Although there is no evidence whatsoever to indicate that Suggestopedia was influenced by Robert Rosenthal and his work on Pygmalion in the classroom, the ideas of Lozanov and Rosenthal regarding the role and impact of the teacher in the classroom are remarkably similar and were developed and advanced at about the same time, viz. the late 1960s. Indeed, when I presented a paper on Rosenthal’s experiments at the First International Symposium on the Problems of Suggestology in Varna, Bulgaria in June 1971 (Bancroft, 1973), I received an enthusiastic response from members of the (then) Soviet and East German delegations as well as from members of the Institute of Suggestology. The enthusiasm had to do, in my opinion, with the recognition that Rosenthal had done work similar to that of suggestopedic researchers.
In the book which he coauthored with Lenore Jacobson, Pygmalion in the Classroom, Rosenthal (1968) gives a statistical basis to the message contained in George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion, viz. that Pygmalion transforms the pupil and then is influenced in turn. The central idea of Rosenthal’s book is similar to Lozanov’s concepts of authority and infantilization in Sugestologiia: the teacher must be competent, on the one hand, and, on the other, be able to project a warm, sympathetic personality in the classroom so that the student (or pupil) feels at ease and has confidence in his (or her) abilities.
According to Rosenthal, people do what is expected of them; one person’s expectations of another’s behavior may come to serve as a self-fulfilling prophecy. (In the same manner, self-expectancy has an influence on one’s behavior; those who fear failure often fail;
those who expect success, usually succeed). The rise and, fall of economic institutions such as banks and the stock market has been attributed to the operation of expectation. In a 1950 essay, “The Role of Expectancy,” Gordon Allport presented the argument that
nations that expect to go to war, do so; those that expect to remain at peace avoid international conflicts. In medicine, too, the self-fulfilling prophecy may have either positive or negative consequences. In psychotherapy, the therapist’s own belief about the patient’s prognosis is a determinant of that prognosis; the mentally ill who are regarded as curable are often cured. Insofar as physical illness is concerned, new drugs are often more effective in the initial stages of their career as the doctor has few doubts about their efficacity; the doctor’s enthusiastic voice and confidence in what he (or she) is prescribing is communicated to the patient so that the drug exerts an additional “placebo” effect. Behavioral scientists also have some expectation or prophecy about the results of their experiments. Far from being an impersonal observer, the interviewer uses auditory and visual cues to communicate his/her expectancy to the respondent or interviewee who replies as prophesied. The more personable and relaxed the interviewer, the more the results correspond to what was expected. (The subjects in scientific experiments are also influenced by interviewers who are regarded as extremely competent and of higher status; Lozanov found that students perform better in educational institutions considered as prestigious). The scientist or experimenter, in effect,
“teaches” the subject the desired response. Researchers tend to obtain the data they expect to obtain.
In pure scientific research, Rosenthal found that those animals who were believed to be better performers became better performers. When experimenters were led to believe that their animal subjects were more favorably endowed genetically, their animals’ performance was superior. Rats did far better in tests when experimenters were told (falsely) that the rats had been specially bred for intelligence. Those experimenters who believed their animals to be “Skinner-box bright” handled them relatively more often than did experimenters believing their animals to be dull. This more careful observation of the “intelligent” rat’s “Skinner-box”
behavior led to the more rapid and appropriate reinforcement of the desired response. When experimenters were led to believe that their animal subjects were genetically inferior, these animals performed poorly. In reality, of course, there were no genetic differences between the animals that had been alleged to be dull or bright. Animals expected to perform well, do so; animals expected to perform incompetently tend to perform as prophesied.
In Rosenthal’s book, Pygmalion in the Classroom, two of the three sections are devoted to teaching and teacher expectation.
Rosenthal found that the subject’s performance of an intellectual task was determined intentionally (or unintentionally) by the prophecy of the teacher or examiner. When teachers have a low opinion of the children’s learning ability, the children seldom exceed those expectations (the so-called “halo” effect: when certain things are known and believed about someone, other things are implied).
The dull child is often further disadvantaged by his (or her) teacher’s setting standards that are inappropriately low. (Wilson [1963]
found that teachers hold up lower standards for lower class children than for children from the “better part of town”). Sometimes the teacher recognizes disadvantages, sometimes he or she creates them.
The lower class child may be even further underestimated by the results of standardized tests; he or she is then labelled as an underachiever and, once placed in the slow track, tends to stay there. On the other hand, when teachers expect that children will show greater intellectual development, those children do show greater intellectual development. By what he/she says, the manner in which s/he says it; by his (or her) facial expressions, gestures and tone of voice; by auditory and visual stimuli; the teacher communicates to the pupils an expectation of improved intellectual performance. More competent work is obtained (according to Rosenthal’s and Lozanov’s findings) by teachers and examiners with “warmer” personalities. When children are expected to gain intellectually and are given more attention by the teacher, they perform better and are then more likely to be evaluated against a higher standard. Teachers may not only get more when they expect more, they may also come to expect more when they get more.
Rosenthal’s experiments in teacher expectation that form the basis of his Pygmalion in the Classroom were conducted with school children in the 1960s in a San Francisco elementary school (Spruce School or, in the book, “Oak School”). A random sample of children predicted to make dramatic gains in school work actually made those gains, while the rest of the student body did not. Only the teachers (and not the pupils or parents) were given the predictions. Although, for ethical reasons, no child was predicted to be dull, Rosenthal’s tests, conducted in the 1960s, provided important empirical evidence for the common belief that many children, particularly minority group children, turn out dull because their teachers expect them to be dull.
