When You See Struggling Learners, Keep This In Mind…

I came across an article by Ross Miller of Association of American Colleges and Universities yesterday, and it reminded me of how important it is to have high expectations for children.  In this article it states that students may have equal abilities, but the student who is expected to achieve more will perform more highly.  Teachers tend to attribute poor performance from a higher achieving student to bad luck while a low achieving student’s poor performance will be attributed to lack of ability.   Americans tend to link ability and performance with little thought of student effort.  Teachers in the U.S. tend to see low ability as something that is immutable.  Contrastingly, Japanese and Chinese teachers attribute students’ learning more to the teaching received and to students’ effort.  Since China and Japan tend to dominate the world in achievement, we could definitely learn from their high expectations of ALL students’ success.