A powerful meditation on expectations from ‘Healing the Eight Stages of Life.

In one experiment called the ‘Self-Fulfilling Prophecy’, researchers told elementary teachers: “We are going to test your students to find spurters, the students who will blossom this year. ” After the testing they gave each teacher a list of the students who would be spurters. At the end of the year they retested the students and found that in each classroom the five students designated as spurters had advanced as much as three years in one year’s time, and their IQ scores had risen 12 – 36 points. The teachers were ecstatic and asked the researchers to return each year to identify the spurters. The researchers replied something like this: “You really don’t need us. We just took five names at random. You thought these five would be spurters so you paid extra attention to them. You had more positive expectations each time you ask them a question and so they answered in a way that would meet your expectations. Every student is shaped by your expectations”.