The Teachers’ Corner:

Have you ever heard of TESA?  It stands for Teacher Expectations and Student Achievement, a program to help teachers build equity in the classroom through recognizing and then changing some of their behaviours to do just that.   For many years, TESA training was a required program for all teachers in the Los Angeles County School District.  This writer is a certified TESA trainer and was pleased to offer the program to staff in his district.

TESA is built on the premise that teachers, mostly unknowingly, send messages to students that the teachers see one group as potentially high achievers and another group as potentially low achievers and behave accordingly. As would be expected, then, the students, albeit unknowingly as well, will pick up these messages and meet the expectations – low or high.

TESA was originally based on the research of Good and Brophy and was popularized by Sam Kerman who spent years explaining the program and teaching educators.  See:  “An Interview with Sam Kerman.  Co-founder of TESA-Teacher Expectations and Student Achievement.”  Educational Considerations Vol. 18. 4-1-91).  The dual purpose of the training was to make teachers aware of how they were sending messages on the expectations continuum to their students, their effect on students – and ways to avoid that practice.

Today’s educational research is full of advice on how to ensure equity in the classroom.  And it should be!  Most classrooms in North America today are replete with children from different countries, cultures, and religions, with children with special needs and with children whose English language skills need considerable development.  It is essential, then, that aside from selecting the right materials, carefully planning units of study which highlight the need for equity, for tolerance and for understanding, that teachers must look at their own classroom behaviours and ask: “In what ways can I send a message through my interactions with my students so that they feel they have a high learning capacity?”  Here are two areas to consider.

In most classrooms the interchanges between students and teachers are oral.  A teacher asks questions, a student answers questions.  But there are subtleties here that teachers may not be aware of.  Here they are:

1. A teacher poses questions that reflect a range of complexities based on most learning taxonomies. For instance: “What is the capital of the province of Quebec?” or “What factors made Quebec City the best choice to be the capital of the province of Quebec?” What is obvious here is the first question is relatively low on any taxonomy (knowledge) while the second question in relatively high (application).  TESA research shows that it is very likely that the first question will be asked of a perceived low achiever (Jimmy) while the second question will be asked of a perceived high achiever (Latoya).  Of course, a sensitive teacher will respond: “I did not want to ask Jimmy the second question because I knew he would struggle with it and did not want to embarrass him.”  The problem is that Jimmy never is asked a higher order question and he begins to see himself as being unable to do so.  It affects the expectations he has for himself.  The obvious answer is that you bring Jimmy along slowly with increasingly harder questions until both Jimmy and you begin to have the confidence that he will be able to handle the question without undue stress.
2. Briefly, this posing of questions is coupled with another subtle message. If a teacher poses a question that most students can answer (including Jimmy and Latoya), the research shows that the teacher will give Latoya far more time to answer than Jimmy.  This is called “latency” and it suggests that the teacher is prepared to wait longer for Latoya’s response because it is more likely to be correct than Jimmy’s response.

The insidious part of this is that teachers would likely never do this purposefully.  Indeed, it is entirely likely that teachers do not know they are doing it at all.  Next week, we’ll look take a brief look at some of the behaviours and talk about a system you can use with a teacher-partner to learn more about communicating your expectations in a fair and equitable fashion.

Dr. Dan

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