I was taking NLP training at the time, and it was the beginning of my fascination with the brain and belief networks. In NLP we were learning 'new behavior generators', which essentially are techniques to teach people, and for me specifically children, new behaviors to replace their less effective ones.
Quickly I realized that while I could teach them a new behavior, such as a spelling strategy that specifically gave them the 'how' to do it, they would fall back into the old pattern of loss of capability once they returned to the field of influence that held their 'identity pattern'.
Even though they would come in being a non-speller and leave being able to spell 'multiplication' backwards, which is no mean feat, try it, leave feeling successful, they would segue back to feeling overwhelmed and believing more in their inability than their new ability.
The quandry I found myself in was how do we maintain their belief in themselves and their own capabilities when everywhere around them gave the message that they couldn't? Change the schools? Teach the parents? Teach the teachers? It was overwhelming. You can't teach new behaviors if they still BELIEVE they are the old ones.
That means, their identity has become the behavior they are exhibiting. There have been lots of studies since that have documented and corroborated this affect. Teachers being told that the class of students in front of them are gifted when in fact they were the remedial, and the students, held within the teacher's expectation that they were gifted, blossomed and performed to the expectation of the teacher. By the same token, the students that were gifted were given to the remedial teacher and they also performed to the level that they were expected to.
So how often are our children, as well as ourselves, actually performing to the level of the field of expecation of those around us?