Pygmalion in the Classroom: A Real Experience

"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.

Dettagli