Teacher Expectations

I believe that teacher expectations (and learner expectations) strongly influence the learning that occurs or doesn't occur in classrooms. The influence of expectations on performance is an area unrelated to any of the research that I've done so far and it's an area I might consider for future research. Raising a student's expectations for his or her own performance may be the single greatest positive impact a teacher can have on the future of a child.

Research on Teacher Expectations

Research regarding the influence of teacher expectations on student performance cited on pp. 97-102 of Jones, V., & Jones, L. (2007). Comprehensive classroom management: Creating communities of support and solving problems, eighth edition. Boston: Pearson Allyn & Bacon:

• Reyes, P., Scribner, J., & Scribner, A. (Eds.). (1999). Lessons from high-performing Hispanic schools: Creating learning communities. New York: Teachers College Press.
• Weinstein, R., Gregory, A., & Strambler, M. (2004). Intractable self-fulfilling prophecies: Brown v Board of Education. American Psychologist, 59, 511-520.
• Pianta, R., Howes, C., Burchinal, M., Bryant, D., Clifford, R., Early, D., & Barbarin, O. (2004). Features of pre-kindergarten programs, classrooms, and teachers: Do they predict observed classroom quality and child-teacher interaction? Manuscript submitted for publication.
• Noguera, P. (2003). Schools, prisons, and social implications of punishment: Rethinking disciplinary practices. Theory into Practice, 42, 341-350.
• Frericks, A. (1974, March). Labeling of students by prospective teachers. Paper presented at the American Educational Research Association Convention, Chicago. [According to Jones & Jones, Frericks found that teachers viewing a group of students that they were told was low performing described their behaviors more negatively than when they were told they were "regular" students.]
• Spencer-Hall, D. (1981). Looking behind the teacher's back. Elementary School Journal, 81, 281-289.
• Sadker, D., & Sadker, M. (1985). Is the o.k. classroom o.k.? Phi Delta Kappan, 66, 358-361. [Teachers treating boys and girls differently.]
• Kahle, J. (1990). Why girls don't know. In M. Rowe (Ed.), What research says to the science teacher: The process of knowing. Washington, DC: National Science Testing Association.
• Lee, V. (1991, August). Sexism in single-sex and co-educational secondary school classrooms. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association, Cincinnati, OH.
• American Association of University Women Educational Foundation. (1992). The AAUW report: How schools shortchange girls. Washington, DC: National Education Association.
• Cooper, H., & Good, T. (1983). Pygmalion grows up. New York: Longman. [Ways teachers treat low achievers differently]
• Brophy, J. (1983). Research on the self-fulfilling prophecy and teacher expectations. Journal of Educational Psychology, 75, 631-661.

And from page 100 of the Jones & Jones text (quoted from Educational Psychology by Anita Woolfolk:

Guidelines for Avoiding the Negative Effects of Teacher Expectations

• Use information from tests, cumulative folders, and other teachers very carefully.
• Be flexible in your use of grouping strategies.
• Make sure all the students are challenged.
• Be especially careful about how you respond to low-achieving students during class discussions.
• Use materials that show a wide range of ethnic groups.
• Be fair in evaluation and disciplinary procedures.
• Communicate to all students that you believe they can learn - and mean it.
• Involve all students in learning tasks and in privileges.
• Monitor your nonverbal behavior.

Other Avenues to Pursue

Although I've held strong beliefs about expectation for a long time, it was a recent episode of Radio Lab that brought these thoughts to the fore. Below are some references for items from the episode.

The NYTimes reported on a study showing an increase in test scores of African Americans after the arrival of Obama on the national scene. Here's the current reference for their study: Marx, D. M., Ko, S. J., & Friedman, R. A. (in press). The Obama effect: How a salient role model reduces race-based performance differences. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology.

Claude Steele was interviewed about his research on the same episode of Radio Lab. He has looked at the effects of expectation on the performance of African Americans and on the performance of women in testing situations. His work is listed here. Here's a recent reference to his work:
Aronson, J. & Steele, C. M. Stereotypes and the fragility of academic competence, motivation, and self-concept, (chapter to appear in A. Elliot & C. Dweck (Eds.) The Handbook of Competence.

I'd like to do some work in these areas, or at the very least, keep up with what these researchers are doing.

