NQT Special: What do high expectations actually look like?

‘When people say you’re dumb, you feel dumb, you act dumb... but when you’re on top and you’re told you can do no wrong, you can’t. You have the classroom in the palm of your hand, and you go.” A student recounting his experiences of Jane Elliott’s classroom (as made famous by the blue-eyed/brown-eyed experiment).

One trait more than any other holds the key to being a successful NQT: having high expectations of your students. Let me explain...

Robert Rosenthal and Lenore Jacobson conducted research in the 1960s which showed that when teachers expected an enhanced performance from their students, their students’ performance was indeed enhanced. Their study supported the hypothesis – known as the Pygmalion Effect and named after a sculptor from Greek mythology who fell in love with one of his statues (Galatea) – that reality can be positively or negatively influenced by other people’s expectations. In other words, the higher the expectations you have of somebody, the better they perform.