Excellent Students

Excellent Teachers

 

Vocabulary

expect	powerful	expectation
impact	other	relationship
conduct (3)	famous	experiment
bay	area	late (3)
still	absorb	modern
education	duplicate	test
way	try/tried	different
large	personally	large scale
happen	work out	each time
principal	beginning	school year
call	office	as a result
result	excellent	conclusion
best	reward	special
identify	bright (2)	bright/brighter/brightest
IQ	quotient	intelligent
assign	going to	high/higher/highest
each	entire	accuse
any way	important	discrimination
select	cause	difficult
expect	exactly	difficulties
result	normally	curriculum
end	lead/led	district
grade	academic	accomplishment
easy	level	truth/true
such	eager	pleasure
maybe	had better	good/better/best
Aha	percent	choose/chose/chosen
idea	no idea	incredible
score	well	population
other side	to draw (2)	draw/drew/drawn

 
 

Video ( 17:00 to 21:00 )

 
 

Transcript

Expectations have a powerful impact on our relationships with others. And they have a powerful impact on what we become in our lives.

Dr. Robert Rosenthal of Harvard University has conducted over 300 experiments in what he calls “expectations theory” to test the impact of expectation based on totally false information.

And after several years of experimentation, he conducted a famous experiment in the San Francisco Bay area in the late 60s, an experiment has still not been absorbed into modern education.

An experiment which many people have since duplicated, and tested and tried in different ways, personally and in a large scale.

And it happens to work out the same in each time.

At the beginning of the school year, the school principal called three teachers into his office.

And to these teachers, he said, “as a result of your teaching excellence over the last three or four years, we have come to the conclusion that you are the best teachers in this school.

And as a special reward to you, we have identified three classes each of 30 students, of the brightest children in this school, the highest IQ students in this school, and we are going to assign them to you. You are going to have one class of 30 students each to teach for the entire year.

Now we don’t want to be accused of discrimination, so it’s very important that you do not tell these children in any way, that you know that they have been selected for a streamed class.

And second of all, we’re going to tell their parents, because we don’t want to cause any difficulties there.

We expect you to teach exactly as you normally do, exactly the same curriculum and we expect you to get very good results with these students.”

At the end of the school year, these students not only led the entire school, but entire school district in academic accomplishment.

Their grade levels were 20 to 30 percent higher than any other school.

They called the three teachers in at the end of the year and they said, “Well you’ve had a very good year.”

And they said, “Yes, we have. It was so easy. The children were so easy to teach, so eager to learn. It was such a pleasure to teach them.”

And the principal said, “Maybe we’d better tell you the truth: that this was an experiment, that those 90 children were chosen out of the school population at large. And when we assigned them at the beginning of the year, we had no idea what their IQs were at all.”

And the teachers said, “Well that’s incredible! How could it be that they scored so highly, they did so well, they got such good grades —

Aha! Yes. It must be because we are such excellent teachers.”

At which the principal said, “And I think we should tell you the other side of the experiment, was that at the beginning of the school year, we put all the teachers’ names in a hat — and yours were the first three names that were drawn.”
 

 
 
  Questions

1. What does expectation mean?

2. Who was Dr. Robert Rosenthal? What did he do?

3. What did the principal tell the teachers?

4. What happened during the school year?

5. Why did this happen?

6. Have all schools adopted these ideas? Why haven’t they adopted these ideas?

7. What is the moral or lesson of the experiment?

8. How could this apply to your school or company?
 
 

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