Raising Our Expectations

Grant (Nicky's husband) is going to come and talk with us about raising our expectations for children with diverse needs. This will be pertinent for all children as research from as early as the 1960s shows. A pair of researchers in the 1960s ran an experiment that changed the way the world thinks about expectations. Robert Rosenthal and Lenore Jacobson told a group of teachers that some of their students had been identified as having the potential to become very high achievers and that these students would bloom over the course of the year. These pupils were, in fact, chosen completely at random. But when the researchers returned at the end of the year, they found that the chosen students had, on average, made significantly more progress than their peers. The impact of having high expectations came to be known as the Pygmalion effect. In Greek mythology, Pygmalion was a sculptor who carved a statue so beautiful that he fell in love with it. His adoration was so strong that the gods turned the stone into a real woman. In sociology, the term is used in reference to living up to someone else’s high standards and expectations. The opposite of this is the Golem effect – named after a mythical violent monster – where low expectations can lead to people performing worse as a result of other people’s expectations.