High Expectations Teaching

The myth of fixed intelligence debunked

For all the productive conversation around “mindsets,” what’s missing are the details of how to convince our discouraged and underperforming students that “smart is something you can get.” Until now.

With the publication of High-Expectations Teaching, Jon Saphier reveals once and for all evidence that the bell curve of ability is plain wrong—that ability is something that can be grown significantly if we can first help students to believe in themselves.

In drill-down detail, Saphier provides an instructional playbook for increasing student confidence and agency in the daily flow of classroom life:

• Powerful strategies for attribution retraining, organized around 50 Ways to Get Students to Believe in Themselves
• Concrete examples, scripts, and classroom structures and routines for empowering student agency and choice
• Dozens of accompanying videos showing high-expectations strategies in action

All children in all schools, regardless of income or social class, will benefit from the strategies in this book. But for children of poverty and children of color, our proficiency with these skills is essential…in many ways life saving. Jon Saphier challenges us all—educators, students, and parents—to get started today.