mindset & expectations

Inside a classroom we find students and teachers with different skills and talents: between the students, there are the ones who have greater ease in math, languages or even arts or sports; among teachers, the most experienced stand out, or the ones with more specialization levels in his area. Besides that, there are also students and teachers motivated to win challenges faced during the school journey for believing in the power of transformation of the educational process and driven by the will to learn with each other and with their own mistakes.

Central part of teachers and students motivations is explained by the intense and strict relation between these agents, especially because the beliefs and expectations that rule these relations affect both the teachers teaching capacity, and the student learning capacity. The authors of an important experiment realized in the 60's in California named the effect of teachers expectation on the student performance Pygmalion Effect: if the teachers believe that their students have little learning potential, they act accordingly and develop an wicked reinforcement cycle to low learning expectations. The expectation flow between teachers and students influences, in this way, not only the belief a teacher upon his student potential, but also the student belief in himself.

The students beliefs upon his own potential, on the other hand, has taken us to another theory (more recent, but algo very important and known): Mindset theory, developed by Professor Carol Dweck, from the psychology department of Stanford University. Mindset breaks into two types of mentality: Fixed Mindset and Growth Mindset. People with Fixed Mindset believe that their abilities are poorly malleable (or not at all), this is, can not be develop during life, thus having less incentive to effort and worring more about looking good. Already, people with Growth Mindset believe that the amount of effort they put in their goals and tasks is determinant for their success, and, mainly, for their learning.
image1
Driven by this literature and the set of international evidence that reinforce the importance of students and teachers expectations and mindset uopn education quality, as well as for the lack of evidence in the brazilian educational context, developing a psychological instrument to capture different dimensions of these theories and went to fiel in 2018 for it's validation, in partnership with Fundação Lemann, starting a Mindset and Expectation agenda in Brazil. With the goal to produce evidence of how these vaiables relate with other brazilian educational problems and to suppor the devolpmen of public policies that aim to improve school development and the quality of socio-emotional relations of teachers and students inside the school enviroment.

Rua do Professor, 370, apto 193, Ribeirão Preto

contato@avancar.org.br
(16) 3315-3918

© 2019 Neve Agency