We, undoubtedly, want the best for all our students and in order to enable them to work to their best we need to have ‘high expectations’ of them.
Robert Rosenthal has explored the effects of teacher expectations on students’ learning over the past five decades under the title: ‘The Pygmalion Effect’ or sometimes ‘The Rosenthal Effect’. A short overview of his work can be seen in this short video here:
OK, this is fine, but it got me thinking… on a day to day, lesson to lesson basis, how do I actually communicate my expectations?
I was particularly interested in exploring how my expectations are understood through ‘feedback’ under what Rosenthal describes as the ‘feedback factor’. Was I guilty of accepting lower quality responses because of my perceived understanding of one’s ability? Was my feedback differentiated based upon who had constructed the set ‘work’? How do I establish what my expectations are of the tasks/work/activities set. In order to explore this I needed to consider a specific case study.
Modelling ‘high expectations’
Within Media Studies students are required to produce a piece of ‘real’ media that can be disseminated and marketed to a ‘real’ audience. In our case we task them to construct a music video. At a very early stage in the process (the research and planning phases) we choose to use professionally produced music videos as the source for our analysis and deconstruction. We ‘break them down’ considering their conventions and how they have technically been shot and edited. One such example of a music video that was analysed this academic year can be seen below:
I believe this approach to research and planning works: looking at ‘professional work’ within the subject provides us with a real world reference point. And, given the technology available to the class is of similar capacity to a working professional (DSLR cameras, Apple Macs with professional level editing software), highlighting ‘professional work’ establishes an aspirational goal of what we ‘can’ achieve. Consequently we have:
a ) established extremely high expectations and…
b ) created a reference/comparison point (the ‘professional work’) onto which constructive ‘feedback’ can be provided without the need to overly critique the students’ work or learning.
The creative journey the learners then embark upon means:
- they make mistakes (lots)
- have to embark on a learning ‘journey’
- they have to continually reflect and refine
- they, consequently, develop a degree of reliance
- they continually have to problem solve.
It is fair to say that the modelling of ‘high expectations’ (by providing a professional level piece of work as the stimulus and reference point) breaks down the learners’ self-perceived level of ability and heightens their own expectations about what they can produce. This expectation is often further heightened by exploring previous cohorts work on the same brief (examples can be seen on the Media Studies Department’s YouTube channel at: http://www.youtube.com/newlandsmedia).
A music video produced by Sapir Tal and Sophie Madden (2014).
Reflecting on this approach has provoked myself to ask questions of how I establish and model the expectations I have of learners across the year groups and subject(s) that I teach. This will be a focus for a further blog post… once I’ve done some research and some thinking!
Newlands Girls' School 