Expectations and equal opportunities in gifted education

Bureau Talent would like to contribute to equal opportunities in gifted education. In our Erasmus+ project Creating Equal Opportunities at School, we developed an academic language curriculum with our international partners because gifted students from less advantaged families often lack the right vocabulary to convert their cognitive talent into good educational results. But there is more to do.

Unfortunately, young people from less advantaged families regularly have to deal with their teachers' (unconsciously) low expectations. Those low expectations act like a self-fulfilling prophecy, also known as the Golem effect. The expectations you have as a teacher have a strong association with the expectations your student has for success in your school subject. And the student adapts their own ambitions for your subject to your expectations. If they are low, this can lead to lower results, which, in turn, leads to low academic self-esteem in the student, which negatively affects the student's motivation. At the same time, your low expectations of this student are confirmed. This puts you and your student in a vicious circle, of which you are probably not even aware.

It is therefore important for teachers to have high expectations of their students. How do you do that? The NRO developed the High Expectations Guideline. They are made for primary education, but some are also very useful for secondary education. (Note: These are in Dutch). Some nice advice I recently heard: don't envision a cleaner's child but a child who might become a professor.

Do you want to know and/or learn more? Please contact Lineke van Tricht.