school & work

Eclass, Topic 5 Powerpoint Notes

Regardless of classroom size, teachers can enhance student's motivation and achievement by:

1) Having high expectations and efficacy

2)Helping students be mastery oriented

3)building school membership and relatedness

4) Focusing on effort attribution

Focusing on effort arrtibution instead of having an 'average' expectancy of intelligence that a teacher holds all of his students to is a more equitable way to treat his students. Each student comes from different cognitive abilities, attentions, life situations etc. and it is the teacher's job to meet the student where the student is, not expect from the student what the student cannot do and then penalize them for it.

Attribution Theory: Weiner

How might being aware of your implicit expectations and the attributions you make for your students' behaviour/explanations help you be a better teacher?

Implicit expectations are those expectations that a teacher holds inside of her that she is unaware she has. Biases are a form of these expectations. The best way for a teacher to understand her own expectations is to examine why she thinks the way she does and try to find a logical explanantion for each one of her beleifs. If she is unable to find an explanation for her belief, then she should let it go. A teacher should also have high expectations for her students to allow them to succeed. It is better to have high expectations without penalizing the student too strongly if they don't reach them than to have low expecations of your students.

The things to look for in students is their internal or dispositional attributions. These explain a student's behaviour from within. A teacher should also rightly be able to discriminate between and external and an internal attribution, becuase life sometimes just happens to us. By being more aware of her students, their internal attributions and why they do the things they do makes for a better educator.