Teachers form their expectations for students in various ways including past academic performance, race, socioeconomic status (SES), and gender. These expectations manifest themselves in the classroom through the classroom culture and climate, instruction, activities, teacher feedback, and teacher-student relationships. Students feed off these experiences and develop an understanding of themselves as learners and human beings. Also, instruction and activities help shape their self-concepts as well as their content understanding. Teachers with low expectations tend to present students with classrooms that are uninviting, lack challenge and rigor, have ability groups, lack feedback, and fail to promote critical thinking. These experiences stunt a student's academic growth and socio-emotional well-being. On the other hand, teachers with higher expectations tend to produce better results. These teachers invite student choice and voice, promote leadership within their classrooms, have activities that are challenging and rigorous, use heterogeneous and collaborative grouping, and are warm and inviting. Students thrive in these settings and are more likely to have higher achievement levels. Through a qualitative study, conducted among six highly effective secondary mathematics teachers in Louisiana, it was revealed that teachers express their expectations to students through communication, instructional decisions, and the ways in which they cultivate their classroom environment and climate. Characteristics that are aligned with prior research about high expectancy was revealed including being positive, offering praise, using incentives, forming relationships, creating mixed ability student groups, modeling, and establishing norms. Strong relationships with students were also necessary to make the appropriate instructional decisions based on student needs and interest, which have positive impacts on students' growth and achievement. Much of the teachers' knowledge was not formulated during professional development opportunities, rather this was done during collaboration time with other educators where teachers learned new strategies and methods, made appropriate adjustments to their lessons, or learned strategies specific to students' exceptionalities. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://bibliotheek.ehb.be:2222/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]