How to have High Expectations for Students

As teachers, we all know that having high expectations for our students is important. But what does that actually look like?

Listen to the full episode to learn what high expectations are and how to use them.

I’m going to call this series “How to Set Up your Math Classroom” and go cheeky with it. The three things you need to set up your math classroom are high expectations, consistency, and relationships.

In this post, I’m going to talk about what high expectations are, and how to effectively use them in setting up your math classroom. Let’s get started.

Research on High Expectations

Back in 1968, two researchers Robert Rosenthal and Lenore Jacobson conducted an experiment with an elementary school. In this experiment, each of the students were given an IQ or intelligence test.

With the results, they gave the teachers of the elementary school the names of the students who scored in the top 20%. And with this, they told the teachers that these students were going to be the best or highest achieving within the classes.

But unbeknownst to the teachers, these students were just selected at random, it had nothing to do with their actual test scores, there was no prediction.

At the end of the school year, these students were tested again. The ones that were “gifted” or the ones that were chosen randomly, actually performed significantly better than the rest of the students.

This idea where high expectations lead to improved performance is called the Pygmalion Effect or the Rosenthal Effect.

What High Expectations Look Like

Having high expectations for students is more than putting up growth mindset posters and tacking on “yet” to the end our sentences. Growth mindset can be a grueling process of rewiring our brains to be able to have new paths of thinking.