Research spanning two decades indicates that effective teaching demands the orchestration of a wide array of skills that must be adapted to specific contexts. Brophy reviews research that indicates that students achieve more when their teachers emphasize academic objectives in establishing expectations and allocating time, use effective management strategies to ensure that academic learning time is maximized, pace students through the curriculum briskly but in small steps that allow high rates of success, and adapt curriculum materials based on their knowledge of students' characteristics. Teachers differ in how they perform such instructional behaviors as giving information, asking questions, and providing feedback. Brophy concludes that any attempt to improve student achievement must be based on the development of effective teaching behavior. He considers the utility and limits of research on teaching and student achievement and cautions against its direct application to policy issues of teacher accountability.—The Editors

The literature on self-fulfilling prophecy effects is reviewed, with emphasis on its application to in-service teachers and their students. It is concluded that a minority of teachers have major expectation effects on their students' achievement, but that such effects are minimal for most teachers because their expectations are generally accurate and open to corrective feedback. It is difficult to predict the effects of teachers' expectations, even with knowledge of their accuracy and the degree of rigidity with which they are held, because expectations interact with beliefs about learning and instruction to determine teacher behavior (so that similar expectations may lead to different behavior), and because students will differ in their interpretation of and response to teacher behavior (so that similar behavior may produce different student outcomes).Although Merton defined and illustrated the concept of the self-fulfilling prophecy in 1948, and although Kenneth Clark (1965) and others had identified low teacher expectations as one cause of the low achievement of students in ghetto schools, it was not until publication of Rosenthal and Jacobson's (1968) Pygmalion in the Classroom that the topic of teacher expectations "arrived" on the educational scene. Since Rosenthal and Jacobson's landmark Oak School experiment, educational researchers have conducted well over 100 studies relating to teacher expectations, and writers of scholarly reviews and position papers have debated the degree to which teacher expectations appear to have self-fulfilling proph-

This thesis presents four activities that motivated my students in a public High School in a small city in Mexico to learn by inviting them be active participants in their language learning process. Added to the regular classroom work, these activities encouraged everyone to make an extra effort. Students had the opportunity to shine and to comprehend that they each have a greater potential for learning. Students gained another perspective about learning English. They were given the opportunity to enrich their experience not only in speaking English, but in applying their efforts to new challenges. They did so by writing and performing skits not only in class and on stage but also by preparing and editing written pieces for a magazine. Doing all these activities let students know that they could shine in different ways by developing a positive attitude and feeling self confident about their studies.iv

The processes by which teachers communicate differential performance expectations to different children were investigated through an observational study of dyadic contacts between teachers and individual students in four first-grade classrooms. Teachers ranked children in the class in order of their achievement. Two observers using an interaction analysis system recorded interactions between each teacher and each of three boys and three girls high on her list and three boys and three girls low on her list. Differential teacher expectations for different children were associated with a variety of interaction measures, although may of these relationships are attributable to objective differences in the behavior of the children, However, other differential teacher behavior was observed which is not attributable to objective differences among the children and which is consistent with the hypothesis that differential teacher expectations function as self-fulfilling prophecies. The teachers demanded better performance from those children for whom they had higher expectations and were more likely to praise such performance when it was elicited. In contrast, they were more likely to accept poor performance from students for whom they heed ldw expectations and were less likely to praise good performance from these students when it occurred, even though it occurred less frequently.

Classroom-process data indicate that teachers’ verbal praise cannot be equated with reinforcement. Typically, such praise is used infrequently, without contingency, specificity, or credibility. Often it is not even intended as reinforcement, and even when it is, it frequently has some other function. The meanings and functions of behaviors typically included under the category of teacher praise are determined by the degree of congruence between verbal and nonverbal components and by the context in which the interaction occurs. Much teacher praise is determined more by teachers’ perceptions of student needs than by the quality of student conduct or performance. Considerations of classroom feasibility and probable student response to teachers’ attempts at social reinforcement suggest that teacher praise should remain infrequent, but that it could be made much more effective. Attribution theory is an important supplement to social learning/reinforcement theory for suggesting guidelines for praising effectively.