This video was shown during our first department meeting of the school year. It’s only three minutes long - please watch it before reading further, or little of this will make sense.
I’m glad it took me two weeks to get around to writing this. When I first watched the video, I’ll admit, I was annoyed. However, given some time, I think there is some value, particularly in regards to the broader claim.
I’ll give the bad and then I’ll give the good. What was it about the video that irked me so much?
The claim that a teacher’s expectations of students can raise their IQ is snake oil. For one, if we could find anything that measurably raised IQ, it would be worthy of a Nobel Prize. We don’t know how to raise IQ. It probably can’t be done. Second, it is almost impossible to measure teacher effects on student standardized test scores. The claim is that the researcher measured the effects of the teacher’s subjective feelings towards their students. So you mean to tell me, we were able to isolate the teacher’s expectation (apart from all of the other aspects of the teacher) and then were able to measure that feeling against IQ tests? This is pseudo science, and it’s frustrating how quickly teachers and administrators are willing to accept it as true.
But then I says to myself: Huskie. Stop being such a fucking nerd. What is it that’s so bad about high expectations?
And I have to admit, I don’t have a good answer. Sure, I don’t think the people who replaced Romeo and Juliet with excerpts of The Poet X are on solid ground to discuss high expectations in the classroom. And sure, the answer to the best question in the video (How far does this go? I.e. we can’t expect students to jump out of the window and fly) is a bunch of woo-woo hippy dippy bullshit (we never know, the line is moving, expectations are, like, everywhere man).
However.
What would the inverse look like? Absolutely no expectations? Obviously that’s not the answer.
And here I want to give a special shout-out to my 5th grade teacher, Ms. Scott. She would likely not be welcomed in today’s world. She was highly suspicious of the Japanese. She often didn’t let us go to lunch so we could drill our times tables. She threw chalkboard erasers at kids whose heads were down. And she disappeared for an hour at a time to chain smoke cigarettes in the boiler room (she had several toes amputated the following year, as a result of her smoking, and I assume heavy drinking).
That said. I had never before or since had a teacher with such high expectations. Much of that was fueled by the fear that, as I mentioned, the Japanese were going to take their revenge, except this time instead of beating us militarily with kamakazis they were going to beat us economically with standardized math scores. Regardless of the motivation. There is absolutely no doubt in my mind that I learned more in 5th grade than any other grade k-12.
High expectations certainly get the most out of us. There is such a thing as having too high an expectation for a person. It’s almost certainly the case that low expectations are the larger concern; we are “leaving some gains on the table”, so to speak. I do wish we go about this more intelligently, but that said, I can’t hate too much on the message: teachers, have high expectations for your students.
Photo by Chris Liverani on Unsplash