Optimism, Creativity, and Resistance: Teachers and Teacher Educators Finding Ways Forward

Do educators need optimism? Dong and Xu (2022) define optimism as “a collective sense of beliefs about the strengths and positive points of a school and its constituent elements, namely teachers, students, staff, facilities, connections, and the like” (p. 2). In other words, optimism refers to a generally positive outlook on the future; optimistic teachers tend to believe they and their students can and will do well. Much research points toward the importance of teachers’ optimism for their students’ ability to learn. Perhaps most well-known among such studies is Rosenthal and Jacobson’s (1968) “Pygmalion in the Classroom,” in which researchers found “dramatic” differences in IQ gains among elementary school students whom researchers led teachers to believe had special academic potential (p. 18). Noting scholars’ challenges in replicating Rosenthal and Jacobson’s (1968) Pygmalion effect and questioning how much teacher expectations may actually be manipulated in experimental studies, Gershenson (2022) examined teachers’ academic optimism—that is, their expectations about students’ academic outcomes, including short-term achievement as well as longer-term accomplishments such as college completion—and its effect on students. To answer his questions, Gershenson used data from the 2002 Educational Longitudinal Study (ELS) and the 2009 High School Longitudinal Study (HSLS). Participating cohorts were in the tenth grade in 2002 and 2009, respectively, and a decade or two out of high school by the time Gershenson completed his study, enabling Gershenson to examine their postsecondary school participation and early career trajectories. A key finding from Gershenson’s study was that regardless of K–12 school type (traditional public, charter, or private), having a math teacher who “fully expects a student to obtain a college degree (relative to one who thinks the student has no chance) boosts that student’s odds of college completion by about seventeen percentage points” (Gershenson, 2022, p. 15). In short, students achieve at higher levels when teachers expect them to succeed.