Star Teachers of Children in Poverty

Martin Haberman, Maureen D. Gillette, Djanna A. Hill

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351757553
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

In his groundbreaking work, Martin Haberman identified key dispositions of "star" teachers that help them work successfully with students in poverty. More than two decades later, Maureen D. Gillette and Djanna A. Hill build on Haberman's seminal work, considering contemporary issues such as social justice, technology, and the political environment, and moving beyond the classroom to focus on teachers as leaders and advocates for all students. Given the high-stakes nature of ensuring that students in high-poverty urban and rural areas receive an excellent education, this new edition provides concrete suggestions for what readers can do to implement culturally relevant pedagogy and to forge a path to becoming a star teacher. Co-published with Kappa Delta Pi, Star Teachers of Children in Poverty offers teachers research-based strategies for action so that they can practice socially just and culturally relevant teaching toward the success of every student.

New to the second edition:

• Updated statistics on school demographics, poverty, and teacher turnover in urban and rural areas.
• Added discussion that demonstrates the interrelated nature of poverty, health, safety, trauma, and power, and the cumulative effects of these factors on learning.
• Examination of the role of federal and state government in education and the necessity for teachers to be leaders beyond the classroom.
• Vignettes for experiential learning and analysis, and end-of-chapter questions and resources for further exploration.

PART I

What It Means to Be a Star

1

WHAT STAR TEACHERS DON’T DO

Martin Haberman

Before we discuss the functions or clusters of behavior that star teachers perform, it would be useful to consider some of what they don’t do. Teachers who quit or fail frequently cause many of their own problems; in other cases they exacerbate situations needlessly. The following list of issues is not exhaustive. It does, however, cover the major behaviors stars report not doing or issues they downplay. I have summarized their views regarding these “hot” topics because their views seem to me to be contrary to what many teachers do, or seem to believe.

Discipline

Star teachers are not very concerned with discipline. They have a few rules, usually less than four and usually established at the beginning of each year. They are not fixated with this issue as their highest priority or even as a major concern. Indeed, on a list of 10 things they care most about, discipline might not appear at all (Fuller, 1969). This is not to say that they don’t face and deal with horrendous issues—everything from a youngster being murdered or facing death threats, to an acting-out youngster vying with them for control of the classroom. The fact that they live with these problems daily—even minute by minute—still does not make discipline their major concern.

There are several reasons for their view of discipline. First, they believe problems are part of their job. They begin each semester knowing they will teach some youngsters who are affected by handicapping conditions. They anticipate that horrendous home, poverty, and environmental conditions will impinge on their students. They know that inadequate health care and nutrition, and various forms of substance and physical abuse, typify the daily existence of many of their students. In short, stars assume that the reason youngsters need teachers is because there will be all manner of serious interferences with their teaching and with students’ learning. Were this not the case, almost anyone could be hired to give directions, make assignments, and correct papers. Star teachers are, in this sense, very much like dentists who are not floored when a patient’s open mouth reveals diseased gums or decayed teeth. They certainly don’t expect to spend all day with models for toothpaste ads. They assume problems are the reason for needing skilled practitioners. Strange as this may seem, most of the youngsters trained in traditional programs of teacher education are prepared for classes made up of “normal” children. This training leads them to create endless mental lists of problem children who shouldn’t be there, or, if they are there, who need special help from other professionals or aides: the mildly retarded, the profoundly retarded, the learning disabled, the emotionally disturbed, the physically handicapped, the speech impaired, the language limited, and the “at risk.”

This traditional approach to training is counterproductive for future teachers in poverty schools since it leads them to perceive a substantial number—even a majority—of “abnormal” children in every classroom. Children and youth in poverty face teachers who begin with the assumption that most of them should not be there. The truth is that the failure and quitter teachers are correct in their perception of their preservice training—they were not prepared to deal with all children in poverty schools. Indeed, they were selected and prepared to teach only those youngsters who can learn without teachers, and to regard everyone else as a “problem” someone else should have to deal with.

The second reason stars view discipline as being of little importance is that they spend relatively little time on it. Stars might be viewed as proactive disciplinarians. Their normal teaching style involves much individual interaction with students. This gives them an opportunity to learn a great deal about their students before emergencies occur (Haberman, 1965). These in-depth, natural interactions around classroom activities permit stars to anticipate, prevent, or ward off many emergencies. The information they know and constantly gain from children before-hand makes it easier to deal with disciplinary or emergency situations. Knowledge about their students helps stars to teach them more, but it also cuts down on discipline problems when they do surface. It is much less likely that youngsters will lash out at teachers who know them well and who have established relationships with them. It is infinitely easier for students to make themselves problems to strangers. The point is that stars have established working relationships with children around learning activities and do not try to develop personal relationships built around discipline problems after such problems arise. Stars spend so little time on discipline because they have invested their time and effort creating learning activities that have helped them build caring relationships with each of the children.

