Educating Everybody's Children

Diverse Teaching Strategies for Diverse Learners, Revised and Expanded

Robert W. Cole W. Cole, Robert W. Cole W. Cole

• Publisher: ASCD
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9781416612490
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Bildung
• Subtopic: Berufliche Weiterbildung

Designed to promote reflection, discussion, and action among the entire learning community, Educating Everybody's Children encapsulates what research has revealed about successfully addressing the needs of students from economically, ethnically, culturally, and linguistically diverse groups and identifies a wide range of effective principles and instructional strategies.

Although good teaching works well with all students, educators must develop an extensive repertoire of instructional tools to meet the varying needs of students from diverse backgrounds. Those tools and the knowledge base behind them are the foundation of this expanded and revised second edition of Educating Everybody's Children. Each strategy discussed in the book includes classroom examples and a list of the research studies that support it.

The most important thing we have learned as a result of the education reform movement is that student achievement stands or falls on the motivation and skills of teachers. We must ensure that all teachers are capable of delivering a standards?based curriculum that describes what students should know and be able to do, and that these standards are delivered by means of a rich and engaging "pedagogy of plenty." By these two acts we can ensure that all schools will be ready and able to educate everybody's children.

Chapter 1

Educating Everybody's Children: We Know What Works—And What Doesn't

Robert W. Cole

Children know how to learn in more ways than we know how to teach them.
—Ronald Edmonds (1991)

Good instruction is good instruction, regardless of students' racial, ethnic, or socioeconomic backgrounds. To a large extent, good teaching—teaching that is engaging, relevant, multicultural, and appealing to a variety of modalities and learning styles—works well with all children.

The instructional strategies outlined in this chapter reflect a sampling of the most exciting and determined efforts to change the way the United States educates its citizens. These "ideas at work" range in complexity and magnitude. They represent concepts that cut across content areas. They overlap so comfortably that they sometimes look like separate facets of a single gem. They are as much about attitude and general approach as about specific pedagogical techniques and classroom application. They have a few characteristics in common:

• They tend to be inclusive, not exclusive.
• They work best in context with other ideas and concepts, not in isolation.
• They often focus on students working within social situations rather than alone.
• Their activities, techniques, and goals are interactive and interdisciplinary, realistic rather than esoteric.
• Possibly most important, they empower students to be actively involved in the processes of their own learning, rather than passively receptive.

None of the ideas in this chapter is new. Although some of them tend to be identified with specific programs, individuals, or locations, they are presented here as generic—that is, as applicable in virtually any classroom, in any subject area. All are adaptable.

Why ideas at work rather than ideas that work? Because "ideas that work" implies a kind of guarantee of effectiveness. In the real world of the schools, however, nothing works every time, everywhere, for everyone. No single strategy, approach, or technique works with all students. But the concepts in this chapter have proven themselves over time, with a multitude of students of diverse backgrounds and widely ranging abilities.

Unfortunately, numerous barriers can prevent poor and minority students from receiving good instruction. Some of these barriers are caused by educators' attitudes and beliefs; others are the result of institutional practices. The intent of the listing that follows is not to provide a thorough cataloguing of every barrier to sound instruction, but rather to place educators on alert.

Attitudes and Beliefs

Racism and Prejudice

Despite much progress during the past few decades, racism and prejudice are still ugly realities in all sectors of life in the United States, including education. Today, racism may be less overt and virulent than in the past, but its effects can still greatly harm minority students. In fact, subtle, insidious forms of racism may be even more harmful to young people than more blatant forms.

Prejudice against the poor, of whatever race or ethnicity, is another force that works against the academic achievement of disadvantaged students. For example, some teachers of poor students don't let them take materials home, out of fear that the materials will never be returned. Yet these same students tend to be proud to have the responsibility for taking materials home and are generally exceedingly careful to return them.

Obviously teachers must avoid discriminating, consciously or unconsciously, against students because of their racial, ethnic, or socioeconomic backgrounds. Such discrimination can be as blatant as imposing harsher discipline on minority students or as subtle as lowering expectations for poor children because they have "difficult" home lives. Teachers must be aware that they see students' behavior through the lens of their own culture. They must carefully examine their own attitudes and behaviors to be sure that they are not imposing a double standard. Most important, they must believe sincerely and completely that all children can learn.

