Teachers' Expectations Can Influence How Students Perform

I find this article very interesting because it is not something I would have noticed until it was addressed. This article explains how teachers expectations influence the way they treat their students and also how it affects the way students perform. A Harvard professor, Robert Rosenthal, did a study on an elementary school from San Francisco. He renamed the normal IQ test so that the teachers nor the students knew what it was. After the students took this test he then selected, at random, a handful of students that were "over average" in their score. These students were not actually over average he just told the teachers that so that he could study the teachers behaviors. Rosenthal found that the teachers actions and expectations towards these selected students had changed and these kids actual became smarter. After this study was done Rosenthal met a guy from the University of Virginia, Robert Pianta, who was studying how to get teachers to change their expectation of kids. He found that the beliefs of teachers can be changed if they are trained to do so. Teachers would take a standard pedagogy course which trained them to teach differently. After they took this course Pianta would video their class and study how their teaching expectations changed.