Teacher Expectations example essay topic

... our pleasure? One major problem with much of the work is that it tends to suggest there is ONE 'dominant' or 'centred' or 'preferred' reading of the film, the one uncovered by the analyst using various combinations of personal insight and various theoretical or political commitments. But will all viewers see the same meanings? Will 'ordinary' viewers be influenced as much by the dominant meanings as the critics usually infer? Will films deemed sexist or patriarchal (or liberating) by critics actually affect viewers and make them (more) sexist or patriarchal or liberated? Media studies these days has its doubts.

We have discovered the 'active viewer', who is quite capable of detecting and resisting sinister ideological meanings in films or TV programmes, just as they resist, for some researchers, the sexist assumptions of the school (see below). Women viewers view Dallas ironically, for example, knowing it has ultra-conventional depictions of women, but not for one moment taking these depictions seriously (according to Ang's famous study 1985). Alternatively, women can find some personal, important and supportive meanings in films and TV programmes designed to simply reproduce stereotypes -- the so-called 'redemptive' readings of soap operas or melodramas, where strong women come through, or where wild men get domesticated in the end, where a whole series of looks and glances can be interpreted by those skilled in reading emotional subtexts (Gledhill 1987). In these circumstances, it is no surprise that the whole project of offering 'centred' readings of films, somehow on behalf of the actual viewers, has experienced methodological problems.

Audience research now seems essential -- although it is still hard to do. Still -- we " ll come back to this point in a minute. 4. So -- we have done families and subcultures or audiences. Let's get on to school factors in their own right.

Just as with the work on working class underachievement, the attention of researchers shifted to look critically at schools. This sort of research is not at all popular, usually, with teachers, I should warn you. Students encounter pressures at school which prevent them from achieving to their full potential, it was argued. Two factors were identified especially: Teacher expectations were held to be vital in motivating students (see my general account here. Kids were supposed to change their behaviour according to the expectations teachers held of them -- if teachers expected females to do well they often did, but if they had low expectations, kids tended to underachieve. Many famous studies then ensued, first to examine teacher expectations and then to investigate the effects of these expectations and how they were transmitted.

Let me summarise some findings pretty quickly: Teachers do have different expectations of their kids, based on social judgement's that they make, reflecting their own culture and background. These can be revealed by surveys or ethnographic research. However, teachers also have particular ways of testing and assessing kids' achievements and a professional commitment to 'treat each child as an individual' which might outweigh their prejudices (to cite a current dispute). Further, we might expect teacher expectations or prejudices, to use a nastier word, to be complex -- one might believe generally that girls are worth less effort than boys, but still do everything possible to encourage one particular girl, just as some people do not like black people in the abstract, but would not dream of being nasty to an actual contact who happens to be black (and vice versa, of course) The real task has been to find a transmission mechanism for these expectations. If teachers successfully keep their expectations to themselves and appear convincingly to treat everyone equally, there is no problem. However, teachers transmit their expectations in classroom behaviour.

A number of studies have looked at teacher-pupil interaction, for example, and noticed that there is a connection between high expectations and a willingness to interact (see the classic Brophy and Good study in Hammersley 1986 a -- it is also worth noticing that this correlation was not found again when Brophy and Good repeated the study! ). Interaction includes permitting some students to initiate more topics in classroom discussion or to 'take turns' (see French and French in Woods and Hammersley 1993). Stan worth (in Hargreaves and Woods 1984) merely describes some aspects of class rom interaction, it is true, but she looked rather carefully at teacher's views, asking if teachers normally used sex as a discriminator among pupils (they did), checking to see which student names were familiar to teachers (more males than females), and gathering predictions about likely careers (again largely conventional in terms of gender). Others have looked at informal grouping or streaming practices within schools, so that 'good' pupils get to sit together at a few 'good' tables (see Rogers in Hammersley 1986 a). Of course, these measures have been rather crude and ambiguous -- is it always of benefit to be interacted with by teachers?

