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Family And Teacher Expectations: Not only will parents bring varying skills and experiences into school but will also have different goals for and expectations of their children and of themselves. Often the expectations of the teacher or school can be at odds with those of the parents. As teachers, we are sometimes faced with parents whose values or educational or professional achievements are removed from our own. One of the most undermining experiences we can have is when a parent's expectations of his or her offspring are vastly disparate from our own.
Home-school relationships are never easy, because we have not defined what this whole concept means and agreed what it involves. It means something different for each teacher and for each set of parents: often the expectations and types of relationship vary with individual children in a family and teacher expectations. It is important to recognise that educators' relationships are different with either parent.
Twenty years ago Margaret Donaldson (1978) suggested that young children's inability to carry out correctly some of the Piagerian tasks was due to their failure to understand what was required of them, that they were tricked by the language, rather than unable to complete the task. She argued that all learning takes place within a particular context and if the child's expectations, based upon previous knowledge of the world, are different from the teacher's expectations then the child will 'fail'. |
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