Expectations

Educators must hold equally high expectations for affluent white students and poor and minority students—despite the disparity in students' backgrounds. Under the right conditions, low-income and minority students can learn just as well as any other children. One necessary condition, of course, is that the teacher hold expectations of high performance for all students.

Both high and low expectations can create self-fulfilling prophecies. Students must believe that they can achieve before they will risk trying, and young people are astute at sensing whether their teachers believe they can succeed. By the same token, teachers must truly believe their students can achieve before they will put forth their best effort to teach them. The teacher's beliefs must be translated into instructional practices if students are to benefit: actions speak louder than attitudes.

Teachers must also be sensitive to the subtle ways in which low expectations can be conveyed. According to researcher Sandra Graham of the University of California–Los Angeles, when a teacher expresses sympathy over failure, students typically infer that the teacher thinks they are incapable of succeeding, not that they simply may not have tried hard enough. Similarly, when a teacher gives students lavish praise for completing a simple task or offers help before being asked for it, students infer that the teacher thinks they are stupid. In other words, holding high expectations is not simply a matter of cheerleading; it requires insight into how students may interpret a teacher's words and behaviors.

Teachers must also resist the temptation to attribute student failure to lack of ability ("I've taught this concept and they didn't understand it; they must not be smart enough"). Failure to learn can stem from many other causes, such as inadequate prior knowledge, insufficient effort or motivation, lack of the right learning strategy, or inappropriate teaching. The bottom line is this: if students are not learning, the teacher needs to change the approach to teaching them.

Teachers are not the only ones who need to examine their expectations for students, however. Administrators who decide what courses their schools offer should ask themselves whether they are providing too few challenging courses. And counselors must consider whether they are steering students into undemanding courses because the students are poor, minority, or female. The expectation that all students can achieve at high levels, under the right circumstances, should be the guiding principle of every school.

Lack of Understanding of Cultural Differences

Teachers sometimes misinterpret the behaviors of poor and minority students because they do not understand the cultures they come from. White teachers can easily misread the behaviors of black students, for example. In Black Students and School Failure, Jacqueline Jordan Irvine (1990) writes:

Because the culture of black children is different and often misunderstood, ignored, or discounted, black students are likely to experience cultural discontinuity in schools…. This lack of cultural sync becomes evident in instructional situations in which teachers misinterpret, denigrate, and dismiss black students' language, nonverbal cues, physical movements, learning styles, cognitive approaches, and worldview. When teachers and students are out of sync, they clash and confront each other, both consciously and unconsciously…. (p. xix)

Only when teachers understand their students' cultural backgrounds can they avoid this kind of culture clash. In the meantime, the ways in which teachers comprehend and react to students' culture, language, and behaviors may create problems (Erickson, 1987). In too many schools, students are, in effect, required to leave their family and cultural backgrounds at the schoolhouse door and live in a kind of "hybrid culture" composed of the community of fellow learners (Au & Kawakami, 1991).

Especially in the early grades, teachers and students may differ in their expectations for the classroom setting; each may act in ways that the other misinterprets. In addition, those teachers (and they are legion) who insist on a single pedagogical style and who see other styles as being out of step, may be refusing to allow students to work to their strengths.

As Knapp and Shields (1990a) suggest, the so-called "deficit" or "disadvantage" model has two serious problems: (1) teachers are likely to set low standards for certain children "because their patterns of behavior, language use, and values do not match those required in the school setting"; and (2) over time a cycle of failure and despair is created that culminates "in students' turning their backs on school and dropping out…because teachers and administrators fail to adapt to and take advantage of the strengths that these students do possess" (p. 755).

Institutional Practices

Tracking

The most notorious of the harmful institutional practices is tracking, which dooms children in the low tracks to a second-rate education by failing to provide them with the support they need to move to a higher track. As a result, they fall further and further behind their peers. Students in low tracks are stigmatized and lose self-esteem and motivation, while expectations for their performance plummet.

