Psychology is a subject that helps us to know ourselves. Psychology of classroom learning is the study of teaching and learning, in a classroom. It is important for we, the teachers to know something about educational psychology. Psychology, a study that helps us to know more about one, is a foundation discipline of education. A teacher would not be properly educated without knowing some psychology of classroom learning. Educational psychology helps to provide us with a framework for our decisions when we teach. The classroom is a busy place, requiring, on average, a non-trivial decision every two minutes! Therefore, we need a conceptual framework to make that complexity more manageable, and it is the psychology of classroom learning.
In this Educational Studies Core module, I have learnt many interesting and useful things, which are, to some extent, not have a clear understanding before and are very useful during my teaching practice. Constructivist approach, which stated those teachers' role, is not to deliver knowledge but to facilitate learning is the central idea of this module, and from this idea many issues we have been discussed. Among those new ideas and interesting founding that I have gained in this course, what impressed me most is the relationship of teachers' expectations on their students and the resulted students' study motivation. This paper aims at presenting my understanding of the three topics after my study of educational psychology, with examples during my school experience.
What are teachers' expectations? In brief, teachers' expectations are a set of beliefs about how students will perform or behave in school situations. All teachers have hopes for their students. We may want all our students to display high achievement, both academically and works done outside the classroom, and have good behaviour as a student, then to be a good citizen when they grow up. However, most of us, at the same time, accept that not all of our students will attain these ideals. Consequently, our expectation for an individual student or a group of students may be quite different from the students' expectations. Ideal wishes may not be as the same as real world, and how we hope, as well as to what extent do we expect our students to go is what teachers' expectations lies. During this module, we have learnt that such expectations are formed through direct experience (such as have taught the student before), indirect experience (such as listening other teachers' comment on the student) and extrapolated experience (such as experience of dealing with a similar "type" of student before). One most interesting thing is, a group of teachers may share the same expectation towards a student, and sometimes to a group of students. Researches in 90s suggested that, two teachers (one in band 1 school and the other in a Band 5 school) will have very similar expectations of low performers in their class, despite the fact that one "low performer" is in the top 20% of his Hong Kong age group and the other may be at the bottom of the last 20%. A study in UK during the 70s also suggested a similar result. The conclusion we can draw from this is that teacher expectations towards students are determined by a consideration of the closest comparison group, i.e. the rest of the class. Such expectation is regardless of how atypical that comparison group might be in terms of the entire school population.
Teachers' expectations have a great impact on the students' life. It can influence student performance and behaviour, without doubt. It is called the teacher expectations effect. Educators suggest that if a teacher expects a good and able student to behave well or get high marks, then the student will tend to continue to behave well and work to get high marks. Positive expectations have a sustaining effect, as it sustain the student's current behaviour and achievement, and is more likely to achieve what the teacher expects. Conversely, Negative expectations can have damaging effects on students. What becomes worse is, in many cases, a large number of additional expectations may probably extended far beyond academic performance into areas that appeared to be unrelated to educational attainment. Researches also suggested that teachers expected the low performing student to be more probably disruptive, unwilling to work hard, disobedient, immature, unintelligent, and from a poor home background. The low performer was also expected to be more probably untrustworthy, disrespectful, withdrawn, unpopular, unfriendly etc.
As I haven't noticed before, once our expectations on our students are formed, they can be quite resistant to change. However, these expectations appear to be formed very easily in response to very little information regarding the student. It implied that, as an example, any low performing student actually entering a class for the first time may be subject to all these negative expectations, even before he/she has had a chance to demonstrate any of his/her more positive qualities.
Therefore, positive expectations on our students should always come first in our mind, avoiding a damaging effect on them and make things worse. During my school experience, my students are actually a class with brilliant and active boys and girls. However, sometimes they are "over-active" (NOT hyper-active!) and some teachers commented that most of them have behavioral problems, and suggested me some ways of maintaining better classroom management. In the beginning of my teaching practice, my class seemed have some symptom of having behavioral problems, and it did affected my conception of the students and my expectation on them, at that time, was not very high. (They are in Band 3) As I haven't shown high expectation on my students, their performance in the first half of my school experience was not very good. When I have a deeper contact with them, have a better understanding of my students, I found that some seemed to have "behavioral problems" are just attention seeking, and my students are really brilliant. But it still takes me time to change my conception and raise my expectation to them. Afterwards, their homework, dictation and test are done much better than before. What I have learnt are, teacher expectations are easily formed even with limited indirect information, and do have a great impact on what the students perform.
