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Showing posts from November, 2019

Positive expectations get positive results

How often do people meet our expectations of them, or is it true that we often fall short of them? So if our expectations are high and people fall just short then they’ve done well, but what if our expectations are low without knowing and people live up to this? Now put yourself in the shoes of a student who had a bad first year at your school, has built a negative reputation for themselves and is spoken of negatively in the staffroom “you have **insert name here** in your class, good luck with that!” What expectations do we have of them, their work and their behaviours? Do we walk into that classroom to teach ‘that bottom set’, or past them in the corridor expecting them to behave in a specific way and thus only see that from them, missing out all the positives they do? What I’m eluding to here is the Golem effect, a self-fulfilling prophecy where negative attitudes towards a student's ability, potential or behaviour inevitably leads to those outcomes coming true. > A st