There has been quite a lot of discussion lately about the importance of high expectations in education. And I have noticed how a particular mechanism also seems to surface in discussions following the now tragic story of Jason Arday. The connection may seem a little far-fetched, but it is actually quite timely if you read this piece by Tyler Austin Harper that I shared last Saturday, from a more progressive perspective.

But what do low expectations actually look like in the classroom? Sometimes they are much less obvious than one might think. That, at least, is the interesting idea behind a new paper by Eddie Brummelman and colleagues. To be clear from the start, this is not a new experimental study. Nor is it a systematic review or meta-analysis. In their paper, the authors bring together several strands of research in a narrative review and use them to build a theoretical model of how socioeconomic inequality can enter children’s minds via the classroom.

Their starting point is simple: teachers can, often without realising it, hold different expectations for pupils from different socioeconomic backgrounds. Brummelman and colleagues describe research showing that teachers sometimes rate the abilities of children from lower socioeconomic backgrounds less highly than those of children from higher socioeconomic backgrounds. They do this even when their actual performance is equal. This is something we’ve known for a while now. Similar differences have previously been found in assessments, expectations, and educational recommendations.

Things become more interesting when the authors examine how these lower expectations become visible. When we think of low expectations, we might imagine a teacher telling a pupil that something will probably be too difficult for them. Or a pupil receiving a lower recommendation than another pupil with the same abilities.

But low expectations can also sound remarkably kind, I’m afraid.  Imagine, for example, that two pupils correctly solve the same difficult problem. The teacher says to one: “Well done.” To the other: “Wow! Fantastic! Incredibly well done!”? Which pupil received more positive feedback?

At first sight, you would probably say the second one. Except… that pupil might also hear something else: apparently, you didn’t expect me to be able to do this. Experimental research discussed by Brummelman and colleagues suggests that, for equal performance, teachers are more likely to give inflated praise to pupils from lower socioeconomic backgrounds. Children who see someone being praised much more enthusiastically for the same achievement may also infer that this pupil must have had to work harder and, ironically, might therefore be less smart.

Something similar can happen with giving support. A pupil is struggling with a task, and, as a teacher, you immediately step in to help. That seems almost the opposite of having low expectations. You care about the pupil and want them to succeed. But the authors warn that unsolicited help can simultaneously contain a message you never intended to send: I don’t think you can do this on your own.

And as research shows, pupils are quite sensitive to this. In experiments, children who receive unsolicited help sometimes come to see themselves as less competent, become less likely to choose a challenging task next time, and persist for less long. And again: children from lower socioeconomic backgrounds are more likely to receive directive and controlling help from teachers.

So we have praise and help, but all good things, or in this case well-intentioned things, often come in threes… The third is consolation.

The title of the paper, “It’s OK—not everyone has to be an Einstein”, comes from a fictional example of an eleven-year-old boy who is disappointed after getting six out of ten. His teacher wants to reassure him and says: “It’s OK. Not everyone has to be an Einstein.” This is both a remarkably kind sentence and a terrible message.

Because the teacher could also have thought: this result doesn’t match what this pupil is capable of.

What happened? Instead, the teacher reads the disappointing result as saying something about what the pupil is capable of. The studies Brummelman et al cite suggest that this kind of consolation can send an unintended message: my teacher doesn’t expect that much from me. And it can lead to a negative spiral when pupils start to believe that message themselves, lowering their own expectations and becoming less motivated.

Perhaps we sometimes use the phrase “high expectations” a little too easily. It does not mean telling every pupil that they can become Einstein. It also does not mean that everyone will end up with the same results, or that differences in achievement are simply caused by differences in teacher expectations.

Brummelman and colleagues are quite careful about this themselves. There is observational, longitudinal, and experimental research supporting the different mechanisms in their model. But that does not mean the entire chain has been demonstrated in real classrooms. The authors explicitly acknowledge this, and the effects found in natural settings are often small to moderate.

So no, teacher expectations are certainly not the explanation for social inequality in education. That is probably worth repeating too.