The labels which teachers give to pupils can influence the construction and development of students’ identities, or self-concepts: how they see and define themselves and how they interact with others. This in turn can affect their attitudes towards school, their behaviour, and ultimately their level of achievement in education.
Labelling refers to the process of defining a person or group in a simplified way – narrowing down the complexity of the whole person and fitting them into broad categories. At the simplest level labelling involves that first judgement you make about someone, often based on first-impressions – are they ‘worth making the effort to get to know more’, are you ‘indifferent to them’, or are they ‘to be avoided’.
According to labelling theory, teachers actively judge their pupils over a period of time, making judgments based on their behaviour in class, attitude to learning, previous school reports and interactions with them and their parents, and they eventually classifying their students according to whether they are ‘high’ or ‘low’ ability, ‘hard working’ or ‘lazy’, ‘naughty’ or ‘well-behaved’, ‘in need of support’ or ‘capable of just getting on with it’ (to give just a few possible categories, there are others!). (*See criticism one below).
According to a number of small-scale, interpretivist research studies of teacher labelling, the labels teachers give to students are sometimes based not on their behaviour but on a number of preconceived ideas teachers have about students based on their ethnic, gender or social class background, and thus labelling can be said to be grounded in stereotypes.
A closely related concept to labelling theory is the that of the self-fulfilling prophecy – where an individual accepts their label and the label becomes true in practice – for example, a student labelled as deviant actually becomes deviant as a response to being so-labelled.
Labelling theory is one of the main parts of social action, or interactionist theory, which seeks to understand human action by looking at micro-level processes, looking at social life through a microscope, from the ground-up.
Classic studies on teacher labelling in education
Most of the work of labelling theory applied to education was done in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Three classic works, summarised below include:
- David Hargreaves (1975) Deviance in Classrooms
- R.C. Rist (1970) Student Social Class and Teachers’ Expectations: The Self-Fulfilling Prophecy of Ghetto Education
- Rosenthal and Jacobson (1968) Pygmalion in the Classroom (the ‘famous’ self-fulfilling prophecy experiment!)
David Hargreaves: Speculation, Elaboration, Stabilization
David Hargreaves et al (1975) in their classic book ‘Deviance in Classrooms’ analysed the ways in which students came to be typed, or labelled. Their study was based on interviews with secondary teachers and classroom observation in two secondary schools, focusing on how teachers ‘got to know their students’ entering the first year of the school.
Teachers have only a very limited idea about ‘who their students are’ as individuals when they first enter the school, based mainly on the area where they came from, and they thus have to build up an image of their students as the school year progresses. Hargreaves et al distinguished three stages of of typing or classification:
- Speculation
- Elaboration
- Stabilisation
In the first stage, that of speculation, the teachers make guesses about the types of student they are dealing with. The researchers noted that there were seven main criteria teachers used to type students:
- their appearance
- how far they conformed to discipline
- their ability and enthusiasm for work
- how likeable they were
- their relationship with other children
- their personality
- whether they were deviant.
Hargreaves et al stress that in the speculation stage, teachers are tentative in their typing, and are willing to amend their views, nevertheless, they do form a working hypothesis, or a theory about with sort of child each student is.
In the elaboration phase, each hypothesis is tested and either confirmed or contradicted, and through this process the typing of each student is refined.
When the third stage, stabilisation, is reached, the teacher feels that ‘he knows’ the students and finds little difficulty in making sense of their actions, which will be interpreted in light of the general type of student the teacher thinks they are. Some students will be regarded as deviant and it will be difficult for any of their future actions to be regarded in a positive light.
Labelling and social class
A lot of the early, classic studies on labelling focused on how teachers label according to indicators of social class background, not the actual ability of the student.
Student Social Class and Teachers’ Expectations
Research in one American Kindergarten by Ray C. Rist (1970) suggested that the process of labelling is not only much more abrupt than suggested by Hargreaves et al, but also that it is heavily influenced by social class.
Rist found that new students coming into the Kindergarten were grouped onto three tables – one for the ‘more able’, and the other two for the ‘less able’, and that students had been split into their respective tables by day eight of their early-school career. He also found that teachers made their judgments not necessarily on any evidence of ability, but on appearance (whether they were neat and tidy) and whether they were known to have come from an educated, middle class family (or not).
Aaron V. Cicourel and John I.Kitsuse (1963) conducted a study of the decisions counsellors made in one American high school.
The counsellors largely decided which students were to be placed on programmes that prepared them for college. They claimed that their decisions were based on the grades students achieved in school and the results of IQ tests, but there were discrepancies: not all students achieving high grades and IQ scores were being placed on college-preparation programmes by the counsellors.
They found that the social class backgrounds of students had an influence. Those from middle class backgrounds were more likely to be placed onto higher level courses even when they had the same grades as students from lower class backgrounds.
Cicourel and Kitsuse argued that counsellors decisions were based around a number of non academic criteria related to social class such as the clothes students wore, their manners and their general demeanour.
Similarly when deciding which students were to be classified as ‘conduct problems’ counsellors used criteria such as speech and hairstyles which were again related to social class.
In general those with middle class manners were more likely to be labelled good prospects for college while those with working class manners and style were more likely to be labelled as conduct problems.
