Because Ronald Ferguson believes that teacher expectations play a major role in widening or narrowing the achievement gap between students of color and their white counterparts, he wanted to find a way to uncover these implicit expectations. He studied how much elementary and secondary students believe their teachers love to help them with work and how much students believe their teachers insist they get the right answer.
Ferguson, a Harvard University professor and researcher, found that there are four types of classrooms:
- High-perfection, high-help classroom: Students believe their teachers love to help them, but they've got to get stuff right too.
- High-perfection, low-help classroom: There is a focus on getting the right answers, but students feel like the teacher doesn't want to help them.
- Low-perfection, high-help classroom: Students feel that the teacher loves to help them and doesn't give them a hard time about whether they get things right.
- Low-perfection, low-help classroom: Students feel like the teacher doesn't want to help, but “at least she doesn't hassle us about whether we got the right answer or not.”
Figure
Same Students, Different Expectations
Ferguson found that the characteristics of students do not differ across these four types of classrooms. What do differ are teachers' beliefs about students and, therefore, how teachers approach instruction. These cues from teachers snowball into student expectations for themselves. Ferguson's findings show that whether kids say they work hard all year depends on their classroom environment. “Take away the help level or perfection level expected in the classroom,” noted Ferguson, “and you get a sizeable drop-off in the percentage of kids who say they've done their best-quality work all year.”
The challenge at the building level is to find out what teachers do to make kids believe they love to help, Ferguson advised. What do teachers do to make kids believe that it's important to get the right answers? If educators want to address how teacher expectations spur or abate the achievement gap, Ferguson said, they must create classrooms where kids think “My teacher loves to help us, and my teacher holds us to a high standard.”
This session report is based on ASCD's audiotape of Ronald Ferguson's presentation at the conference, which is available from the ASCD Service Center at 1-800-933-2723 or 1-703-578-9600. You can read excerpts from Ferguson's book The Black-White Test Score Gap (Brookings Press, 1998) online at http://brookings.nap.edu/books/0815746091/html.