Your perceptions of pupils’ explanations

When talking to pupils, adults sometimes make assumptions about how they expect pupils to respond. However, pupils often do not fit those assumptions. For example, when we say ‘Tell the truth and you won’t be punished’, pupils understand that not telling the truth usually means they will be punished. They know that confidentiality means that the teacher will tell others – that it will not be kept a secret. Hence they tend to develop excuses and socially acceptable explanations to manage their self-presentation, and we, in effect, encourage them to do so. If a child fails to complete their homework, it is highly unlikely that they would say it was because they could not be bothered or were out late. More likely excuses include ‘the computer crashed’ or ‘someone stole my bag’ because such explanations are more likely to evoke sympathy than rebuke (see Juvonen, 1996 for a fuller discussion).

Attribution retraining helps to reveal the pupil’s mindset about how school works and their perceived status in it. A pupil with low self-worth may feel, for example, that the system is unfair, their work is rubbish and that nobody likes them, since after all they are essentially bad or worthless. Some pupils, when asked why they did or said something will immediately think ‘Because I am bad, useless and rubbish’, but they will not say it, because this answer would just get another negative reaction (eg ‘Don’t be silly, now why did you do [x]?’). For teachers, such a response from a pupil is not an explanation, but for many pupils, it is the only one (Bar-Tal, 1982 and Schunk, 1982). Questioning by the teacher leads such pupils into greater feelings of worthlessness, because they cannot satisfy the teacher’s demands. Even if the pupil eventually does give in and admit doing or saying something, it is still their being that they see as the problem.