About a sixth of the 650 students in the San Francisco school were Mexican children, the only minority group enrolled. Mexicans were over-represented in the slow track of the school’s three-track
system and under-represented in the fast track. In the spring of 1964, with principal Lenore Jacobson’s permission, Rosenthal administered an IQ test to all pupils in the kindergarten and the first five grades of “Oak School.” Teachers were falsely told that the test would show which pupils were due to spurt ahead academically.
They were given the names of 20 per cent of the student body, randomly selected from all grades and all three tracks (“fast,”
“medium” and “slow”), and were told that every pupil listed would improve dramatically within a year. The difference between the special and the ordinary child was thus in the mind of the teacher.
A year later, when all the children still in school were retested, the “spurters” showed an average IQ gain of 12.22 points, compared with 8.42 for a control group representing the rest of the student body. The dramatic gains came in grades 1 and 2—increases of 27.4 in grade 1 and 16.5 in grade 2. Seventy-nine per cent of the spurters and 49 per cent of the control group showed absolute gains of 10 or more IQ points in the first two grades. According to Rosenthal (and J.P.Scott in a 1962 article, “Critical Periods in Behavioral Development”), the large gains in the early grades can be attributed to the fact that young children are more malleable than older ones and more sensitive to teacher expectations. Not only are younger children easier to change than older ones; younger children have less well-established reputations within a given school. A teacher may “know” an older child much better by reputation and be less inclined to believe him or her capable of intellectual growth simply on someone else’s say-so.
The pupils of Mexican descent were found to gain more by favorable expectations than the other children and, in particular, the Mexican boys showed the greatest advantage of having been expected to grow intellectually. Among the spurters, Mexican boys (but not girls) whose faces looked somewhat more “Mexican”
showed higher IQ gains than those with more “Anglo-Saxon” faces.
According to Rosenthal, there is no clear explanation for these findings, but one can speculate that the teachers’ pre-experimental expectancies of the more Mexican-looking boys’ intellectual performance were probably lowest of all. These children probably had the most to gain by the introduction of a more favorable expectation into the minds of their teachers.
In addition to the comparison of the “special” and the ordinary children on their gains in IQ, it was possible to compare their gains after the first year of the experiment on school achievement, as defined by report-card grades. Only for the school subject of reading
was there a significant difference in gains in report-card grades. The children expected to bloom intellectually were judged by their teachers to show greater advances in reading ability. Just as in the case of IQ gains, it was the younger children who showed the greater expectancy advantage in reading scores. The more a given grade-level had benefited in over-all IQ gains, the more that same grade level benefited in reading scores. It was the children of the medium track who showed the greatest expectancy advantage in terms of reading ability, just as they had been the children to benefit most in terms of IQ from their teachers’ favorable expectations.
At the end of the school year of 1965–66 (or about 20–24 months after the start of the program), the children of “Oak School” were tested for a final time. This follow-up testing was carried out to see whether any advantages of favorable teacher expectations could last two years, especially after the second year had been spent in a classroom whose teacher had not been told which of the children were “special.” Rosenthal found that after two years the overall magnitude of expectancy advantage had increased slightly over what it had been after only one semester but decreased slightly over what it had been after one year; middle track children, however, benefited most after the second year.
Teacher expectations are a powerful determinant, not only for the “special” pupils but also for the other class members, including the teacher. Rosenthal found that the greater the gain made by children of whom gain was expected, the greater the gain made in the same classroom by children from whom no special gain was expected. Perhaps, as in the Shaw play, the pupils transformed Pygmalion. Teachers may have treated all their children in a more pleasant, friendly and encouraging fashion and watched all their children more attentively as a result of the “special” pupils.
Rosenthal’s research on the psychology of unintentional influence relates to Lozanov’s Suggestopedia in a number of ways.
In the suggestopedic classroom, the teacher must have high expectations for his/her students (i.e., believe that all students can learn more than has traditionally been believed possible) and communicate these expectations both directly (i.e., verbally) and indirectly (i.e., nonverbally). To overcome the unintentional communication of interpersonal expectations, the teacher must be aware (or made aware), not only of the importance of what s/he says but also of the impact on the students of his/her body language, facial expressions and tone of voice. The self-fulfilling prophecy can be related to the effects of suggestive processes; students become
more talented if they are treated as talented. Lozanov goes further than Rosenthal by saying that the teacher must be trained in the art of verbal and nonverbal suggestion and, like a trained actor, must become a veritable artist in his/her profession. Rosenthal found that the warmer personality gets the better results. According to Suggestopedia, the teacher must show care and concern for each individual student as well as for the group as a whole. Rosenthal found that younger children are more malleable and more open to suggestion(s) than older ones; according to Lozanov, everything possible must be done in the classroom to make the students recover the spontaneity and suggestibility they had in childhood. In the first version of Suggestopedia, in addition to role-playing, songs and games, special techniques of mental and physical relaxation adapted from yoga were used for the process of “infantilization”; in the second variant (as we shall see), while the yogic elements are largely removed, the infantilization process is realized through the integration into the classroom proceedings of the various arts.