“Other people’s
successes tend to be attributed to situational factors and their failures to
internal factors.”
The above statement may be true for a classroom.
As teachers we need to be very careful with the attributions we make about our
students. We can fall into the attributions tramp really easy. If we do not
evaluate our feelings and bias about the Socio-Economic Status or culture of
the ones we teach our classroom it’s at risk to become the ultimate fail
attribution.
For example, we may attribute to external
causes the F a student got, or we might attribute it to internal causes and we
say “He/she deserves it because is lazy”. On the other hand, we may think a
student with a perfect score of A’s got it because of external attributions “He
did it just because his father hired him a tutor”.
We can’t say either of these attributions
is correct. As Ivers reminded us “Every circumstance is different.
You can't just use these culturally created attributions in a sweeping way to
decide what your reality is, what your self-worth is, all that sort of thing”
The same with our students we can not allow
culturally created attributions borrow our view, poor people are not always
lazy and rich students are not always taking advantages. But again, the main
principle here is that every situation is different, and because of that we
need to allow ourselves to question whether the attributions is the right one
or not.
Hello Rebeca.
ReplyDeleteIt is true, we must be careful about the attributions, especially in a TESOL classroom. I think that you can be empathetic with your student when analyzing a situation.