Pygmalion in the Classroom: A Real Experience

By Miss Lucy

“Imagine for a moment that the inclusive school is an IKEA piece of furniture with a very complex design and with many beautiful, but difficult to execute, details: almost certainly we won't even think of using the first tool we have at hand to assemble it; we will have to study each piece well and each step of the assembly process in order to be able to choose the most suitable tool at each moment. Well, those many and diverse beautiful and complex details are our students and we are going to have to study them, understand them and, finally, find for each one the most appropriate way to act in order to get the best out of them and facilitate their full development through education.”

Halfway between a journal and an essay, this publication is the result of the author's desire to share a real experience lived in a public school located in a humble neighbourhood in Madrid, Spain, during the period of her internship as a primary school teacher. Here she tells us how it was possible to achieve a sort of small miracle, thanks to the teamwork of several professionals, who, for different reasons, collaborated in order to open the doors of knowledge to a group of students especially disadvantaged and unmotivated.

The described facts and circumstances were the perfect excuse to test one of the most effective psychological theories when it comes to improving the performance of students of any school level: the Pygmalion effect, also known as self-fulfilling prophecy; in both cases we are talking about the communication of high expectations. Rosenthal and Jacobson were the first scientists to study and experience them in the educational field; after them, many other psychologists dedicated their efforts to identifying the main features of the interaction between teacher and student which most influence the school results of the latter. The result was the classification of specific teaching behaviours that convey these high expectations.

However, it was also discovered that teachers did not always put this behaviour into practice with each and every one of their students, especially with those who are perceived as low-performance students. In order to avoid this problem as much as possible, there are very effective techniques, easy to apply to our daily classroom practice, which enable high expectations to be communicated indistinctly to all students. Indeed, some of them were the ones that were put into practice to achieve the overwhelming results told in this book, demonstrating once again the power that the teacher's attitude has over their students’ performance.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Miss Lucy
• Release date: Jun 6, 2020
• ISBN: 9780463440896

Miss Lucy

¡Hola! Soy Lucy, maestra titulada en educación Primaria por la Universidad Camilo José Cela desde febrero de 2018 y con una larga trayectoria (12 años) en la enseñanza del inglés exclusivamente a niños, a partir de los 4 años.Mi natural curiosidad para los procesos de enseñanza y aprendizaje de los alumnos más jóvenes es lo que me impulsa cada día a buscar las mejores formas de hacerles llegar el inglés y cualquier otra asignatura les esté impartiendo.Captar su interés para generar curiosidad y 'ganas' de ir a clase es el primer paso para obtener su atención y conseguir que aprendan de forma natural y casi sin esfuerzo. Sin embargo este proceso no sería posible sin 2 elementos que yo considero básicos en cualquier relación docente - alumno: los refuerzos positivos y la comunicación activa de las altas expectativas.Todo esto, reflejado en mi experiencia diaria y respaldado por la investigación científica sobre Educación, como pude averiguar en mis estudios universitarios, lo pueden encontrar en mis escritos.¡Buena lectura!Hi! I'm Lucy, a qualified primary school teacher since February 2018, who studied at the Universidad Camilo José Cela and who has a long history (12 years) of teaching English exclusively to children, from the age of 4.My natural curiosity for the teaching and learning processes of the youngest students is what drives me every day to look for the best ways to make English and any other subject accessible to them.Engaging children's interest in order to awaken their natural curiosity and 'desire' to go to class is the first step in order to get their attention and get them to learn naturally and almost effortlessly. However, this process would not be possible without 2 elements that I consider basic in any teacher-student relationship: positive reinforcement and active communication of high expectations.All this, reflected in my daily experience and supported by scientific research on Education, as I was able to find out in my university studies, can be found in my writings.Good reading!

Book preview

Pygmalion in the classroom.

A REAL EXPERIENCE.

Author: Lucy Moretti

Copyright © 2019 Miss Lucy’s Teaching Fun

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http://mihijohablaingles.com

Remember that not getting what you want is sometimes a wonderful stroke of luck.

Dalai Lama

I shall always be a flower girl to Professor Higgins, because he always treats me as a flower girl, and always will; but I know I can be a lady to you, because you always treat me as a lady, and always will.

G. B. Shaw, Pygmalion.

PROLOGUE

Three years ago, in 2017, I was studying to become a primary school teacher and I had to choose a school where to carry out my compulsory internship in order to get all the course credits I needed to graduate. Among the many alternatives available in the capital of Spain –we have in fact public, state-subsidised and private schools–, and considering only those options which could have improved my future job prospects, I perhaps took the least provident decision: a public school in my not particularly glamorous but, at the same time, very multicultural district, called Usera.

Two main reasons pushed me to make that choice: the first one was the school proximity: in fact, that primary school was, and I still is, 5 minutes’ walk from my house; something that can be certainly considered a great privilege when you live in a city as vast as Madrid. That way I could carry on my internship in the morning and keep my teaching job in the afternoon, without leaving my dog unattended all day long.

The second reason that led me to that choice was a certain curiosity, that I felt at the time, to find out by myself the objectivity and truthfulness of all those articles I was reading in the newspapers - practically one or two every 3 months since I had embarked on this formal education path - about school segregation in Spain and its effects on the performance and drop-out rates of students who suffer from it.

Almost 3 years later, I can state that, despite those bad premises, my real classroom experience, which lasted for about 4 months, have been highly instructive from multiple points of view. Furthermore, I have been positively surprised both by the students’ potential and by the capacity that we, teachers, have of taking advantage of that limitless potential. Indeed, this ability of making the most of our environment would be underexploited without a strong teamwork mentality, which, in my specific case, involved both my tutor and my Behaviour Modification professor. The latter, by pure chance, knew my new school perfectly, because he had worked as a counsellor in that same district for several years and could assess my research and observations in a very specific way.

These promising impressions and experience are the reason why I wrote this book: with it I’d like to send a message of hope to all those teachers who decide to read it, pushed by the fact that, thanks to the educational intervention proposal we put into practice, the obtained results were absolutely positive, in spite of the fact that the protagonist of my Final Project about educational innovation was a group of very demotivated third grade students who couldn’t find any appeal in their Social Sciences lessons and whose disinterest was reflected in their scarce general performance in this area of knowledge.

In the same way, through the report of this first-hand experience, I would like to let you know the tools and the didactic strategies that were used to tackle this almost desperate situation, and thanks to which the general performance of the whole group improved considerably. On the other hand, I would also like to be able to transmit to every reader that the figure of the teacher, despite of his imperfections and infinite possibilities for improvement, continues to be a fundamental pillar of any teaching and learning process, for the simple fact that teachers always have in their hands the crucial opportunity to catalyse and promote the motivation and interest of their students.

CHAPTER 1

ON MOTIVATION, SELF-CONCEPT AND SELF-ESTEEM

Every day, at work, in sport, in learning, there is a force that pushes us to act and be proactive over a longer or shorter period of time, in order to achieve a goal or satisfy a need: we prepare something to eat because we are hungry, we study for a good grade, we cure every detail of a presentation for a company meeting, we train every day for winning a tournament, we abandon harmful habits for our health, etc. These are just a few examples of the power of this force that we all know as 'motivation'. It is a kind of motor that ignites in response to different stimuli and needs, for the simple fact that our way of being and acting depends on 5 different dimensions: cognitive, emotional, psychomotor, volitional and social.

Many times, in the education sector, we hear the expression 'motivating activity', in reference to any form of learning other than