Teacher Expectation Effects

In diverse classrooms, ensuring success of all students is possible by having high expectations for students. Teacher expectations are defined as inferences that teachers make about the future behaviors and academic achievement about their students, based on what they know about these student now (Good & Weinstein, 1986). Educational researchers have been concerned with the possibility that teachers communicate different performance expectations for students they believe to have low versus high achievement potential. In planning for and interacting with entire classes, small groups, and individuals, teachers are guided by their beliefs about what students need and by their expectations about how students will respond if treated in particular ways (Good, 1987).

The literature identifies two types of teacher expectation effects: self-fulfilling prophecy effect and sustaining expectation effect. Self-fulfilling prophecy refers to a process in which an originally erroneous expectation leads to behavior that causes the expectation to become true. In the sustaining expectation effect, the teacher expects students to sustain previously developed behavior patterns, to the point that teachers can take these behavior patterns for granted and failed to see and capitalize changes in student potential (Good & Brophy, 2000).

Brophy and Good's (2000) model is a well known model developed to describe the process of the self-fulfilling prophecy. The following steps show how this process works.

"1. Early in the year, the teacher forms differential expectations for student behavior and achievement.

2. Consistent with these differential expectations, the teacher behaves differently toward different students.

3. This treatment tells students something about how they are expected to behave in the classroom and perform on academic tasks.

4. If the teacher's treatment is consistent over time, and if the students do not actively resist or change it, it will likely affect their self-concepts, achievement motivation, levels of aspiration, classroom conduct, and interaction with the teacher.

5. These effects generally will complement and reinforce the expectations, so that students will come to conform to these expectations more than they might have otherwise.

6. Ultimately, this will affect student achievement and other outcome measures.
High-expectation students will be led to achieve at or near their potential, but low expectations
students will not gain as much as they could have gained if taught
differently" (p.79).

The effects of a self-fulfilling prophecy are more powerful than sustaining expectation effects because they introduce significant change in student behavior instead of merely minimizing such change by sustaining established patterns. Studies show that teachers' expectations are often an accurate assessment of student ability. Hence, teachers' expectations for student behavior are not necessarily inappropriate. The problem of low teacher expectations is not a matter of the simple identification or labeling of students (i.e., recognition that one student is relatively less able than another) but rather of inappropriate knowledge of how to respond to students who have difficulty
learning (Good, 1987).

Source: Good, T. & Brophy, J. (2008). Looking in classrooms (8th ed.). New York: Longman