Ability groups may demoralize weak students

You seldom come across a secondary school teacher who has not felt the pinch of increasing failure to take charge of the conduct of his or her students on account of strong peer influence. I have previously supported the need to teach young people to think for themselves as one way to address negative influence. But sometimes seemingly well-adjusted and capable students are misled by peers (commonly referred to as mates) into activities that do not contribute to their school success. I argue that this tendency is often rooted in such practices in school like ability grouping and the negative appraisal teachers often give weak students.

Self esteem and ability groups

Self-esteem is a self-maintenance motive. It is can be seen as a social product (consequence of social influence) or as a social force (a cause of social behaviour). School performance may be a cause of self-esteem. This is because academic success is a public and visible indicator of a pupil’s standing and society generally upholds academic success.

There are causal connections between low self-esteem, juvenile delinquency and poor academic performance. Prior poor performance in school brings some school authorities to draw categories of top performers, mediocre and poor performers. Ability grouping is a practice in some schools to place students in a given year in different streams according to their previous academic performance. You may have streams A, B and C with C being the class with the poorest grades. The aim of keeping these groups separate may be to give each group (especially C) the attention they need to improve. Unfortunately the C group may come to be looked on by some teachers as the students in whom there’s very little hope for improvement. I recall that my primary school had four streams with pupils achieving aggregate 4 and 5 learning together. With time even friendships I had with second grade students weakened because there were no longer close. In the A stream pupils who fooled around where sometimes threatened with instant deportation to stream D. In stream D the methods teachers used where different and sometimes 

To understand how teacher feedback is important in building or eroding esteem, let’s take a look at one principle of self-esteem formation—that is, reflected appraisal.  The principle of reflected appraisal holds that people’s feelings about themselves are strongly influenced by their judgments of what others think of them. Here self esteem is a product of social interaction. This principle has implications for ability grouping. 

The success of failure

Young people are very keen and can tell when a teacher does not care enough when they need help. Students with low self esteem often face undesirable conditions in school experiences that create feelings of doubt about their self-worth.  A peer group who live for entertainment may be the place where a youngster finds favourable reflected appraisals. This group replaces the negative feedback from teachers with positive reflected appraisals they receive from one another. In addition, defiance of authority in school may be played out before an appreciative audience of mates yielding positive reflected appraisal. A student may come to compare more favourably with peers in keeping up with the music charts than he or she does in classroom study. This student considers that they gather more positive self-attributions by observing success in keeping up-to-date with music than school work. A student’s failure to keep up with others in class becomes an avenue for acquiring positive appraisal from peers in activities in which they have genuine interest!

The stream of poor performers or those students who have little interest in school sometimes resist alteration of the image they have developed of themselves. As a result students are motivated to maintain the level of positive or negative judgments of their ability. The A class know they are good and often work hard to maintain their good grades. The trailing group is also constantly aware of their weakness and may not work any harder.

Optimism

Unless there is a deliberate effort by teachers to show that they have faith in weak students’ potential to work harder and excel, to constantly encourage and reward their every effort, weak students soon find alternative activities outside school that are rewarding and in which they obtain positive appraisal from peers. They may immerse themselves in sports, music or hanging around with little regard to any other responsibilities.

Teaching is a profession founded on optimism. It is here that people invest much time in others’ lives and future without any guarantee that beneficiaries will use their learning profitably. It is especially in the lives of students in various kinds of need (counsel, love or remedial tuition) that the most enduring and useful contribution of a teacher may be. 

(This article was first published with a few changes in the Daily Monitor newspaper)