So I ambled across the great Terminal 5 concourse to the check-in desk and presented my passport to the clerk. She looked me up and down, checked my passport, looked at me again... and then printed out a label, peeled back the sticky part and slapped it onto my bag. I looked at it. It said 'MAD'. I looked at her. I felt mildly offended. How does she know me? I thought.
I'm a psychologist you see. They say you're either mad before you start a degree in psychology, or absolutely insane by the time you finish. But how did she know? Perhaps it was just co-incidence, I said to myself. Then she stuck another 'MAD' label on my other piece of luggage.
Damn it, I thought - it's no mistake. This is a trend. She really thinks I'm mad. In a moment she's going to stick one on me too.
And then it dawned on me ... Airlines have a propensity to make the first three letters of your destination city into abbreviations and use them as labels on your baggage. Now I know this, I feel better. In fact I'm very much looking forward to travelling to Singapore later in the year. If I get into trouble with the authorities there, I'll simply point to my baggage labels and claim that the airline company gave me explicit instructions. What could possibly go wrong?
How often do we label our students? He's very bright, she's brilliant.... he's not such a hard worker, and that one over there is a real trouble maker.... Often we spend just a short amount of time with our students before we build an impression of their characters. Then we begin to label them. And then we think we know them. Our attitudes towards each student begins to harden and we think we can predict what they will do next. I hate hearing from other teachers what my new group of students is like. I would rather find out for myself what they can do, without any preconceived expectations or prejudices.
An interesting psychological study by Rosenthal and Jacobson back in the 1960s showed the problems and benefits that can occur in education when we label children. The Pygmalion effect, as it's known can be beneficial. If teachers ascribe great expectations onto their students, those students tend to perform better as a result. Perhaps this is because when teachers believe students are bright or hard working, they tend to lavish a little more time on supporting them than they do students who they believe to be less able or less hard working. And there's the rub. The reverse (or the Golem effect) can also occur. When teachers see students as time wasters, and expect less from them, those students tend to under perform. This kind of self-fulfilling prophecy has been shown time and again to emerge because of the way teachers perceive the potential of various students. I know personally that this can happen. Some of my previously failing students have come to me (several of whom have been thrown out of other courses) and have asked me to support them, to give them a second chance. I have seen these 'failing' students transformed into people who love learning, and who will go that extra mile or two, simply because someone has believed in them. They have ended up becoming great successes.
So next time you start off with a new group of students, don't jump to any quick conclusions. Don't label your students. Believe in them all. Treat each one as if they have the potential to succeed. Because if you believe they do, and you tell them, they are likely to believe it too. ... and they will be relying on you to support them.
Photo by Eddie Codel on Flickr
The labelling game by Steve Wheeler was written in Istanbul, Turkey is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
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