A Psychoeducation for Teachers Skill-Building Guide

1. The Role of Teacher’s Expectations in
Shaping Children’s Behavior

2.  An expectation is a belief that some future event will
happen. The cognitive literature agrees that our
expectations greatly influence both the way we feel and
the way we behave. Consciously or not, teachers
constantly cue students as to what our behavior
expectations are. We exhibit hundreds of nonverbal cues,
some as subtle as tilting up the head, raising the
eyebrows, head nods, the breathing rate, eye contact (or
absence of eye contact), and/or the dilation of nostrils.
Other cues are more obvious, including a certain tone of
voice and our verbal messages, and children notice those
cues and messages. Teachers’ expectations often play a
major role in bringing about the behavior we expect from
individual students. We transmit our higher or lower
expectations to each individual student, and soon children
begin to reflect the image that we have created, and may
be inadvertently reinforcing in them.

3.  On most occasions, we are not even aware that
we are expecting and communicating disruptive
behaviors, because the cues we are sending are
often non-verbal and unintentional. Once we set
our behavior expectation for a habitually
disruptive child, the student will act more and
more in ways that match the expectation. In
addition, consistent with our low expectation for
the child, we give up easily, feel discouraged
easily, and act resigned, not staying with the
child during setbacks and failure situations. This
never-ending cycle of student’s misbehavior and
teacher’s discouragement gets stronger by the
day, moreover, like a self-fulfilling prophecy,
the less we expect from the child, the less we
get.

4.  Tollefson (2000) states that teachers develop outcome
expectations, that is, the belief that some kinds of
students will learn the material taught (or will behave in a
particular way), and efficacy expectations, or our belief in
our personal ability and professional skills to help each
student in our classroom to achieve academically and/or
to behave.
 According to Tollefson, in combination, our outcome and
efficacy expectations influence the way we interact with
students as well as our willingness to spend effort to help
individual children. Simply put, the higher our
expectations, the higher the quality of our interactions
with the student, for example, we smile more, make more
eye contact, are more supportive, give more assistance to
the child, encourage the child in generating solutions to
problems, and pay closer attention to the child’s
responses. The opposite is true for a child for whom we
have lower expectations.

5.  Even when the amount of time we spend
with both kinds of students is similar, the
quality of time spent and the quality of
interactions are not the same. To promote
behavioral change in a habitually disruptive
student, the key is not in what we say to the
child, but in how we say it and in how we
interact with the child.

6.  Teachers need to believe that we have the skills and ability
to influence positive behavioral change in our most
challenging students (teachers’ efficacy expectations). A
teacher with a high level of personal efficacy, or self-
efficacy, believes that he or she has the ability to motivate
and engage students both in learning and in behaving. The
teacher perceives the student’s habitually disruptive
behaviors as a challenge, not a threat, and explains the
behavior to the child in a way that encourages the student
to evaluate his success or failure in relationship to the
amount of effort the child spends and the strategies the
child knows and applies to self-regulate behavior. In
addition, the way we explain to children their successes or
failures influence how we interact with children, for
example, the teacher provides feedback that is more
positive and constructive, and keeps criticism to a
minimum.

7.  Constructive feedback does not just review
the past, or what the child did wrong, but
help outline future performance, or what the
student needs to do to master a skill or
behavior. In a friendly and accepting way,
behavioral setbacks are explained as errors
or mistakes necessary for growth and
learning, and the teacher encourages the
student to fix his acting-out behaviors the
way he fixes an academic error. A teacher
with high self-efficacy expectations and the
right child guidance skills is able to influence
and develop strong self-efficacy expectations
in students.

8.  Teachers with high self-efficacy expectations aim
high, developing goals of high academic
achievement and positive behavior for all
students. High self-efficacy teachers keep
children’s potential in mind, and are tenacious in
not giving up, even when we realize that we are
going to face roadblocks right in the next corner.
Children feel motivated when they believe that
putting in more effort and using the right coping
strategies will result in improved behavior. In
addition, just perceiving that the teacher has
high expectations for him improves the teacher-
student interaction and enhances the child’s
motivation.

9.  To modify behavior, the habitually disruptive
child needs both resources and skills to do the
job. It is not enough to tell simply to the child
that you believe she can behave better. We need
to provide resources like information and
teacher’s time coupled with child guidance skills
and strategies, for example, a problem-solving
plan, coping skills for anger management,
and/or self-monitoring strategies. With higher
goals, encouragement, extra support, adequate
time, and the right skills and strategies any
child, including a child with behavior deficits,
will eventually learn to replace disruptive
behaviors with more positive ones.

10.  Tollefson, N. (2000). Classroom applications
of cognitive theories of motivation.
Educational Psychology Review, Vol. 12 No.
1, pp.63-83.

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