Labelling theory and the self fulfilling prophecy
Self Fulling Prophecy Theory argues that predictions made by teachers about the future success or failure of a student will tend to come true because that prediction has been made. Thus if a student is labelled a success, they will succeed, if they are labelled a failure, the will fail.
The reasons for this are as follows (you might call these the positive effects of labelling):
- teachers will push students they think are brighter harder, and not expect as much from students they have labelled as less-able.
- Building on the above point, a positive label is more likely to result in a good student being put into a higher band, and vice versa for a student pre-judged to be less able.
- Positively labelled students are more likely to develop positive attitude towards studying, those negatively labelled an anti-school attitude.
- The above may be reinforced by peer-group identification.
It follows that in labelling theory, the students attainment level is, at least to some degree, a result of the interaction between the teacher and the pupil, rather than just being about their ability.
A classic study which supports the self fulfilling prophecy theory was Rosenthal and Jacobson’s (1968) study of an elementary school in California. They selected a random sample of 20% of the student population and informed teachers that these students could be expected to achieve rapid intellectual development.
They tested all students at the beginning of the experiment for IQ, and again after one year, and found that the RANDOMLY SELECTED ‘spurter’ group had, on average, gained more IQ than the other 80%, who the teachers believed to be ‘average’. They also found that the report cards for the 20% group showed that the teachers believed this group had made greater advances in reading.
Rosenthal and Jacobson speculated that the teachers had passed on their higher expectations to students which had produced a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Gender, ethnicity and labelling
A considerable amount of research has been done into the ways in which students of different genders and ethnicities are labelled by teachers.
One classic study of gender and labelling was John Abraham’s research in which he found that teachers had ideas of ‘typical boys’ and typical girls’, expecting girls to be more focused on schoolwork and better behaved than boys in general. Teachers also had higher expectations of girls than boys.
The issue of gender and labelling is covered in more depth in this post: Gender and educational achievement: in school processes.
Many studies have also focused on how teachers label differentially based on both gender and ethnicity simultaneously.
David Gilborn (1990), for example, has argued that teachers have the lowest expectations of Black boys and even see them as a threat, while Connolly (1998) found that teachers label Asian boys’s disruptive behaviour as immature rather than deliberately disruptive, so they weren’t punished as severely as Black Boys. Meanwhile Asian girls were largely ignored because they were seen as passive and not willing to engage in class discussion.
The issue of ethnicity and education is covered in more depth here: Ethnicity and differential achievement: in school processes
Contemporary research on labelling theory
Waterhouse (2004), in case studies of four primary and secondary schools, suggests that teacher labelling of pupils as either normal/ average or deviant types, as a result of impressions formed over time, has implications for the way teachers interact with pupils.
Once these labels are applied and become the dominant categories for pupils, they can become what Waterhouse called a ‘pivotal identity’ for students – a core identity providing a pivot which teachers use to interpret and reinterpret classroom events and student behaviour.
For example, a student who has the pivotal identity of ‘normal’ is likely to have an episode of deviant behaviour interpreted as unusual, or as a ‘temporary phase’ – something which will shortly end, thus requiring no significant action to be taken; whereas as a student who has the pivotal identity of ‘deviant’ will have periods of ‘good behaviour’ treated as unusual, something which is not expected to last, and thus not worthy of recognition.
Criticisms of the labelling theory of education
Negative labelling can sometimes have the opposite effect – Margaret Fuller’s (1984) research on black girls in a London comprehensive school found that the black girls she researched were labelled as low-achievers, but their response to this negative labelling was to knuckle down and study hard to prove their teachers and the school wrong.
Given the above findings it should be no surprise that the Rosenthal and Jacobson research has been proved unreliable – other similar experimental studies reveal no significant effects.
Labelling theory attributes too much importance to ‘teacher agency’ (the autonomous power of teachers to influence and affect pupils) – structural sociologists might point out that schools themselves encourage teachers to label students. In some cases entry tests, over which teachers have no control, pre-label students into ability groups anyway, and the school will require the teacher to demonstrate that they are providing ‘extra support’ for the ‘low ability’ students as judged by the entry test.
One has to question whether teachers today actually label along social class lines. Surely teachers are among the most sensitively trained professionals in the world, and in the current ‘aspirational culture’ of education, it’s difficult to see how teachers would either label in such a way, or get away with it if they did.
Signposting
This post has been written primarily for A-level sociology students, although it will hopefully be a useful primer for anyone with a general interest in this subject.
Labelling Theory is one of the main theories taught as part of the education module, and it is one of the main ‘in-school process’ students need to understand, alongside banding and streaming and student subcultures.
Students can also use this material to illustrate some of the key ideas of social action theory more generally when they study social theory in more depth in their second year.
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Sources/ Find out More
- David Hargreaves (1975) Deviance in Classrooms
- R.C. Rist (1970) Student Social Class and Teachers’ Expectations: The Self-Fulfilling Prophecy of Ghetto Education
- Rosenthal and Jacobson (1968) Pygmalion in the Classroom (the ‘famous’ self-fulfilling prophecy experiment!)
- Haralambos and Holborn (2013) Sociology Themes and Perspectives.