Narrowing the focus

I like the direction that I'm seeing in Kamberelis 1999 and Wollman-Bonilla 2000 with regards to learning to write genre-specific texts to gain access to discourses of power. I'm interested in extending that thinking to video production.

For this lit review, I may turn my focus more toward this. Maybe my question should be limited to the relationship between genre in children's literature and genre within writing instruction. I'd like to relate it to genre in film, but that may be too ambitious for this semester.

I think for the outline that is due next week, I will try this narrower focus and then see how the semester progresses. This may end up being part of a lit review for another paper.

Okay... one more thing: The Wollman-Bonilla 2000 article relates to the Radio Lab episodes "Tell Me A Story" from 7/29/08 and "Making the Hippo Dance" from 9/9/08. In Wollman-Bonilla, they are teaching kids to approximate scientific discourse (objective tone, present tense verbs, precise language). In Radio Lab, they are talking to scientists about the need to make science accessible to the general public by making it more personal, less cold and removed, more subjective, more story-like. In both cases, the authors are advocating the importance of code-switching. Scientists need to able to relate stories to non-scientists. Non-scientists need to be able to adopt a scientific tone to gain access to science.

Still, Wollman-Bonilla is talking about adopting more than just the trappings of the genre; she talks about the inter-related nature of scientific writing and scientific thinking. Radio Lab isn't advocating an abandonment of orderly, systematic, scientific thinking; they are talking about relating scientific knowledge to non-scientists.

Complexity

On a recent mini-episode of Radio Lab, Robert Krulwich presented a recent speech at Cal-tech. He implored the audience of future scientists to talk about science to the non-scientists in their lives. He told the story of Newton who published his most important work in the most dense, academic language possible. Newton, according to Krulwich, did this intentionally to eliminate the need to talk to non-scientists about his work. He didn't want to be bothered by questions from people who weren't working on his level. Krulwich contrasts this approach with that of Galileo, who certainly could have chosen to publish his work showing that the sun, rather than the Earth, was at the center of the solar system in scholarly Latin. Instead Galileo chose to put his ideas in a story about friends on a vacation, discussing theories. And he wrote it in Italian so that everyone could understand what he was saying. He wanted to reach a wide audience. He succeeded, and, of course, was placed under house arrest and called a heretic for his ideas.

So the other day, I read a piece by Patti Lather and I found it very difficult to comprehend. On the second reading, I started to get it and then got the feeling that after a few more readings and more work, it would start to become more clear to me. This work is full of dense terminology with complex meanings that have to be painstakingly unpacked before beginning to make sense. For Lather, the payoff is there. When I put in the work, I got a lot out of it. My colleagues are all big fans of Lather, and J explained that Lather uses that language to limit her audience. "If you want to understand what I have to say, you're going to have to work for it", she seems to be saying.

Lather is being like Newton and I think that this question of representation must be a common, if not universal, one for scholars. Do I want to be understood by the masses? Or by the elite few who have the intellect or the patience?

It's a question of accessibility. The question exists for artists too and I wonder if it is the same question. Sondheim, for instance, is difficult at first. He's not going for "easy" and he's not going for "common". But I love Sondheim's work and it's not because his work is difficult. Once you get your brain around it, there is beauty in the complexity of his use of language and music. I don't think his motivation is like Newton's. Or maybe it is. Maybe Krulwich is selling Newton short. Maybe Newton wasn't willing to compromise his vision to make it more easily comprehensible. Saying something using different words is saying something different.

This also reminds me of a classic Radio Lab episode that included a story about the public reaction to Stravinsky's Rite of Spring. When it was first performed, the music was so difficult, radical, so unlike anything that had come before that there was a literal riot at its debut. One year later, it was met with accolades, and within a few decades it was so non-radical that it was included in the score of Disney's Fantasia. In that episode, Jad and Robert explain that our brains are incredibly good at finding patterns and that music is all about patterns. Given this, something that initially sounds shocking will always eventually sound normal. Look at the initial establishment reaction to jazz, to rock, to punk, to metal, to anything. Initially, people get upset, but eventually our brains tame the material and we "get" it.

Is the same true with non-musical ideas? If I read Einstein enough, will my brain work it out? If so, maybe we just don't spend enough time dwelling on scientific concepts for our brains to work them out.

I don't know, but I'd love to ask a scientist and a composer to have a conversation about it.