Kimberly Brooks

Completely true. Most students don't know what it is like to have someone believe in them and know what they are capable of. If someone has told them all their life they weren't good at something, it is only natural for them to feel that way.

Dr. Ryan Meers

Sharron,
Thank you for sharing this personal story. I think this is a great reminder to all of us to be very aware of how we are communicating our expectations & beliefs about our students to our students.
Ryan

Dr. Ryan Meers

Sharron Bortz

When my twin daughters were in first grade, they each had a teacher who assumed based on the fact that the girls were very tiny and had been premature that they would be slow learners. At the 3 weeks of school conference one said that daughter A was not only in the lowest reading group, but she was the lowest of the low, despite the fact that the girls had been reading since pre-school. The other teacher announced that she didn't intend passing daughter B at the end of the year. I talked with the principal and got nothing but support for the teachers and lies from the teachers. I finally had a talk with the girls that we were going to spend the year showing those teachers how wrong they were. They took the challenge. Two years later they were in the school's gifted program; both took honors at Duke University and are now a law partner, and an optometrist with her own clinic.
I had watched my nephew destroyed educationally by a bad first grade teacher. My sister thought the teacher must be right and she shouldn’t interfere. She, my sister, later became an award winning teacher herself. I think her experience with her son was part of the impetuous for studying elementary education.

Tauisha Noble

I also believe in the Pygmalion Effect as well, many students don't know what they have until someone help to pull it out of them. Seeing is believing, doing is learning, and hearing makes the heart believe.