature review of what are considered the pedagogical “best practices” for supporting neurodivergent students in higher education. One recommendation that is found in many areas of the literature is to make expectations explicit. The links are just a small sample of what I have seen, to demonstrate that this is indeed a common piece of advice. If you are someone who has been plugged into the pedagogical research and or educational development worlds for a while, you might hear the phrase “make expectations explicit” and think of the Transparency in Learning and Teaching (TILT) framework. I knew of and used the TILT framework before I started working seriously with neurodiversity in teaching, in part because the theory and research base of the framework suggested that it benefited first-generation students. I am not a first-generation student, but I struggled quite a bit with understanding the expectations of my instructors throughout my undergraduate and graduate programs. Even though lack of clarity about expectations and goals may disproportionately affect certain groups of students (perhaps neurodivergent, first-generation, or international students to name a few), I imagine many people have their own “Amelia Bedelia” story in higher education - I recall a student who brought athletic clothing and sneakers in a bag to class because the class was described as taking place in an “active learning classroom.”

Ever the one to intensively analyze children’s books, I was always very annoyed by the fact that the “joke” in each story is that Amelia messes up the instructions for each new occupation she tries (office clerk, teacher, babysitter) even though she has never done those jobs before. Success at any job relies on specialized knowledge, likely developed over time. While brushing up on my Amelia Bedelia knowledge, I discovered a widespread “fan theory” that Amelia Bedelia is autistic or neurodivergent (see here and search reddit for more discussion of this), presumably based on the idea that autistic people tend to interpret information in a literal way. I think there is even a deeper lesson in these stories about how people think and communicate: Some of the misunderstandings between Amelia Bedelia and e.g. her boss Mrs. Rodgers, may not have been possible to avoid even with maximum effort in making expectations explicit. In one instance, Mrs. Rodgers asks Amelia to “remove some spots” from a dress, by which she means use a stain-removing cleaning product, but which Amelia interprets as an instruction to cut the spots out of the dress with scissors. It took me a couple of minutes to break down this particular misunderstanding and specify in words how each character was interpreting the directions, a process which is much easier after the misunderstanding has played out. In short, misunderstandings of expectations are hard to identify before they have played out, and people don’t always accurately predict how others will interpret what they say.

So, I have been pondering the advice to “make expectations explicit” in the classroom, and I have come to the conclusion that “making your expectations explicit” seems like a very easy thing to do, but is much more difficult in reality. There are two additional reasons for this I’d like to mention, in addition to the ones I have detailed above.

People vary quite a bit in how they think and receive and process information

Much of the frustration I experience in teaching, and in life more generally, is the frustration of having painstakingly written out or otherwise communicated instructions, as clearly as I can, and having a student, fellow community member, or even my 2-year-old (!), interpret them differently or tell me that I have not been clear. I have written before about the way I extend both the neurodiversity paradigm and the double empathy problem to teaching - basically that we can accept and embrace different ways of communicating and thinking while also acknowledging that developing mutual understanding between people can be quite challenging. No one has done anything “wrong” when one person feels they have made their expectations explicit and another person simply…doesn’t understand them. In a teaching context, it is a great idea to put significant effort into clarifying expectations, but nothing has gone wrong when students have additional follow up questions, and these should definitely be encouraged. I don’t deny that this can feel really difficult when you have put in so much effort to be as clear as possible. I think this is one of the hard frictions of teaching.

Students’ understanding of your stated expectations may be impacted by more than what goes on in your individual classroom

A few weeks ago, I was corresponding with one of my students about the expectations for a discussion board assignment. I had (clearly, from my perspective) indicated that I didn’t expect them to use a formal, “research paper”-style tone for the posts, but that they should use APA reference formatting if they cited any sources. I reminded the student of this in my feedback on a post, and they responded that they had assumed that style was necessary because one of their other instructors had encouraged it. The college in question does have a number of policies to standardize certain elements of the student academic experience (common syllabus templates, course shells, weekly course rhythms, etc.) so this wasn’t an unreasonable inference. In this situation, I hadn’t failed to communicate my expectations, it was just that my student’s perception of my expectations was affected by other information aside from the instructions I myself gave. In a Zoom class session for the same course, students took a certain action to mark themselves “present” for the class, despite me never asking them to do so. Again, it was a requirement of another professor that they assumed I shared (but that I was totally unaware of).

In keeping with many of my other reflections on teaching advice throughout past posts on this newsletter, I would like to propose that making expectations explicit should probably be seen as a process and dialogue between instructors and students, rather than a one-time practice or statement at the top of an assignment sheet. I think it would be good to orient our discussion of “making expectations explicit” toward “developing understanding of expectations.” This may require some level of tolerance for error and misunderstanding, a natural feature of human communication that we can never head off completely. Perhaps readers have always interpreted the idea of “making expectations explicit” in the way I suggest, and it is I who has misunderstood (humor!). But this framing has certainly helped me avoid feeling like I have failed when developing understanding of expectations takes some work.

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Photo by Adam Birkett on Unsplash