In Keeping Track, researcher Jeannie Oakes (1985) says, "We can be quite certain that the deficiencies of slower students are not more easily remediated when they are grouped together" (p. 12). Yet even now the practice of tracking persists, despite the negative effects on students documented by Oakes and many other researchers. Tracking is especially harmful to poor and minority students because these students are more likely to end up in the low tracks.

Effective alternatives to tracking have included the Accelerated Schools Project, developed by Henry Levin of Stanford University, which includes accelerated programs to bring at-risk students into the mainstream by the end of elementary school and results in faster learning because students receive engaging, active, interdisciplinary instruction; and the Higher Order Thinking Skills (HOTS) program, developed by Stanley Pogrow of the University of Arizona–Tucson, which works to enhance the general thinking skills of remedial students by showing them how to work with ideas. These programs and others are aimed at helping students get up to speed, rather than permanently segregating them and feeding them a dumbed-down curriculum.

Inappropriate Instruction

Inappropriate instruction harms poor and minority students. Instead of being presented in a variety of modes, instruction in too many U.S. schools tends to be abstract, devoid of application, overly sequential, and redundant. Bits of knowledge are emphasized, not the big picture, thus handicapping global thinkers. Moreover, the largely Eurocentric curriculum downplays the experiences and contributions of minorities.

For teachers of diverse students, it is especially important to use a broad repertoire of strategies. Some children may be global thinkers; others, more analytical. Some children may learn best from lecture and reading; others, through manipulatives and other hands-on experiences. Some children may thrive on competition; others may achieve far more in cooperative groups.

Differential Access

Poor and minority students are often denied access to challenging coursework. Counselors place them in remedial or undemanding courses, and because more challenging courses often require students to have taken specific introductory courses, students can never switch to a more demanding track. Irvine (1990) cites data showing that "black students, particularly black male students, are three times as likely to be in a class for the educable mentally retarded as are white students, but only one-half as likely to be in a class for the gifted and talented" (p. xiv). In addition, the pull-out programs intended to help many of these students end up fragmenting their school day. And after pull-out programs end, students are given little support for reentering the regular classroom, so they tend to backslide when they rejoin their peers.

Lack of Consequences

Unfortunately, there are few consequences for students and teachers if poor and minority students do not learn. So long as students put in the required seat time, they will receive a diploma; so long as teachers go through the motions, they will have a job. In many cases, nobody—not the education establishment, not the parents or guardians, not the politicians—protests a status quo that is woefully deficient.

Schools that have had success in teaching poor and minority students do not keep ineffective teachers on the faculty; in these schools, teachers are held responsible if their students do not learn. These schools also collaborate with parents or guardians to ensure that students who come to school and strive to achieve are rewarded.

Disciplinary Practices

Teachers sometimes punish poor and minority children more harshly than they do other children for the same offenses. Moreover, suspension is often the punishment of choice, causing students to miss valuable class time. According to Irvine (1990), "one factor related to the nonachievement of black students is the disproportionate use of severe disciplinary practices, which leads to black students' exclusion from classes, their perceptions of mistreatment, and feelings of alienation and rejection, which result ultimately in their misbehaving more and/or leaving school" (p. 16).

On the other hand, some teachers are more lenient with poor or minority students, because they believe these children have been socialized differently than mainstream children. For example, teachers might overlook boisterous or aggressive behavior among poor or minority students while chastising mainstream students for similar behavior. Teachers need to establish a clear, reasonable discipline policy and require all students to abide by it.

Involvement of Parents or Guardians

Poor and minority parents or guardians often have no opportunities to create an ongoing relationship with their children's schools; in fact, they often have no communication with the schools at all. In turn, schools tend to make few efforts to develop a relationship with poor and minority parents or guardians, who may be too intimidated or hard-pressed to initiate contact themselves. For parents who don't speak English, the language barrier can pose another formidable obstacle.

James Comer of the Yale Child Study Center has developed a process to foster good relationships among children, teachers, and parents or guardians. Parents or guardians are encouraged to be an active presence in the school. Social activities bring families and school staff together, helping parents or guardians gain trust in the school. The program has reportedly helped to lower dropout rates, among other benefits.

Unequal Access to Resources

Unequal access to resources further reduces poor and minority students' chances of receiving equal opportunities to learn. Poor and minority students typically attend schools ...