How a teacher's expectation can make or break a student

How a teacher's expectation can make or break a student | @healthbiztips
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Why coaches and teachers should be mindful of their expectations to be able to train students better?

@healtbiztips by Arlene Gentallan | Psychology blog

Expectations--how a teacher's assumptions can have a bearing as to how good their students can be. A lot of people can imagine that a professor's job is just to teach students and at the end of the day, it's ultimately up to the student on how well they can perform. But, the famous Rosenthal effect (aka. pygmalion effect) proves otherwise.

Studies by Rosenthal reveals that there are subconscious actions teachers does depending on their presumptions. The experiments were conducted in rats and school children, and both came to the same conclusion.

Rosenthal tasked trainers to teach rats to solve a maze, however, while the first sets of trainers received rats labelled as "smart", the second group got "dumb" rats. Unknowns to them, such label was only made up, however, by the end of the experiment, the "smart" rats did end up with better performance than their counterpart despite having the same intelligence. How come? Turns out, based on their expectation of the rat's capability, trainers handled and trained their rats differently.

Same goes with school children, when Rosenthal's team conducted an IQ test on school children, and told teacher's the top 20% of the class who have the highest IQ, consequently, they were taught and managed differently than the others and ended up being top performers of the class. Ironically, those list of the top 20% students who supposedly performed best during the initial IQ exam was in fact just a random list of students.

It's quite alarming how a teacher's way of teaching can change profoundly just based on how they perceived students.

Somehow, it isn't really hard to imagine, how a coach or a teacher's inner view of their pupils can in turn have a psychological effect on them and affect the way they interact and teach. However, it's quite alarming that, without consciously taking this into account, teachers way of teaching can, in turn, be profoundly swayed by such preconception. If you think about it, this can go a long way, possibly even leading to a pupil's failure just as much as it can lead to their success.