What are expectations?

Imagine someone having a new partner and going to meet their partners family for the first time. This is a nervous time for many people. They might worry if they will be accepted and secretly fear they won’t. So, to help with this imagined response, they plan all the things they can say about themselves or drop into the conversation anything that will make them look good enough to be accepted.

Unfortunately, what happened is this person just sounded bigheaded and boastful all evening. Underneath all the boasting was a fear of being rejected. It was the expectation of being rejected that guided the boasting, there was no room to find out about the family and just get to know them. The new family couldn’t get to know the new person either.

Whilst this is an extreme example of how expectations can affect relationships, bringing expectations into any relationship is very common. So it will certainly be common in the tutoring relationship.

Expectations can take the form of many things. They can be how you predict future events will pan out and how you think others will behave. People also have expectations of themselves; how they will behave and how people will respond to them.

What do expectations do?

Expectations can become a compass. Beneath your awareness, they can guide you through day to day life like a blueprint of how events and behaviours will occur. Expectations can make us feel safe. However, the more people rely on expectations, the more people will panic when that false blueprint of reality is disappearing. Some people will begin to feel very unsafe and anxious.

If the expectations and safety were heavily relied upon, panic can intensify. Most people who have strong expectations will feel out of control if those expectations are threatened and will need to take that control back to feel safe again

What could this look like?

Molly is meeting her friend Jane for coffee in her local Cafe. She likes this particular cafe because they serve the coffee in big cups and she knows the staff there.  When Molly and Jane arrive, they see a sign on the door seeing the cafe is closed due to unexpected illness.  Molly becomes instantly angry and wants to know why they don’t have staff who can cover when some one is ill and why the owner doesn’t come and open the cafe. Molly doesn’t even hear Jane say there is a new cafe down the road, why don’t they try it, she is too busy ranting about how unprofessional the staff are.  Five minutes later, Molly and Jane are in another coffee house, and Molly is feeling uncomfortably embarrassed, she has no idea why she was so angry earlier. Molly isn’t fully aware of how her expectations of where she was going and what it would be like were very strong and how much she relies on those expectations to feel safe.

How people control varies from person to person, but it is normally a form of blaming, coercing, directing or manipulating others and events. All this control is aimed at changing the reality to try and make it match the person’s initial expectations. This control is often out of people’s awareness, it’s not done out of spite or malice, it’s done because a person feels unsafe.

However, the key to feeling safe without expectations is to become aware of what our expectations are so they can no longer have control. By letting go of expectations, we can naturally become more curious about what is in front of us and more accepting of the actual reality.

We can have expectations for ourselves.

• To be good
• To be correct
• To always know
• To be pretty
• To be rich
• To be the best

What happens if this self-expectation gets rocked, or even worse broken?

What about the tutoring role?

Just imagine if your expectation of yourself in the tutoring role is to be able to tutor every child you meet with ease. Maybe for the children to always want to have sessions with you because that means you’re likeable.  Then imagine if you carried a second self-expectation of always being prepared and knowing because that means you are a good tutor.

If we follow those imaginary expectations through, what happens when a child can’t understand something the way you tell them? What happens when the parent says the child doesn’t want to have anymore tutoring? What happens when you are asked to tutor something you are not sure about? How easy is it for you to ask for help? How easy is it for you to trial a new approach? How easy will it be for you to learn?

Any feelings of deflation, being crushed or ruminating after an event or when someone has criticised you shows that personal expectations have been damaged.

Exercise 1.

Take a few minutes and see if you can write down all the expectations you have for yourself as a tutor. Try and be as honest as you can and just list them without self -criticism and judgement.

Expectations as a projection. 

Expectations can also be projected out of us and mapped onto other people, events and contexts. These expectations can be our dreams and hopes of how things will be. They are positive or negative predictions.

• What a new neighbourhood will be like
• What a new learning topic will be like
• What a new job will be like
• What a new qualification will give me
• What it will be like if I diet or change my appearance
• How all my students will react and learn when I tutor them.
• How my partner should behave
• How my friends will celebrate my birthday

Anyone who has felt disappointed or despondent has had their expectations fail. For some, expectations that have had considerable hope attached to them and periods of validation and positiveness can feel like a trauma when they are shattered or abruptly halted.  This type of trauma can feel overwhelming.

Complex grief can set in as the person grieves for how they expected things to have been or what could have been. Sudden redundancy from a loved job is a common example.  When expectations were very strong, for some the loss of the possibility can feel like a significant death.

What could be wrong about having expectations and predicting when tutoring?

Rogers (2004) believes that teachers personal expectations of how children should think, behave and act whilst they are learning, can lead to predictions about a child’s future. For example, if a child doesn’t act the way a teacher would expect in the classroom, or the child isn’t learning as expected the prediction that the child won’t pass the exams can happen.