How do we usually show our expectations to our students? In the knowledge forum, home area two: Teacher expectations and self-esteem, most of our classmates choose praising as the major way to show our expectations. Praising is a powerful tool, not only to show our expectations but also to encourage participation in class discussion and activity. It will also help in building-up a student's self-esteem. However, as I have pointed out in the computer note "Praise = Expectation = Pressure?" (Please refers to appendices), praise may also have negative effect on students if too much pressure was created, even not intended by the teacher. The level, situation and wording of praising are big issue in discussing the art of praising, since it will influence students a lot. Suitable praising from teachers may, positively increased students' motivation of study.
It is interesting to that the young child is so trusting in the adults that he/she does not consider that they could be wrong or misguided. Secondary students are not young children, however they also take a reference on what and how their teachers expect them to do. Some more recent and innovative research indicates that students have clear expectations of their own, not only for their own achievement and behaviour but also for teacher behaviour, and that these expectations for teacher behaviour can have a powerful effect on student behaviour and achievement. It will definitively affect the motivation of study of the students.
Teaching would be an easy task for teachers if all students wanted to learn. But most do not, just as what our expectation lies. How to arise students' motivation to learn is one of the most difficult questions faced by many teachers. Why do people want to learn things? In everyday life, we do things because of a felt need. It is exactly the same in study. Students learn because the have the need. Unfortunately, the fact is, students may not feel that they have the need, or need for survival of learning school subjects. Then, for students to be academically motivated, they need to see that the academic activities they are required to do are "meaningful and worthwhile".
Nobody wants to do something they see as worthless, nor things they have no chance of succeeding. If we put these two common senses into education, in order to motivate our students to learn we have to help students see the value of what they are learning, and give them a reasonable expectation of success in achieving it.
There are four ways of putting value in the task, which are named extrinsic motivation (can get something that you want, or prevents you from getting something you do not want), social motivation (gain recognition from teachers), achieving motivation (gain faces when you do it better than the others) and intrinsic motivation (have a great feeling when you learn it). From my experience, the teacher can do many thinks in achieving so, for example by competition, punishment and rewards, praising, etc. However, students' will plays a more important role. As it is the students studying, if they do not see the subject of the value, they may not motivated to learn, even though we have aroused most of student in a class have the motivation to learn. One of my students during my teaching practice was an example. In his reflection to my teaching, he called himself as "a non-attentive student", and did told me that he has no interest in studying Chinese language. Students' motivation, in some senses is out of teachers' control.
Teachers should do what they can to help students expect success, and avoid conveying to students the expectation of failure. Besides teachers' expectations, students also have expectations on themselves, just as discussed above. How students see their chance of success depends to a large extent on how they see themselves. The relationship between how we feel about our performance and ourselves has clearly been established with respect to schoolwork. Therefore, students' expectations on themselves do have an important influence on their motivation of study. We as teachers may try to help them by showing positive expectation, however it is the student who matters.
Several factors were introduced in this module for maximizing academic motivation.
Such as positive associations of pleasure, praise and give student an example
of admired figures (such as "model student"), rewards for good performance,
and a right mix of familiar content (to give them a sense of success) and unfamiliar
content (to give them a sense of challenge). At the same time, equally important
is to minimize those factors that depress academic motivation. Such factors
include threats of punishment, unpleasant associations of the expectation of
failure, and setting work that is either too easy or too difficult.
To conclude, we, as teachers, should never underestimate our influence on the lives of our students. We are models to our students, what we say and what we do would have a great impact on them, both positively and negatively. After study this course, I have learnt that teachers' expectations have an important role to students' learning motivation, which is much larger than we are though. Although students' motivation to learn is not something that we can all-control in our hands, we can try our best to influence them by showing our positive expectations. We, as teachers, do play a critical role in students' lives, not only learning but also their personal growth. We should think twice before we set our goal and show our expectations on our students.
David Wong Wing Chung
January 2001
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