A third reason stars do not perceive discipline as a major issue is that they expect a range of achievement in their classrooms in the same way they expect a range of behaviors. They do not begin with the failure teacher’s assumption that teachers should have classes comprised of homogeneous ability groups reading on or near grade level (Haberman & Raths, 1968). This means that successful teachers don’t create discipline situations by assigning meaningless work. Neither do they engender hostility or resistance by assigning tasks that students have no way of doing. Indeed, stars work very hard at assigning less and less as the year progresses. In the course of their year with students, they develop more and more ways of involving the pupils in the determination of their own assignments.

Thus far several reasons have been offered for why star teachers do not regard discipline as their major problem or even as a high priority. They expect problems as part of their normal workload. They use very few rules, established early. They build strong personal relationships with children around learning tasks and do not leave the process of relating to a child until after a serious problem arises. They expect wide differences in student achievement and anticipate that many students will test below grade level. Their assignments and expectations of students do not exacerbate the condition that the typical urban classroom has a wide range of achievement levels. They act with confidence on tentatively held beliefs rather than present a frazzled, harried, or authoritarian image to their classes. Teachers who feel harried act harried. In turn, they inevitably engender stressful reactions from their pupils.

These are not rules for becoming a great disciplinarian but, rather, an analysis of how stars’ perceptions of their job makes what they do different from most other teachers. There is no suggestion here that stars do not face the horrendous problems of all teachers who work with poverty children. The major difference between stars and other teachers is that most others—particularly failures and quitters—perceive discipline to be an issue separate from teaching. Most teachers see discipline as a set of procedures that must be put in place before learning can occur, and believe that few of their problems with discipline emanate from the way they teach. If they get to know children in any depth at all, it is after undesirable events have occurred. Stars perceive the reverse. They seek to establish in-depth caring relationships in the course of their day-to-day teaching activities, and to avoid, deflect, or defuse problems that would inevitably arise if such rapport had not been developed. They know this will not forestall all problems, but it will make their work manageable. The fact that they expect and plan for such problems gives them a perspective different from other teachers. Again, the difference is between treating discipline as a prior condition and a set of controls apart from how learning activities are pursued vs. using the learning activities themselves as the basis of self-control. When students are involved in an activity, they discipline themselves.

Most teachers, if asked how they would solve a discipline problem, describe the next level of escalation in some control scheme: talk to the offender, talk to the parent, talk to the principal, talk to the psychologist! Stars, on the other hand, describe the next level in terms of work: find something the student is interested in, find something else the student can do, find something else the student can share. Stars view discipline primarily as a natural consequence of their ability to interest and involve learners. Again, this is not to say they never face discipline problems separate from or prior to the work going on, but that they minimize such events.

Most teachers are sufficiently sophisticated to realize that a list of “10 easy steps” or a summary of “how to discipline” will not be very helpful to them. What they are less likely to see is that discipline does not occur entirely prior to or apart from learning. It is an integral part of how the learning and teacher-student interactions proceed. A final caveat is in order. Failure teachers and quitters frequently state: “With more than 30 in a room, retaining all this individual knowledge about each kid is impossible.” This view neglects the facts. These same teachers spend endless hours during and after school with parents, principals, the offending child, guidance counselors, and others after an incident has occurred. The investment in teacher time would be much less beforehand. Poor teachers spend more time on after-the-fact discipline than stars spend on finding interesting things for children to do and interesting ways for them to learn. This fact leads me to believe that finding time for individuals is more a question of how the teacher perceives his or her work than a matter of actual time (Doyle, 1985).

Punishment

Star teachers do not engage in corporal punishment, even where legal and sanctioned. They do not perceive themselves as instruments of punishment at all. This should go without saying, but it doesn’t because most states still allow corporal punishment; i.e., they permit individual school districts to practice or prohibit physical punishment. The state of Texas, for example, requires that a written form be completed and filed to document each instance of physical punishment. In a typical year, over 275,000 cases are reported. Imagine how many go unreported! This issue is peculiar to the United States. There are already 12 nations in which it is illegal for parents to spank or hit their own children, while we in this country still regard the use of physical punishment as a debatable issue for instructional purposes (Harper & Epstein, 1989). Can one practice a “profession” by beating the client?

Star teachers use few punishments and generally do not think in terms of punishments. Essentially, they are not proponents of behavior modification. They do not conceive of their relationship with students in terms of rewards or punishments because they do not regard their students as animals to be shaped. Neither do they see themselves as controlling a laboratory in which all the rewards and punishments emanate from one authority (Haberman, 1994). Because they know they cannot control their students’ reactions or perceptions—let alone their drives—star teachers do not think of themselves as reinforcers, rewarders, shapers, or extinguishers. They think in the words of ordinary language, rather than in the jargon of the psychology lab assistant, training rats to ring bells and run mazes in order to receive water and food. Star teachers think in ways that explain, rather than mystify. Interest, involvement, and participation are more common words for them than motivation. Being happy for—and with—a youngster who does ...

Table of contents

• Cover-Page
• Half-Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• Introductions
• PART I What It Means to Be a Star
• PART II The Functions of Star Teachers
• PART III Being a Star
• Resources
• Index