‘when we struggle to make sense of children’s behaviour – in a social context – it can be tempting to make easy judgements about their future.’ – Rogers 2004

Rogers stresses the need to encourage potential and not a prediction. Always encouraging with a child’s potential and not moving into a prediction fosters a healthy learning environment.

It’s at this point we need to examine what the potential harm of predicting is. It could be argued it’s just someone’s internal way of making senses of a child’s behaviour. In many ways it is, but many psychologists have come to understand it can have a very detrimental effect on a child’s performance.

The unconscious process of predicting. 

In 1963 a psychologist Robert Rosenthal and his team looked at the effects of expectancy on others. They took a large group of maze rats (rats that have been used to running around in mazes), and randomly allocated them into two groups. The rats were given to two teams of researchers whose job it was to train the rats to run the series of mazes in a certain way. The experimenters were told the two groups were ‘maze bright rats’ who had performed best in the trials and the ‘maze dull rats’ which had performed in the bottom of the trials.

At the end of the experiment, all the rats were tested on their performance. The rats in the maze bright condition did far better than rats that were allocated to the maze dull version. It was the researchers’ expectations of the rats that affected the outcomes.

In 1964 this effect was tested on children in an American school. Rosenthal et al went into a school to give what they said was a unique IQ test that could measure a child’s abilities in a new way. After the testing was completed, the teachers were told that a group of children had been identified as having late bloomer potential and were going to be very bright.

When the researchers went back at the end of the academic year. The children who the teachers believed had been very bright and late bloomers, had all excelled in all of their subjects.

The important aspect of this study is that the children did not have any test scores that were exceptional from any other child, the researchers had made it all up. What was at play here was the teacher’s expectations of the child. It had led to an unconscious change in their behaviour towards those children.

The researchers found four factors that the teachers unconsciously did when teaching students who they thought had incredible potential.

1. Positive Climate.  Teachers who thought the students were brighter were warmer to them and nicer in how they spoke to them whilst they were learning.
2. Input Factor – Teachers taught more content and they were willing to put more time in.
3. Response Opportunity – Teachers gave more chances for a child to respond and helped them organise their response coherently.
4. Feedback – children who were seen as having potential were praised more positively and more often.  Also, the teachers challenged those children more, which meant that the children were encouraged to stretch themselves and their ability.

To watch a short video on what has been described above, click here

However, there are criticisms concerning this study. Some researchers say the methodology cannot be standardised, meaning that it cannot be repeated or measured. That it was unethical due to the impact on children’s lives. Moreover, some teachers may have given less to other children.  In many ways, the study can’t be repeated.

How does all of this relate to tutoring?

There are many ways expectations can cause unconscious havoc within the tutoring profession. The example above looked at positive expectations and how they can have a positive effect. However, if a child is struggling at school and needing extra tuition to cope, could expectations have a negative effect? Let’s look at some examples.

The expectancy to tutor all children in the same way and have the same results.

Many educators will deny doing this or have no awareness of it. That is, to not adapt and explore how a child needs to be tutored, instead, they repeat the same method. They know how they have taught a subject /skill before and they want to repeat it. When they come across a child who doesn’t seem to pick it up, they initially repeat the same process.  The next step would be to practise it again but very much slower. Perhaps then change the format slightly but using the same conceptual understanding for the learning. Then the last resort might be to unconsciously slide into thinking this child is not going to grasp this task.

Sticking with a certain learning technique because you think it will work in the end.

Teaching spelling using phonics is a good example. For most children, spelling rules and phonics will enhance the acquisition of better spelling and reading skills. But for many dyslexic children, it becomes a limiting method.

If the tutor continues to use phonic teaching methods, many dyslexic children will struggle. Even if the tutor breaks the sessions down into slower learning steps, (perhaps having different variations of phonic spelling games and proceeding to get more creative ideas in how to tutor the phonics,) but the outcome remains the same.  After a time, the tutor predicts this child will always struggle with spelling.

Refusing to be curious

What was missing was the tutor to let go of their expectations and open up into a new place of curiosity and ask themselves, “out of all the different ways of learning to spell, especially ones that do not rely on phonics, is there one which will work better for this child sat next to me?”

Another example of this is problem-solving in maths. There are many ways to teach children to problem solve. Some need to make mental images of the problems, some need to focus on what the words represent, and some need support to break problems into the number of steps required. Unless a tutor can let go of the expectation of how they did it before, and try and force a child through the same process, the tutor will be unable to access the much-needed curiosity of ‘which problem-solving method will work best with this child’.

Hopefully, you can see that without meaning or intending to, having expectations can force your will, your beliefs and educational values onto a child. This, in many cases, will shut down the potential in that child.

A wonderful Ted Ex talk on expectations by Heather Marshall will sum up everything we have talked about. To watch the video, click here

 

References

Rogers, B. (2004) How to manage children’s challenging behaviour. Chapman Publishing.

Rosenthal, R and Jacobson, L.  (1992) Pygmalion in the classroom Teacher Expectation and Pupils’ Intellectual Development. Irvington Publishers, Inc.