We all know teachers should have high expectations of pupils.
Teachers who think their pupils can learn and do lots set more challenging work than those doubting their capacities and this leads to more progress.
Nobody – quite rightly – argues against high expectations.
Officially you can’t even be a teacher if you don’t have them – they’re in the Teacher Standards.
But high expectations aren’t the same thing to everyone. Given the huge variability in our education system how could they be?
Different teachers and schools demand different levels of effort and have differing standards on acceptable general behaviour.
But we don’t talk about it well because being accused of having low expectations isn’t just an observation – in teaching it’s a personal and professional insult.
Describing someone as having “low expectations” is damning, meaning at heart we think the person is not a good practitioner.
Thinking about whether we have high enough expectations makes us angry and defensive.
But it shouldn’t – ideally there would be no reason to take it so personally because our expectations are more products of our environments and experiences than deeply held and immutable core beliefs.
If we have always been managed by terrible bullying bosses, then we will expect future bosses to be terrible and bullying. If we have always hated exercise, then we will expect a new sort of exercise to be horrible.
Conversely if we have always enjoyed Indian food, we’ll be excited a newly opened Keralan restaurant and if we’ve always liked science fiction films and loved Dune 1 then we’re more likely to rush to see Dune 2.
The point is expectations are not ethereal or objective – they are set by what we have seen and experienced before.
This is true of standards in schools.
If a teacher has only ever worked in schools in which behaviour is poor, they are far more likely to think this normal than a teacher who has only worked in schools where behaviour is excellent. If a leader has never worked in a place in which the completion of lots of outside school study is normalised they are far less likely to believe children capable of it and more likely to be satisfied with less and lower quality work.
This makes it hard for people to change their expectations – telling someone their expectations are too low doesn’t usually work because this is rhetoric against experience, which is a battle that only ever has one winner.
Our experiences are very powerful.
If you’ve worked in or led a school in which students angrily swear at staff regularly or where violence is not uncommon it can be very hard to believe much better is possible. When there are a lot of dysregulated children behaving chaotically the idea it’s possible for a school to be truly calm and orderly can seem absurd.
To these people – those struggling to stay afloat in the most challenging of circumstances – the idea other places have succeeded where they have apparently failed is often laughable and it’s logical to explain examples of success away; perhaps their demographic is radically different or perhaps they are faster to exclude the children who are most challenging. Perhaps they have more resources. Perhaps they just have more staff.
This is complicated because such explanations might be true.
But sometimes they are not.
Even in the areas of highest challenge children can behave as well and work as hard, but knowing this often means experiencing it.
Some schools are genuinely turning the dial, but for lots of reasons it can be hard to accept this.
This problem isn’t unique to teaching.
Prior to the Joseph Lister’s pioneering work on antiseptics the death of very large numbers of patients after surgical procedures from infection was regarded by doctors as sad but inevitable. When Lister began achieving astonishing survival rates it was natural some of the first reactions were of disbelief; firstly, the improvement seemed too good to be true, and secondly the idea tiny invisible “microbes” could kill a powerful fully grown man was logically absurd.
These sceptical reactions were not a demonstration of low expectations – they were a sensible and entirely reasonable reaction to something they had no reason to believe and would have been fools to take on face value, especially when the new methods slowed surgeons down.
The initially sceptical are not the villains. The villains of the story are those who refused to look at the evidence or to change their practice even after it became clear a huge breakthrough had been made.
Why didn’t they change? It’s impossible to be certain. Perhaps they had wrapped up their personal egos in their professional status which meant they felt any admission of prior mistakes reflected on them as people. Perhaps they were overcompetitive and couldn’t deal with the idea a rival had found something they missed.
Lister’s attitude was not helpful. Arrogant, contemptuous and dismissive he called his peers “murderers”, which led to further defensiveness and entrenchment.
There’s lots to learn from this.
It’d probably be better if we viewed our expectations as expressions of our past experiences rather than expressions of our moral characters. Given all the rhetoric this isn’t easy. Quite recently a friend of mine questioned whether my expectations were as high as his, which for a second made me bristle until I thought about it and realised his perspective was different because he had spent much more time working in schools achieving excellent outcomes than I had.
It wasn’t personal.
Not taking things as personally would make it all much easier to talk about – easier to admire others and learn from them – easier to understand and appreciate nuance and context.
Those achieving brilliant things shouldn’t get carried away either – they should remember their results are better not because they are better people but because they have had the privilege of a different perspective.
It isn’t easy to get to this point – accountability metrics in England are inherently competitive and create winners and losers with all the associated hurt and hubris.
But education isn’t a game and when we play it like it is the losers are the children we all want the best for.
Ben Newmark 