Claire Brooks - Ask yourself: “Will all children be challenged by this…?” (Chris Parsons)
All teachers like to say they have high expectations of their students, but what does this really mean? There is a plethora of blogs, tweets, videos and educational research aiming to summarise and evaluate various theories about why high expectations are so crucial and how we might, in practice, ‘raise’ these ‘expectations’ and provide challenging work for students. Although most teachers (and those inspecting them) agree with this concept, there have always been debates as to what ‘high expectations’ look like in practice and what effect they have on students. These range from conflicting ideas about Rosenthal and Jacobson’s 1968 ‘Pygmalion in the Classroom’ study to the accepted thought now that all students should have the same learning objective with appropriate scaffolding to achieve it. There are many published ideas about how this scaffolding should look and what it should be called, but in effect, it provides “steps to succeed mapped out… with guided practice leading to independent practice and students reaching ambitious goals over time.( Sherrington 2019 Rescuing Differentiation from the Checklist of Bad Practice.)
Then there is the question of ‘challenge’. A child learns best when challenged just outside his comfort zone” (Tharby 2017 Making every English lesson count) but there’s a fine line between challenging children in this way, so they are willing to try to achieve a difficult learning objective, and presenting them with a learning experience that causes either anxiety or demotivation because they just don’t ‘get it’. Finally, there is that seemingly insignificant word at the end of my title: ‘all’. How do you challenge every child when there are a variety of needs, backgrounds and abilities? Sherrington, in his article: Rescuing Differentiation from the Checklist of Bad Practice (2019), states “previous attainment, experience, competence, knowledge, skills and confidence” all affect a child’s ability to learn. The aim of this literature review is to evaluate methods of challenging all students to enhance the learning experience of students in my classes. High Expectations Expectations are subjective, but at the very least we should expect students to bring equipment, engage in the lesson and try to meet the learning objective. Equally, students should have high expectations of teachers, to plan, teach challenging texts and concepts, give feedback, act professionally and show that we care. But what do researchers say about the impact of teachers’ expectations? In 1968, Rosenthal and Jacobson’s Pygmalion in the Classroom study found that randomly selected students were “more likely to make larger gains in their academic performance over the course of the year” when teachers had high expectations of them. (Guardian Education : what research tells us Nov 2017 by Bradley Busch.
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