High Expectations Teaching

How We Persuade Students to Believe and Act on "Smart Is Something You Can Get"

Jon Saphier,

High Expectations Teaching: How We Persuade Students to Believe and Act on "Smart Is Something You Can Get"

The myth of fixed intelligence debunked

For all the productive conversation around "mindsets," what’s missing are the details of how to convince our discouraged and underperforming students that "smart is something you can get." Until now. 

With the publication of High-Expectations Teaching, Jon Saphier reveals once and for all evidence that the bell curve of ability is plain wrong—that ability is something that can be grown significantly if we can first help students to believe in themselves. 

In drill-down detail, Saphier provides an instructional playbook for increasing student confidence and agency in the daily flow of classroom life:

  • Powerful  strategies for attribution retraining, organized around  50 Ways to Get Students to Believe in Themselves  
  • Concrete examples, scripts, and classroom structures and routines for empowering student agency and choice
  • Dozens of accompanying videos showing high-expectations strategies in action

All children in all schools, regardless of income or social class, will benefit from the strategies in this book. But for children of poverty and children of color, our proficiency with these skills is essential . . . in many ways life saving. Jon Saphier challenges us all—educators, students, and parents—to get started today.

About Jon Saphier

The author of nine books, including The Skillful Teacher, Jon Saphier is founder and president of Research for Better Teaching, Inc. (RBT), a professional development organization dedicated since 1979 to improving classroom teaching and school leadership throughout the United States and internationally.


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