relationships and processes within schools Flashcards
Teacher pupil interactions
Teachers are actively judging and typing students in various ways including their ability, personality and behaviour, whether they are average or deviant in these respects. Interaction based on these attitudes can shape students self concepts and identities, how they see and define themselves.
Becker - 1971 - the ideal pupil
first discovered that teachers initially evaluate pupils in relation to their stereotypes of the ‘ideal pupil’
‘ideal pupil’ who was intelligent, motivated and well behaved. In the classroom, teachers judged their pupils against this model, labelling them
who fitted The ideal pupil label best
middle class students
what is a stereotype
stereotype is a generalised, over-simplified view of the features of a social group –allowing for few differences between members of the group.
what did Becker conclude
teacher attitudes are crucial in the way they affect students’ self-images and consequently their attainment.
Hempel Jorgenson - 2009
can be used to prove that becker ideal pupil is still in modern contemporary society
year long study, 12 primary schools, Hampshire
asked children what they think their teachers would like to see in classroom; most said stay out of trouble, good behaviour, listening, rules, good scores
what research methods did HJ use
observation and conversation with children and semi-structured interviews with teachers
what did HJ conclude
this influences how they view themselves and how they view their classmates and that conceptions of ‘ideal pupil’ and ’ideal learner’ had arisen out of daily interactions in the classroom.
what is meant by the self fulfilling prophecy
where people act in response to expectations of them, thereby making the expectation come true
what did Rosenthal and Jacobson (1968 California) find about the SFP
They found a randomly chosen group of students whom teachers were told were bright and could be expected to make good progress, did in fact make greater progress – unrelated to ability - than those not so labelled.
Hartley and Sutton (2011)
stereotyped expectations and labelling from teachers, peers, parents and the media are generating a self – fulfilling prophecy in the performance of boys.
Hartley and Sutton study involved…
Their study of 140 children in 3 Kent primary schools allocated children to 2 groups, the first were told that boys do not perform as well as girls and the others not. They were then tested in maths reading and writing. Boys in the first group performed significantly worse than those in the second. Girls overall performance was similar in both groups. They proposed wider society contributed to boys under performance by routinely using phrases like ‘silly boys’, ‘school boy pranks….’
Banding, streaming and setting are ways of grouping students according to their actual or predicted ability. what are the differences between them?
Banding is where schools try to ensure their intakes have a spread of pupils drawn from all ability bands. Streaming students are divided into groups of similar ability for all subjects. Setting refers to dividing students into groups of the same ability for each subject
what are the consequences of banding, streaming and setting
The allocation of students to differentiated groups can be a consequence of teacher labelling. Student perceptions about the set they are placed in affects their efforts and their pupil identity, contributing to the processes of self- fulfilling prophecy and the development student subcultures.
Ball (1981)
placed in a low stream undermined student confidence and discouraged from trying. Top stream students were ’warmed up’ by encouragement to achieve highly and to follow academic courses of study. Lower stream students were ‘cooled out’, encouraged to follow lower status vocational courses and were less qualified
