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Transcript

Teaching With Poverty in Mind

-Eric Jenson

Most of the children who are living in a low income household, simply aren't equipped with a range of emotions for how to respond in certain situations.

We Must Help!

We are Hardwired ...

The majority of students who are acting out in classrooms, for example, a student with anger problems, only knows how to act angry in that circumstance, due to the fact that at their home, they aren't taught how to express any other emotions.

  • If you are puzzled and irritated by a students behavior avoid blame .... avoid demanding a change .... HELP the student change
  • If a student is showing improper responses, he/she needs to be taught the proper response - be careful not to assume they know remember we are only hardwired for so many things (sadness, anger, disgust, surprise, fear)

Children raised in poverty are are more likely to display ....

  • Acting out behaviors
  • Impatient and impulsive
  • Gaps in politeness and social graces (p.19)
  • A more limited range of behavioral responses
  • Inappropriate emotional responses
  • Less empathy for others misfortunes (p.19)

Examples

  • More than half of all poor children deal with evictions, utility disconnections, overcrowding, or lack of a stove or refrigerator, compared to only 14% of well off children
  • Other stressors include lack of proper supervision, physical neglect or abuse, difficulty forming healthy friendships, and vulnerability to depression

Can We Change Our Brain?

How does this increased stress affect school performance?

Students bring relational forces with them ....

Studies show that disciplinary strategies grow harsher as income decreases.

  • The drive for reliable relationships - you must build relationships
  • The strengthening of peer socialization - students want to belong, academic success must be acceptable
  • The quest for importance and social status - must "feel special", do not dismiss the social side of students lives - this "runs their brains, their feelings,and their behaviors" (p.20)

Action Steps ...

Embody respect, don't demand it

  • Give respect to students
  • Share decision making
  • Avoid demeaning sarcasm
  • Model adult thinking
  • Discipline through positive relationships not by exerting power or authority

Be Inclusive

Embed Social Skills

  • embed turn taking skills
  • Teach meet-and-greet skills
  • Teach how and why it's important to say thank you
  • Always refer to school as "our school"
  • Thank students for small things - "thanks for coming today"
  • Celebrate effort and achievement
  • The stress associated with poverty can devastating to the brain
  • Brains can and do change!
  • We cannot make kids smarter by stuffing more curriculum into their brains - "kids raised in poverty need more than just content - they need capacity" (p.54)
  • The must-haves of school success
  • Ability and motivation to defer gratification and make sustained effort to meet long term goals
  • Auditory, visual, and tactile processing skills
  • Attentional skills that enable the student to engage, focus, and disengage as needed
  • Short-term and working memory capacity
  • Sequencing skills
  • Confidence

These skills give students the capacity to override the adverse risk factors of poverty

More stress at home = more disruptive behavior in school.

Engagement Tips

Other Strategies ....

-Switch up social groups regularly (every 10-20 minutes)

-Incorporate movement (stations, switching etc…)

-Ask more compelling questions (not who saw this movie, but "How many of you have sen or experienced this in your life?"

-Appreciate and acknowledge every response

-Use energizers (games, dramas, simulations, demos, etc…)

-Keep the content alive with call backs, hand raisers stretching etc…

-Be passionate. If you don’t make it exciting and interesting, it won’t be!

Action Steps

Hope Building - students from low SES households need a "megadose" of hope. we make assumptions that low SES kids will have less access to resources, be more stressed, be sick more often. Although these things are often true, we can make a difference by providing hope. "Hope changes brain chemistry, which influences the decision we make and the actions we take. Hopefulness must be pervasive, and every single students should be able to feel it, see it, and hear it daily" (p.113).

Monty's story .....

  • Recognize signs - behavior that comes off as apathetic or rude may actually indicate feelings of hopelessness or despair
  • Reduce homework stress by incorporating time for homework in class or right after class
  • Use cooperative structures not top-down authoritarian approaches
  • Help students blow off steam by having celebrations, doing role plays, and by incorporating walks, relays, games, drama activities, and creative projects
  • Teach conflict resolution skills and how to deal with anger and frustration (count to ten, take deep breaths)
  • Role model how to solve real world problems
  • Teach responsibility and restitution - if I do something wrong (like throwing something) I have to make it right
  • Explicitly teach social skills (make eye contact when greeting someone, saying please and than you)
  • Introduce stress reducing techniques (dance, yoga, meditation)

It does not "work to pity kids raised in poverty and assume that their background dooms them to failure ... what works is to acknowledge that the human brain is designed to change from experiences and that if we design enough high quality experiences, over time we will get positive change"

"The research suggests that the worse off kids are, the greater potential gain" (p.64).

