How teachers’ high expectations of average students make them into whiz kids. And the opposite.

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Do you think that what your teacher believes about you — that you’re a good student, a late bloomer, or that you’re dumb as wood — influences your performance and future development?

Well it does. A LOT. — Dig in.

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You’ve probably heard this before: “Believe you can succeed and you will.”

It’s the credo of David J. Schwartz’s book The Magic of Thinking Big and there’s certainly a lot to it. What you think of yourself highly influences who and how you are. No questions asked.

Now, interestingly enough, what other people think about you also influences who you are and who you will be. What they believe in you to be true, their expectations, form your reality.

So we can redefine Schwartz’ quote:

“Believe they can succeed and they will.”

This is the Pygmalion Effect: when our belief in another person’s potential brings that potential to life.

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The Rosenthal Study (read this!)

In the 60s Rosenthal and his colleagues tested every kid in a school. They used a test that pretended to be a test that would predict academic blooming. Then they gave each teacher the names of a handful of children from their classroom that would get smart in the school year ahead. These kids were labeled as bloomers. The researchers claimed that the results of the test revealed that those are the kids that will bloom the following year. In reality, though, the names of the “bloomers” were randomly taken out of a hat.

The bloomers did not know that the teachers were holding high expectations of them. And the teachers were told not to tell them either. So the children never knew.

The bloomers weren’t any smarter than their peers — the difference was in the mind of their teachers.

What happened?

A year later, when the kids were tested again, they found that the bloomers in fact showed greater intellectual gains than the other kids.

The kids actually got smarter when they were expected to get smarter by their teachers.

The kids were transformed by their teachers’ expectations.

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Mind-blowing, right?

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Here’s what happiness researcher Shawn Achor says about those results:

“The belief the teachers had in the students’ potential had been unwittingly and nonverbally communicated. More important, these nonverbal messages were then digested by the students and transformed into reality.”

Start the circle at “Others beliefs” and see how others’ beliefs can influence your actions.

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It’s only now that I realize how lucky I was in 5th and 6th grade. My teacher was a monster. But she made me feel like I’m the smartest kid in class. So I developed well under her, got good grades, and was sort of the superstar in class. My peers, on the other hand, had a super rough time with her. She treated them like dumb and useless shit. And that’s how they developed until they got new teachers. Many of them later got promoted into better classes because they bloomed with their new teachers.

I’ve often wondered how my peers would have been with a different teacher. And how I’d have been when my teacher had lower expectations of me. I guess I was lucky to have an older brother who did well at school, so that my teachers thought I must be smart as well and treated me respectively.

It just shows how important (and powerful) teachers are.

By the way, the story I just mentioned is an example for the Pygmalion Effect (I bloomed because the teacher thought I was the smartest), and it’s also an example of the opposite Golem Effect (my peers developed badly because the teacher thought they were dumb).

Positive expectations influence performance positively, and negative expectations influence performance negatively.

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If you’re a teacher, leader, or coach of any kind, then develop the belief that every student, employee, or athlete is a bloomer and a high-performer.

Take away: