Check out our list of tips on how teachers can be clear about objectives and expectations.

If you are a high school educator, consider writing a syllabus for your class. Include learner objectives, assignments, a calendar, and other pertinent info. This general plan will help you plan the course and help learners understand what is expected of them. This will give them a peek at what to expect in college.

Provide clear expectations for homework assignments. Disseminate the purpose of the homework, why it is important, and what you hope the learner will learn from it. Tell the learner and the parents if you believe a learner needs additional practice. Communicate exactly how much time you think it should take to complete each assignment.

Place the class’s content area standards and benchmarks on a large, laminated poster. Consult the standards and benchmarks when you are teaching. Learners need to understand what standards they need to achieve in each class.

Disseminate daily lesson and unit objectives and write them on the board daily. Learners need to see and hear what is being expected. Objectives are their road map to learning. Following the unit, refer back to the objectives and ask learners if the objectives were met. Ask them to support their answers by providing their reasoning.

Instruct learners to take notes. Students will try to record what that they hear. Give them tactics that will help them to find the most important things.

Instruct learners how to set goals. Long-range objectives can be set for the school year. Short-term objectives can be set for each unit. Take the time to look at where the learners perceive themselves to meet the goals.

Instruct learners on how to summarize the info. They need to know how to efficiently restate info in their own words. Learners will copy a passage word for word and call it summarizing. Show learners how to highlight the major points of a passage.

Ask learners to make predictions about what will happen next in a passage, in an experiment, or in a video clip. You will test learners’ assumptions about what they are reading.

Once learning vocabulary words, find learner-friendly definitions. Ask learners to draw a visual interpretation of the word and make up a story that will help them remember it.