Inspiring, motivating and challenging your pupils

Learning outcomes

By the end of this chapter you should have developed and clarified:

• an appreciation of the characteristics of a safe, stimulating and successful learning environment;

• an understanding of how to set goals that stretch all your pupils;

• an awareness of the importance of modelling the positive attitudes, values and behaviours expected of pupils.

The first of the Teachers' Standards, 'a teacher must set high expectations which inspire, motivate and challenge pupils', should be seen as a synoptic statement. In other words, each of the other Standards makes a contribution to its achievement. Secure subject knowledge, your ability to plan good lessons and sequences of lessons, proactive use of assessment, successful behaviour management and a range of other professional attributes must be in place if you are to inspire, motivate and challenge your pupils productively.

The importance of expectation

Notice particularly that the thrust of this Standard rests upon a belief that all pupils are capable of making progress, and it requires you to believe that your pupils are no exception.

Sometimes educational theories have been thought to indicate that a pupil's capacity is finite, and that it is therefore appropriate for a teacher to have limited expectations of that child. For instance, Piaget's stage theory (Child, 2007: Section 2, Chapter 4) can bemisunderstood as implying that children who are 'not ready' to move to the next stage of learning need simply to wait until they are ready. Instead, it should be seen as guiding teachers towards ways to prepare pupils for the next step. Similarly, policy debates about selective education based on intelligence testing, usefully summarised by Sumner (Sumner, 2010), have included arguments that teachers of pupils not selected for a grammar school education might lower their expectations of them. This would be difficult to establish, but a subsequent development has seen Ofsted paying close attention to grammar schools. It has been suggested (Davis, 2012) that some grammar schools have 'coasted', because of assumptions that their pupils will do well regardless of the efforts of their teachers. Both examples illustrate how teachers' perceptions of pupils' potential for educational achievement can be shaped by misconception and misunderstanding.

Teachers' expectations of pupils

There is plenty of evidence that high expectations lead to an improvement in performance. It is also true that teachers' expectations of children need to be realistic, otherwise they may be setting up their pupils to fail (Stewart and Harris, 2007). Three examples from psychology, the Hawthorne effect, the Pygmalion effect and the Halo effect, are especially relevant to teaching.

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