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When psychologist, Robert Rosenthal, and a principal, Lenore Jacobson, undertook a study, they changed the way some schools looked at ‘teacher expectations’. At the start of the year, they told a group of teachers at Jacobson’s test school that some of their students had been identified as having the potential to become high achievers and would do well over the year.
These students were chosen at random and it was found that, at the end of year, they had made more progress than the control group.
This led to the Pygmalion Effect where it’s thought that higher expectations lead to increased performance.
Using this research as inspiration, we’ve put together some essential tips to help you raise your expectations and to try to fulfil their true potential.
1. Set Achievable Goals
If you set challenging but realistic goals for your students, you can help them to achieve more because it will encourage them to be challenged. Sometimes, setting unattainable goals may result in stress and it might not help your students to fulfil their true potential.
2. Show Everyone Your High Expectations
To make sure you’re getting everyone behind your raised expectations so they achieve, make sure you’re giving every student fair treatment. Raise expectations for everyone and expect every student to achieve to their best. By telling them your expectations clearly and giving them feedback after tasks, students will always know what they have to do to meet them and progress. In fact, that’s one of the benefits of SuccessTracker – so you can stay on top of students’ progress easily.
3. Adopt a Growth Mindset
By showing your students that everyone can grow and we can all better ourselves by having a ‘can do’ attitude in the classroom, this will help develop a mindset where students are continuously trying to improve. This will trigger confidence and help to develop a growth mindset.
Students with growth mindsets, compared to fixed mindsets, can progress and see that it’s fine to make mistakes and learn from them. It shows that if the work has been put in, every student can do better over time.
4. Involve Parents
By involving parents in their child’s education and encouraging them to help their child succeed and have high expectations, parents can be big influencers on progress. In fact, for parents who need a quick resource to help, EducationCity’s Home Access is fantastic. Parents can not only get involved with their child’s day-to-day education, but if they’re stuck on a concept that they’re learning, they just need to watch a Learn Screen, and they’ll be able to gain the understanding to help.