Virtual Teacher

Practically every day, school-age children experience a variety of troubling events and stress both at school and at home. These troublesome events may involve peers, significant adults such as teachers, and/or family members. It is widely documented in the psycho-educational literature that children’s difficulty in handling these troubling events and stressors in their lives result in emotional, behavioral, and/or physical health problems. Children feel stress when they believe that they lack the emotional and/or physical resources, or coping skills they need to handle the event successfully. The less able a child feels to cope with a troubling event, the more stress the child feels. In other words, the event is not what triggers stress in the child; stress and troubling feelings are triggered by the child’s perception, accurate or not, that she cannot cope with the event.   Forman (1993) define coping skills as sets of information and learned behaviors that the child can u...

  An expectation is a belief that some future event will happen. The cognitive literature agrees that our expectations greatly influence both the way we feel and the way we behave. Consciously or not, teachers constantly cue students as to what our behavior expectations are. We exhibit hundreds of nonverbal cues, some as subtle as tilting up the head, raising the eyebrows, head nods, the breathing rate, eye contact (or absence of eye contact), and/or the dilation of nostrils. Other cues are more obvious, including a certain tone of voice and our verbal messages, and children notice those cues and messages. Teachers’ expectations often play a major role in bringing about the behavior we expect from individual students. We transmit our higher or lower expectations to each individual student, and soon children begin to reflect the image that we have created, and may be inadvertently reinforcing in them. On most occasions, we are not even aware that we are expecting and communicating...