In general, 'interaction' is rather difficult to study in much more detail or subtlety, although much might depend on a look or a tone of voice. The other main factor has been curriculum choice (which became important before the National Curriculum and before the Sex Discrimination Act limited the 'choices' available). Here, girls chose particular subjects (languages, arts) and left others un chosen (notoriously science and engineering). Some early work (e.g. Samuel's two pieces in Whyld 1983) identified a male bias in science sylla bi, with science applied mainly to 'male' examples (which often assume a good deal of experience in 'tinkering' with metal wood and hand tools, says Samuel), while later work confirms the notion we explored earlier -- that personal computers are seen as 'boys' toys'. As a result, substantial efforts were made in some schools to attract girls into science subjects -- the usual formula included (a) a high-powered but conventionally attractive female science teacher, pictures and drawings of female scientists and so on (b) 'girl-friendly' examples (the thermodynamics of cooking, perhaps, or the mixing of liquids illustrated by using not petrol and water but vinegar and French dressing in another of Samuel's examples) ) (c) some policy to positively advantage girls in the actual classroom -- e.g. taking care to stop the boys pushing to the front to take charge of the scientific apparatus or computer. There is much to investigate here too, though.

Meas or (in Hammersley and Woods 1984) found, for example that girls wanted to be conventionally girly in science lessons, that they found it necessary to dislike science in order to have the chance to show they were 'proper girls'. Their commonly-voiced 'reasons' for disliking science should really be read as rationalizations -- they weren't really afraid of the apparatus, since, after all, they had coped perfectly well with equally dangerous apparatus in domestic science lessons, for example. I couldn't help thinking of a kind of opposite case (not researched yet to my knowledge) -- why boys seem to dislike languages: my own son and his friends disliked the examples where they were to speak French (shopping, or writing personal descriptions of yourself for mythical penfriends), and they disliked the whole ambience of French lessons which involved a lot of public speech (very uncool for an English male adolescent). We are talking here of suggested unpredictable 'audience reactions' again, of course. Despite the best intentions of teachers and course designers, the members of the audience are imposing their own meanings and values on what they are doing. If this is typical, it suggests that very little will be achieved in policies aimed at gender equality in schools -- girls and boys will always find in lessons a chance to expose their differences, try as the school might to suppress those differences.

Perhaps this is why some feminists have advocated entirely single-sex teaching -- but even here I have my doubts about whether it would work, given the influence of factors outside schools. Finally there is one major area -- assessment and marking practices. This is still the 'secret garden' of education. It seems OK if we are talking about major public examinations, like GCSEs or A-levels, where candidates are anonymous.

Here, students can succeed despite low opinions of them in their actual schools -- indeed this is what the black girls in Fuller's study relied upon, knowing that they could risk a certain level of disapproval from their teachers as along as they did well in their exams. However, much less is known about the processes of informal assessment and 'judgement's' in secondary schools (or, indeed, in universities and colleges where there are no equivalents to the public exams of school life). Here, it is interesting to see the A-level texts relying upon some work on France, by Bourdieu. Bourdieu (1988) makes it clear that gender is indeed one of the factors that affect the (largely unconscious) judgement's that educational institutions make of their students.

It is also true, he suggests that parents invest less cultural capital in their female children, producing a complex picture where class, gender and cosmopolitanism affect your chances of success. What we now need is a British Bourdieu to see if the same factors affect us. Concluding comments So far we have considered the factors as a kind of list of variables, based, as we began by arguing, on the parallels with work on working class underachievement. For many feminists, I suspect, this would be a dubious procedure. The argument is that the experience of women is much more of a totality that cannot be really broken down into separate and distinct 'variables' like this, as in 'male stream's sociology (se the discussion in Bilton et al 1996 ch. 5).

Instead, we need to consider these factors as combining into a total experience for women, a whole cycle of events that affect them -- some will be working at school, others in their families of origin, others in their peer groups and so on. A distinctive project therefore suggests itself -- to look at how these and other factors are integrated into the life-cycle of actual women or girls via the actual experience of such women and girls. The methodology here would involve some sort of open-ended life-history approach, using perhaps the most famous technique -- the ethnographic diary or journal, with the researcher as a collaborator and participant in analyzing the events of the daily cycle.

Bibliography

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