  • Remember tha IQ is not fixed! Brag about students who beat the odds - "kids change, and we can make it happen" the more people who know about positive changes the better.
  • Ask the following:
  • does every student have a caring adult whom he or she can go?
  • Does every student have some connection to peers (club, buddy program)
  • Is the curriculum enriching? Does it incorporate the arts and physical activity?

The following do not work:

  • Focusing only on basic skills (drill and kill)
  • Maintaining order through force
  • Eliminating or reducing time for arts, sports, and PE
  • Increasing classroom discipline
  • Decreasing interaction among students
  • delivering more heavy handed top down lectures

Enrichment Mind Set

Relationship Building

Accountability

"Doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result is a recipe for failure. [Our] school will get results only when [we] shift [our] collective mind-set from "those poor kids' to 'our gifted kids.' Stop thinking remediation and start thinking enrichment. the enrichment mind-set means fostering intellectual curiosity, emotional engagement, and social bonding" (p.94).

Hard Data

Support the Whole Child

Schoolwide Success Factors

Although at times overwhelming, data can be our friend and can help target specific needs for specific students

Which policies have the greatest positive impact on the brains of students raised in poverty?

Mentoring relationship can be a great foundation for school improvement

Action Steps:

• Build relationships among students

• Build student-staff relationships

- avoid raising voice unless it is emergency

- do what you say you are going to do

- acknowledge a change in plans if you need to make one

- never demand what you want … Always say please and thank you

- Own your mistakes and make amends

- be consistent and fair to all (show no favoritism)

- Offer all the support you can in helping students reach their goals

- Positively reinforce students when they do something right

- show care more than you show authority or knowledge

  • Consult assessment data to identify your school's or your class' areas of lowest performance, and then set a limited number of goals addressing those deficits
  • Work as a team to find better ways to teach the necessary skills and continuously refine these strategies by using a baseline and measuringthe number of students who actually learn the targeted skills
  • Create a specific plan and put it into action

"Passion comes from feeling responsible and accountable for results, which means its the rigor, intensity, and duration of the enriching education you provide that matters" (p.82)

What are you up against??? Each year a child has about 4,368 hours of which you get about 1,260 or 28%

"With the small proportion of their lives that you do have you cannot afford to put a student down or treat him unfairly. You cannot afford to bore a student or fail to engage her in class ...School needs to be a nonstop bobsled run, full of activity, challenge, correction, support, and enrichment. You need to challenge students to do their best every hour of every day they are in your charge. Unless your school is doing this month after month, year after year, you have no chance." (p.82)

We cannot surrender to the despair and deprivation of students ' lives outside school

  • Find ways to address social, emotional and health challenges facing your kids. Kids raised in poverty do not have access to essential human services.
  • Academic tutoring
  • Mental health counseling
  • Access to medications
  • Dental care
  • Medical care
  • Reading materials
  • Transportation for when students stay late for after-school help
  • Offer on-site programs on such topics s nutrition, parenting, and study skills for children
  • Build strong relationships with parents

"Each child has a limited set of internal resources for dealing with everyday worries as well as bigger stressors. Once that capacity is maxed out, the first casualty is school. Why? When kids are worried about being evicted or living in abusive households, doing well in school barely makes it onto the to-do list. If you have a painful, persistent toothache, the teachers well-designed lesson seems irrelevant. To get kids to focus on academic excellence, we must remove the real- world concerns that are much higher on their mental and emotional priority lists" (p.73)

  • Support the whole child
  • Hard data
  • Accountability
  • Relationship building
  • Enrichment mind-set
  • Create a strong environmental message - pleasant scenery, greenery, natural settings in classrooms help reduce mental fatigue
  • Every level of student achievement (no matter how high or low) should be the floor not the ceiling
  • Get away from drill and kill and move toward engaged learning
  • Teach about eating healthy - often in low SES homes it's not the quantity but the quality of food offered

"At one school, only 4 percent of students reached the writing standard in "descriptive settings." The teacher team checked the interpretive guide to the state assessment to learn what an effective descriptive setting looked like. In less than 30 minutes, they sketched out an effective lesson for addressing this deficit. They implemented the lesson and assessed progress weekly. In a short time, the teachers got an astonishing 94% of students to write high-quality descriptive settings. One half hour meeting and one month of implementation of the lesson plan achieved clear results" (p.79).

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