A long history of research shows that teacher expectations can have a profound impact upon students’ academic outcomes (Jussim & Harber, 2005; Rosenthal & Jacobson, 1968; Rubie‐Davies, Hattie, & Hamilton, 2006). Students experience these teacher expectations through classroom interactions that communicate if, what, and how teachers expect their students to achieve academically at school (Bohlmann & Weinstein, 2013; Rubie-Davies, 2014).  This presentation will share snapshots of findings from a study that generated substantive grounded theory about how teacher expectations effect students, characterising student experiences of high teacher expectations.

The qualitative study upon which this presentation is based was situated in the interpretivist paradigm, drawing upon the theoretical framework of symbolic interactionism (Blumer, 1969; Snow, 2001). Grounded theory methodology was used to generate substantive theory (Corbin & Strauss, 2008; Glaser & Strauss, 2017), which is a suitable choice for research based on the theory of symbolic interactionism (Aldiabat & Navenec, 2011). A conceptual framework was developed through the literature about symbolic interactionism, grounded theory, and teacher expectations to investigate the conditional context and the actions, interactions, and emotions that contribute to students’ experiences of their perceived teacher expectations of them.

To develop these findings, more than 175 shadow-study observations of the Year 10 students were conducted over the course of a week of each of their classes, across an array of their school subjects with a wide range of teachers, with more than 100 follow up interviews with the students. Students who experience disadvantage are more likely to be affected by their teachers’ expectations for their achievement, so government schools with mid-low indexes of socio-economic disadvantage were selected. The students were selected based on recommendations from the school staff, student participants, and observations by the researcher as those who appeared to be affected by their teacher expectations.

The findings that will be overviewed convey student voices about how their academic outcomes are positively affected by high teacher expectations. Students achieve more highly when they experience classroom interactions with their teachers that communicate high expectations, such as teachers’ respecting them, using constructivist teaching methods, caring for them, and creating a classroom environment that satisfies their needs. When students experience interactions that communicate high expectations, they feel confident, included, valued, calm, and engaged. These responses lead to the students taking actions that they believe improve their academic outcomes, such as focusing, seeking help and feedback from the teacher, doing extra schoolwork, studying, engaging positively in learning, and working independently. Synthesised representations of these student appraisals of teachers, responses, and actions, will be presented to capture the students’ experiences of high teacher expectations.

The European educational research community will find these results from the Western Australian context relevant because they articulate new theory that is transferable to a European context. Many recent studies from the Netherlands continue to show that students are affected by their teachers’ expectations (de Boer, Timmermans, & van der Werf, 2018; Ritzema, Deunk, Bosker, & van Kuijk, 2016; Timmermans, van der Werf, & Rubie-Davies, 2019) and this study gives students voice in this research area to explain how the expectation effect occurs. Student voice is a relevant construct in the current European educational climate, where scholarship from countries including Ireland (Fleming, 2017; Hall, 2017) and Italy (Ianes, Cappello, & Demo, 2017) have followed on from earlier student voice work from England (Fielding & Rudduck, 2002; Rudduck, 2007) to speculate about how students can be offered authentic voice in education. The research presented in this IGNITE session will capture a method conducted in the Australian context where researchers work with students to develop new theory together.

This study employed grounded theory methods of the classical tradition (Corbin & Strauss, 2008; Glaser & Strauss, 2017). Symbolic interactionism is the theoretical framework in which the study was situated, which asserts that people and social worlds are mutually constructed based on interactions and the meaning that people attach to themselves that their world (Blumer, 1969; Powell, 2014). Grounded theory is based on a philosophical foundation of symbolic interactionism (Chamberlain-Salaun, Mills, & Usher, 2013; Corbin & Strauss, 2008; Ezzy, 2002), so it was chosen as a suitable and well established qualitative approach to achieve this study’s aim of generating new theory about how students experience their teachers’ expectations of them. Grounded theory methods are useful for research that seeks to generate new theory (Corbin & Strauss, 2008; Glaser & Strauss, 2017). In grounded theory, the researcher moves ‘up’ through levels of theoretical abstraction while always remaining connected to the ground – the data. In order to purposefully select data that would best help me understand the problem and answer the research question (Creswell, 1994; Morehouse & Maykut, 2002), I used theoretical sampling to intentionally seek out students who were experiencing effects of their teacher expectations . I followed each of the 25 student participants across a course of a week each of their secondary school classes, observing their interactions with their teachers and interviewing them about these interactions each day. The data were analysed progressively after each day, which meant that every day of classroom observations and interviews was coded and analysed before returning to the field for more data collection. This allowed for maximization of opportunities for the theory to be constructed by seeking out the variations, dimensions and relationships between concepts of the topic (Corbin & Strauss, 2008). Saturation was reached with the 23rd student participant, and confirmed with the observations and interviews of the final two students. The data had then been analysed and synthesised into a theory that explains the process through which students are affected by their teachers’ expectations, from the students’ points of view. This includes a characterisation of how students experience high teacher expectations and how these expectations positively affect their academic outcomes.

The results of the study include a theory that explains how students are affected by their teachers’ expectations of them. After the data were analysed and synthesised, composite narratives (Todres, 2007) were written to convey the study’s findings in a way that is readable, transferable, and projects the students’ voices (Gendlin, 2004; Wertz, Nosek, McNiesh, & Marlow, 2011). This presentation includes extracts from these narratives in an IGNITE presentation, focusing on the student experience of high teacher expectations that improve their academic outcomes. After outlining the study in the first three slides, four slides will offer student views on teachers who communicate high expectations through respect, constructivist teaching, relationships, and needs-satisfying classroom environments. The next four slides will give students’ words about their responses of feeling confident, included, valued, and engaged. The final four slides will tell students’ stories of experiencing improved outcomes when they act on these responses by studying, seeking feedback, focusing, and working independently. The final slide will enforce the relevance of these findings for a European audience, who may find these student experiences transferrable to different contexts.

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