 Little five-year-olds bounce in the classroom door and within two to three weeks maximum, they're in an ability group where they're labelled and for the rest of their school life, pretty much, they remain in those ability groups. It sets them up for either achievement or failure right through schooling. The teacher expectation project was based around my research on high expectation teachers where I identified particular practices and beliefs of high expectation teachers that differed from those of other teachers. High expectation teachers are those who have high expectations for everybody in their class and they did things like not ability grouping, for example. They used flexible kinds of grouping. They created a very warm classroom climate so that it became like a little community where everyone worked together and they set very clear learning goals with their students and their children knew exactly where they were and where they were going next but they didn't make ability salient in the classroom day after day. Interestingly, New Zealand has the highest grouping rate of any OECD country and we also have the highest disparity between our highest and our lowest achievers. I don't think that's coincidence. I applied for a Marsden fast start grant and I was very fortunate to actually win it. We did an experimental study where we randomly assigned teachers to either the intervention group or the control group and then the intervention group were trained in the practices of high expectation teachers and they also learnt about verbal versus non-verbal behaviour. Why did you not bring your homework in? Why did you not bring your homework in? This one? He's really happy. He's probably praising. He's like, it's the morning. He's like, come on. You know better. Yeah, it's like that. He's clearly angry. He's cursing. He's telling off somebody. He's really angry. If a teacher expects you to do well, she pushes you and gives you work that's higher than your age. She doesn't do anything negative, nothing like that. It's everything positive to make you feel better. It definitely makes me feel more confident. She would let me do my best and she'll show me my gaps so I can work on it. Being part of the teacher expectation project was actually a real blessing. Lots of things just stuck with me. For example, the fact that about 30% of students are actually in the wrong group. They are not being assessed correctly or for whatever reason. Our grouping is entrenched in New Zealand, particularly in reading and interestingly, we got the largest effects in maths. The students in the intervention group gained 28% above what the control group gained over just one year. That's more than a whole-terms learning in one year. And it was mostly, I think, because teachers were more able to go away from ability grouping in maths because it's not quite as entrenched. Whereas in reading, they really struggled. Teachers in New Zealand just don't know how to teach reading without students being in ability groups. I've been developing a proposal for a project that I'm calling the HITE project which is high teacher expectation. We thought that we would train the mentor teachers rather than the teachers themselves because those are the management people who can then work with their teachers to embed the practices of high expectation teachers. When we had senior management people involved, their students did even better than in schools where management didn't really take an interest. The more that teachers engaged in the practices of high expectation teachers, the greater were the gains for their students.