A fantastic way to communicate one's expectations for an assignment is to provide an example or a template. I often use this method in my classroom and when I do, I find my students return more consistent work that aligns with my expectations. Below are two examples from two different lessons that I provided my Engineering Principles class with to utilize this method.

Including real-life examples in one's lessons helps strengthen a teacher's expectations of the students. While a teacher can list off specific requirements for a project or class, incorporating real-world examples into students' work creates the expectation that a student's work should be up to the standard of real-world practice. For example, when exploring hydraulics and gears, I used real-world examples not only to give relevance but to create life-like situations a student might encounter when pursuing a career in engineering. Once a student believes in the reality of their work, their work quality increases to a level they believe are their best. Check out more benefits of real-life examples on the Well Structured Lessons page which covers UDL and Bloom's Taxonomy. Below are two homework problems I gave my students mimicking real-world problems.

Hands-on learning goes hand-in-hand with real-world examples allowing students to physically work on relevant engineering challenges. Every lesson had a hands-on or real-world portion of it, many times comprising a majority of the lesson. While this made class extremely engaging it also further expanded my expectations of applying knowledge to real-world skills, mimicking WPI's motto of "theory and practice" Below are 3 guiding documents for our "Tower Design Project" where students got to design construct and demolish a tower using household items to learn about and apply their knowledge of material properties. I structured the project into chunks where students can send in one part at a time allowing me to give feedback along the way and guide students towards my expectations.

Also, another integral skill for setting high expectations is correcting unacceptable student behavior. All my classes were very respectful to myself and others, but I did have to correct a student when they started to joke about pronouns at the beginning of class. Along with an attendance form, I sent out a preferred pronouns survey to every one of my classes to ensure all students are being spoken to properly. This to me is essential for creating a safe learning environment as well as gaining the respect and trust of my students. During this, one of my students decided to make a joke out of the survey by putting improper words like "guy" as their pronouns. While this did not seem like much I wanted to properly address this in order to affirm the rest of the class's trust in the classroom and in dealing with situations like this. Instead of using a desist tactic I simply asked the student "Is that your preferred pronouns, I can mark you down as he/him/his if you would like?". Even though I could tell the student was making a joke by their body language, inflection and personality, I did not want anyone to think I do not take pronouns seriously. I also did not want anyone to feel nervous to make a mistake because maybe this student was not knowledgeable in this area. After getting the students correct pronouns I was very proud of myself for handling the situation in a way that strengthened our safe learning environment and ensured students could take academic, or in this case social, risks.