Motivating Black Males to Achieve in School and in Life

Baruti K. Kafele

• Publisher: ASCD
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9781416608578
• eBook ISBN: 9781416612094
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

One of the most vexing problems confronting educators today is the chronic achievement gap between black male students and their peers. In this inspiring and thought-provoking book, veteran educator Baruti K. Kafele offers a blueprint for lifting black males up and ensuring their success in the classroom and beyond.

Motivating Black Males to Achieve in School and in Life offers proven strategies for getting black male students in middle school and high school to value learning, improve their grades, and maintain high standards for themselves. The author shows how simple but powerful measures to instill self-worth in young black males can not only raise these students' achievement, but also profoundly alter their lives for the better. This book will help you to help students

* Reverse the destructive effects of negative influences, whether among peers or in the popular culture;
* Surmount adverse conditions at home or in their communities;
* Participate in mentorship programs with successful black male adults; and
* Take pride in their heritage by learning about great figures and achievements in black history.

Whether your school is urban or rural, all-black or mixed, you'll find this book to be an insightful resource that addresses the root causes of low achievement among young black males and offers a clear path to overcoming them.

Chapter 1
Learning About Black Male Students to Meet Their Classroom Needs

It is said that you cannot teach what you do not know. I couldn't agree more. Imagine that you are a 6th grade language arts teacher with no background in science, and your principal asks you to teach two periods of science every day. How are you going to be effective? How are you going to be enthusiastic? How are you going to hold the attention of your students? It is going to be very difficult, if not impossible, under these circumstances.

Now, imagine that you are teaching the content area that you have been trained to teach, but you know nothing about your students. Let's say that you have a sizable number of black males in your class. What do you know about this specific population of students? Are you prepared to connect with them? Do you know not only how to motivate them, but how to keep them motivated over a long period? Do you know what their classroom needs are? Are you prepared to address and meet their classroom needs? Unless you can answer these questions, your students' success (and, therefore, your success as a teacher) would be very difficult to achieve. Ask yourself what you know about your black male students'

• Need for inspiration;
• Learning styles;
• Goals and aspirations;
• Experiences and realities;
• Needs and interests;
• Challenges, obstacles, and distractions;
• Peers, parents, and neighborhoods; and
• History and culture.

Do you know enough about all these issues? Let's explore each one individually.

Need for Inspiration

One of my favorite educational quotes is from William Arthur Ward:

Mediocre teachers tell.
Good teachers explain.
Superior teachers demonstrate.
Great teachers inspire.

One of the first steps toward becoming a great, inspiring teacher is to concentrate on building strong relationships with your students while simultaneously making learning fun (Kunjufu, 2002). As obvious and rudimentary as it may sound, your students must actually like you if they are to do well in class—and in order for them to like you, you must show that you like them. In an ideal situation, you would demonstrate that you loved them, cared about them, and appreciated them without ever having to say it. Students should be able to sense how you feel about them through your words and your actions. Trust me, if you do not like them or do not want to be bothered with them, they will know how you feel through what you say to them and how you say it.

If you build a solid relationship with your students, they will expect you to consistently treat them respectfully and fairly, as equals. You must be able to demonstrate to them that you are genuinely interested in them and their overall growth and well-being beyond their academic progress. They want and need to know that you are interested in them as individuals. Many of them simply want someone to listen to their concerns and offer suggestions. You can help meet these needs by interacting with students in the cafeteria, in the hallways, on the playground, outside before and after school, or in class before and after the bell rings. As their teacher, you are a significant person in your students' lives. You have the power to mold your students into successful high achievers, but you must first build solid relationships with them.

There is much about your own life that can serve as a source of inspiration for your students. All of us have our own unique experiences that led to our individual accomplishments, but until we have earned our students' trust, our stories will probably be unimportant and uninspiring to them. I have seen many educators try to share their experiences with students when they had not yet earned their trust. Needless to say, these educators' words went in one ear and out the other.

You must always keep at the forefront of your mind that you are a teacher of students first, and of subjects second. The human factor must always be the first priority. It is so much easier for students to learn from those they know, like, and trust than from those with whom they have no relationship.

In addition to building solid relationships with your students, you must also ensure that learning is stimulating, engaging, and, most important, fun. For example, black males struggle with mathematics more than any other subject. In each of the four schools where I have been principal, I have paid particular attention to what goes on in the math classes. After analyzing which math teachers are more successful than others with black males, the reason for their success becomes obvious: they build solid relationships with their students and are committed to making learning fun. Their classroom environments and lessons are student-centered, and boredom is nowhere to be found. The teachers understand that with each lesson, they must bring a high degree of energy, enthusiasm, and passion to their students to keep them consistently inspired about learning.

