The Handbook for Poor Students, Rich Teaching. Eric Jensen
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discover a wide range of positive alternatives to what your students are doing at school.
Each chapter and part ends with a series of reflection questions about the topic or mindset you just read and how your thinking on it has evolved. There’s much more for you to learn, but these seven high-impact mindsets and the accompanying strategies and tools will make a world of difference if you implement them well. That’s my promise.
Why These Mindsets
Before we get into part 1 and all seven mindsets for change, it’s important that I establish for you that these mindsets and strategies are not simply feel-good measures. They have the backing of years of research into how the brain reacts to poverty and how intervention counteracts poverty’s detrimental effects. You will find additional information in Poor Students, Rich Teaching, Revised Edition that plumbs the depths of how pervasive poverty affects students and why, in America, it is all a part of a new normal that teachers must be prepared to confront. But for the purposes of this handbook, the key takeaway is that the brain is not set and even your most troubled students are not locked in to self-destructive cycles.
The fact is, humans can and do change (Mackey, Singley, Wendelken, & Bunge, 2015). When people don’t change, it is often because others have given up on them, their daily environment is toxic, or others are using an ineffective strategy that doesn’t help. Often, teachers feel powerless to help students if there is a lack of support at home, but the truth is the classroom teacher is still the single most significant contributor to student achievement; the effect is greater than that of parents, peers, entire schools, or poverty (Hanushek, 2005; Haycock, 1998; Rivkin, Hanushek, & Kain, 2005; Rockoff, 2004).
Given this, it’s important that we have a way to measure a strategy’s effect. In most sports, the team that scores the most points (or goals, runs, and so on) wins. This scoring system is simple and easily understood. In our profession, the scoring system that decides a winning classroom strategy is called the effect size. This number is simply the size of the impact on student learning. In short, it tells you how much something matters. The mathematics on it are simple: it is a standardized measure of the relative size of the gain (or loss) in student achievement caused by an intervention (versus a control; Olejnik & Algina, 2000). See figure I.1.
Source: Vacha-Haase & Thompson, 2004.
Figure I.1: Effect sizes made practical.
Researchers simply measure the difference between doing something and doing nothing. Ideally, one uses an experimental group (using a new strategy) and a control group (using an existing norm). The strongest analysis includes large sample sizes and multiple studies with varied population demographics. Then, you know your data are very, very solid.
Classroom interventions typically have effect sizes between 0.25 and 0.75 with a mean of about 0.40 (Hattie, 2009). One full year’s worth of academic gains has a 0.50 effect size, and two years’ worth of gains have a 1.00 effect size. This means that effect sizes above 0.50 are just the baseline for students in poverty. Teachers have to help students catch up from starting school one to three years behind their classmates, and it takes good instructional practices for effect sizes to be well above 0.50.
To ensure students from poverty graduate, you’ll want to teach in ways that give them one and a half years’ worth of gains (or more) in each school year. What if, by just replacing one strategy you already use (for example, saying “Good job!” to a student) with another (a far more effective one, like “Your steady, daily studying really paid off. That’s going to help you graduate on time!”), you could get five to ten times the positive effect on student achievement? Not only do I show you how to do that in this book, I give you more than one hundred tools to help implement each strategy.
An amazing journey is about to begin. Are you game?
PART ONE
IMPLEMENTING THE RELATIONAL MINDSET
In this part, we begin with building the narrative of relationships as the core underpinning of high-performance teaching with students from poverty. Sometimes we find it easy to connect with students who share our own background, but it becomes much more challenging with students who don’t; yet it’s essential to build relationships with those students before any real learning can happen. If you’re not connecting by giving respect, listening, and showing empathy, you risk losing your students. When students lose interest in school, they will most likely find somewhere else to invest their energy and may make poorer choices. Some will get their respect and connections through peers and sports, others through drugs or even gangs.
To begin this part, use figure P1.1 (page 6) to self-assess how you already approach building (or not building) relationships with your students.
As you think about your answers to these questions, it’s paramount for you to build your awareness that all of us are in this together—you, me, colleagues, students, and parents. Relationships between everyone that touches students’ lives affect their success. When your students succeed, you succeed. There is no us (teachers) and them (students). Maintaining an erroneous narrative of separation will ruin your chances of success in teaching. The relational mindset says, “We are all connected in this life together. Always connect first as a person (and an ally) and second as a teacher.”
The relational mindset says, “We are all connected in this life together. Always connect first as a person (and an ally) and second as a teacher.”
Figure P1.1: Assess your understanding of how poverty affects students.
Visit go.SolutionTree.com/instruction for a free reproducible version of this figure.
Do not confuse this mindset with me telling you that it is impossible to succeed with every student unless each likes or respects you. Some students (those from strong, intact families) come from such stability at home that they need less relationship time at school. When a student has an emotionally stable family, good friends, and positive relatives, the need for relational stability at school is less. Ask yourself, “How can I show my students I care about their home life as well as their classroom life?”
Your students will care about academics as soon as you care about them. As neuroscience tells us, we are hardwired to connect (Commission on Children at Risk, 2003; Moriceau & Sullivan, 2005), and effective teacher-student relationships contribute to student achievement. Also, this contribution varies depending on students’ socioeconomic status and grade level. The research tells us that relationships mean more to students who have instability at home than to students who have a stable, two-parent foundation (Allen, McElhaney, Kuperminc, & Jodl, 2004). Among all students, good relationships have a 0.72 effect size, which makes them an exceptionally significant and strong effect size catalyst (Hattie, 2009). Among secondary students, the effect size is an even larger 0.87 (Marzano, 2003).
The scope of the relational effect goes much further, and I explore it in depth in Poor Students, Rich Teaching, Revised Edition (Jensen, 2019). The bottom line is that relationships influence engagement in multiple ways. First, quality interactions within a relationship provide instruction, correction, modeling, and support for students, forming the basis of a teacher-student relationship (Hughes & Kwok, 2006). Second, a positive teacher-student relationship enhances students’ sense of classroom security and increases their willingness to engage in the classroom (Baumeister & Leary, 1995). Third, evidence shows that quality relationships can help students achieve more through greater connected engagement (Roorda, Koomen, Spilt, & Oort, 2011). Another study reveals that students’ positive or negative