High Standards, High Expectations

Commitment to the incrementalist belief can show up in teachers' behavior, classroom practices, school structures, and even conversations with one another.

Teachers set standards of performance they believe to be rigorous, important, and appropriate; find out where students are in relation to those standards; and adapt instruction to accommodate students' differences in readiness levels (current knowledge or skills), learning and processing styles, and motivation.

They don't pull back, give up, or dilute expectations and academic press for any of them.

They send positive expectation messages to all children regardless of their learning or language differences.

They seize every opportunity in regularly recurring classroom situations to reinforce the messages children get that their teacher believes they can do it and won't give up on them.

Teaching policies and practices are conscientiously geared toward instilling in children life-liberating beliefs.

Teachers teach students and parents about attribution theory and make effective effort an explicit agenda to combat the entity theory.

They don't expect all students to learn at the same rate or meet standards at the same time, especially when there are wide differences in their prior preparation.

But teachers take it as their responsibility to constantly examine and manage their biases for seeing current student performance through the lens of innate ability, teach children to believe in themselves, and explicitly teach them how to work not just harder but smarter with appropriate strategies.

All teachers can create the conditions where unmotivated children want to put forth the effort and this should be an integral part of all our work.

In classroom practices, teachers invest in discovering ways to build confidence in students (belief in themselves and their capacity to achieve) and in teaching them how to invest their effort effectively.

Saphier, J., Haley-Speca, M. A., & Gower, R. (2012). The Skillful Teacher. United States: Research for Better Teaching, Inc.