The tricky business of expectations: ESL students and their career aspirations

I've been asked to help English as a Second Language (ESL) students at a local high school develop realistic and alternative expectations for post-secondary options. The issue stems from the fact that many of the students think that they are going to be surgeons or lawyers but are struggling to pass basic math courses. This is not as "simple" as just building their linguistic ability so that they can do the math work (or other subjects) but a more complex issue of realizing that they might not have the aptitude for such careers.

This is not really that different than the experience of non-ESL students: We all dream of different careers when we are young and these get tempered as we get older. Some of this is because we start determining what we would enjoy and be successful at. But it's also because we start to develop a more realistic sense of our own abilities.

The difference for some ESL students is that career aspirations may be a "shared" expectation. By this I mean that the career aspirations may be "assigned" to them by their parents, either overtly ("you are going to be a pharmacist") or covertly through interactions and innuendos. Parents of ESL students have often had to overcome incredible obstacles to live in Canada. They may feel that their sacrifices should lead their children, with enough work and focus, to embark on the most respectable and highest-paying professions possible.

Expectations are tricky ... we promote a "can do" attitude in schools (e.g., growth mindset) but we are also accountable to ensure that we are not supporting unrealistic expectations. Part of our job is to work diligently to ensure that students are learning beyond what they could do by themselves but at the same time helping students recognize that they may not have the skill set or cognitive ability for certain careers.

This reminds me of Lev Vygotsky's Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD):

http://www.innovativelearning.com/educational_psychology/development/zone-of-proximal-development.html

Teachers work in the ZPD (that would be a great name for a book or movie!). We help students do more than what they could do (or be) by themselves. But there are limits to the ZPD and we need to help students (and parents/guardians) carefully manage unrealistic expectations so that students are challenged to go beyond what they think is possible while not living with unrealistic and unattainable expectations.

It's a funny business ... we want students to reach for the stars but we also want to temper that with the reality that most of us are going to work on this planet!