The Importance Of Teacher Differential Behavior

For about two decades, educational researchers have been concerned with the possibility that teachers communicate different performance expectations for students they believe to have low versus high achievement potential. In planning for and interacting with entire classes, small groups, and individuals, teachers are guided by their beliefs about what students need and by their expectations about how students will respond if treated in particular ways (Good, 1987). In general, teachers expect students to behave in specific ways and attain certain levels of achievements; thus, teachers behave differently toward different students. This differentiating behavior affects and, over time, will shape students’ self-concepts, achievement motivation,

The first relates to the differential learning opportunities that teachers plan and then institute for their students. The second aspect of differentiation relates to the ways in which teachers interact with students, depending on whether they hold high or low expectations for a student (Rubie-Davies, 2015).

Rubie-Davies (2015) found that students perceive differential teacher behaviors – both in the learning opportunities that are provided and in the ways that teachers interact with them. Differentiating the learning opportunities for low and high expectation students can have a direct effect on student achievement. The student is engaged in the process almost unknowingly and certainly has little chance of altering his or her own trajectory, as the teacher plans the student’s learning opportunities. However, teachers also provide students with messages about their expectations for them, through both the verbal and the non-verbal messages they give to students. Students have to acknowledge their teachers’ expectations for them, interpret those expectations and, over time, conform to them (Rubie-Davies,

For example, one scenario for a high achiever was: ‘John is someone who does really well in his schoolwork. In fact, he always gets the best grades in the class and is considered to be a very smart boy’ (Weinstein and Middlestadt, 1979, p. 483). Students then rated teacher behaviors to report whether or not their teacher would interact with John in that way or not. Examples of behaviors included: ‘The teacher asks other students to help John’ and ‘The teacher trusts John’. Students were asked to think of their previous year’s class, not their current one, because the researchers considered that students might be reluctant to report on their current teacher. The results showed that, overall, students did report differential treatment for the high and the low achievers. For the high achiever, students perceived that the teacher expected him to do well, that she placed high academic demands on him, and that he received special privileges. In contrast, for the low achiever, the students reported that he had fewer opportunities to participate in class, but that the teacher was more concerned about him and monitored him closely (Weinstein and Middlestadt,