You know how the old joke goes..

Q: How do you improve your marriage? A: Lower your expectations.

Well, the same is true for children’s learning. If you have low expectations of what your child is capable of – at any age – then that is precisely what you get. Average results. Except maybe for the outspoken kids that refuse to be ‘put down’ by the low expectations of their teachers/parents.

But if you have high expectations, consistently high, and you communicate these to your children in a supportive, encouraging way, then you will get great results. Every time.

The problem is that schools, being amorphous, large and very often impersonal places, only really understand ‘average’. Teachers teach to the middle, the middle. Schools compare children to their peers and even the marking systems used, are focused around the average, the statistical ‘bell curve’. Parents too easily buy into this and tend to be happy if their child is performing at the average and are proud as punch when they get slightly higher-than-average marks.

For me the message is clear. To improve childrens’ learning we need to remove mass assessment exercises and set children free to realise their true potential. Radical? Yes. Frightening? A little. But what other choices do we have, when the system is so clearly failing so many children for much of the time.

@admin [+]July 25th, 2010, 18:41