In addition to being inspired to learn, your black males must also be motivated to excel. Do you possess effective strategies for keeping your black male students motivated? Do you know what they require to stay motivated? If your students are unmotivated, do you know why? How have you addressed their lack of motivation? Ask yourself if their lack of motivation has anything to do with the following:

• Your instructional methodology
• Lack of individuality in your instruction
• The level of difficulty of your instruction
• Lack of interest in your content area
• Lack of prior understanding in your content area
• Low reading comprehension skills
• Your relationship with your students
• Your classroom seating arrangement
• The other students in the classroom
• Peer pressure
• The students' home life
• Neighborhood issues
• Other priorities

You must be willing to make whatever adjustments are necessary in your classroom for your students to be motivated to excel. If there are home or neighborhood issues, you will need to investigate, along with other school stakeholders, to ascertain what the school can do to help resolve the issues.

Bear in mind that in order for your students to be motivated to excel, your students must first have goals. They should be required to set goals for each marking period and post them on the wall, and to write down their strategies for achieving each goal. Once goals have been set, you must seek any possible excuse to celebrate when students achieve them: selecting students of the week/month, recognizing homework submission, posting student work samples regularly, and recognizing perfect attendance are just a few of the ways to do so. You must personally take every opportunity to make a big deal of your students' accomplishments. When they see that you are genuinely excited about their progress, they will be more likely to continue to strive for excellence. In my capacity as principal, in addition to the normal honor roll breakfast and certificates, I make sure that I shake hands with, hug, and congratulate as many of my honor roll students as I can when I see them in the hallways between classes. Of course, this requires that I know all of my students and study the names on the honor roll. Imagine the reaction of my black male students when I express sincere excitement about their achievements by shaking their hands and hugging them for everyone in the hallway to see. Trust me—it goes a long way.

Learning Styles

All children do not learn alike. Do you know how your black male students learn? Do they all learn alike? Do they learn in the same way as your black females or students of other ethnic groups? Does culture play a role? Do life experiences play a role? In order to achieve success with your black male students, these are questions that you must consider in your daily lesson preparation.

When I was in school, most of my teachers used the lecture format to deliver instruction. Lectures obviously appeal to auditory learners, but they are the worst instructional strategy to use with students who do not learn best simply by listening. I myself have never been an auditory learner, but my teachers never took my particular learning style into consideration. I am confident that if my teachers had determined the learning styles of their students and differentiated their instruction accordingly, we would have performed much better than we did.

At my own school, I remind my staff that just because they are excited about the lessons they have developed doesn't mean that their students are equally excited. I remind them that they must take into consideration the learning styles of all of the learners in their classrooms, including their black males. When teachers take the time to learn how their students learn, the probability for actual learning increases for all students in the classroom.

It is not easy to discern the different learning styles of your students. You must first get to know your students. In a teacher-centered learning environment where teachers do most of the talking, it is virtually impossible to adequately ascertain how the students learn, because the students are reduced to passive learning. The classroom learning environment must instead be student-centered, as this enables you to observe your students engaging in active learning. In a student-centered classroom, you get to watch your students participate in a variety of different learning activities that require them to use a variety of different problem-solving skills. These observations place you in a better position to reach informed conclusions about how your students learn.

Goals and Aspirations

What are the goals of your black male students? Do they have concrete academic goals? Do they want to be honor roll students? Do they want high GPAs? Is graduating with a high school diploma a high priority for them? What role have you played in helping them reach their goals? Teachers of black males must maintain the highest possible standards and expectations for them, whatever the challenges and obstacles.

Each spring, I am invited to speak at several inner-city graduations, which I consider to be an honor. The 8th grade graduations are my favorites: Parents are typically very excited, as though their kids were graduating from high school or college. At around the middle of all my graduation speeches, I have the male students stand to be recognized and applauded. The crowd typically gives these young men a thunderous ovation. I believe they do so because these young men need and require all of the praise that they can get. The odds are certainly against many of them: On the national level, the statistics say that only half of them will see another graduation (Schott Foundation for Public Education, 2008). Many parents are fully aware of the possibility that this graduation may be their son's last.

While the young men are standing, I passionately say to them: "This cannot be your final graduation. You must work diligently for the next four years so that you may graduate once again with your high school diploma. But it does not stop there: You must then proceed to college, which you planned for throughout your high school experience. But it does not stop there either: You must then proceed to earn your master's degree, and then your doctorate." By this time the parents and families are in a frenzy. They are giving the young men ovation after ovation. Some are even in tears. It becomes evident to me that the young men feel quite good about themselves for graduating.

We as educators must help our students to set goals and develop plans of action for reaching those goals, and we must hold students accountable for striving toward their goals throughout the years they are in school. Regardless of the grade level, the most important goal that students must set is that of going to college. Even at the elementary school level, black males must focus on ultimately attending college. I cringe whenever I hear an adult say that college is not for everyone. Even if this claim has any merit to it, grade school children must be exposed to teachers and other stakeholders who instill in them the value of a college education. Of course, students must have other goals as well. To know your students, you must familiarize yourself with these goals and help ensure that they are consistent with their educational growth and development.

You must also be familiar with your students' aspirations. It is far easier to motivate them when you know what it is that they aspire to become. What are the aspirations of your black males? What do they want to do with their lives beyond high school? How much of a commitment are they willing to invest in themselves? Are their aspirations being dictated by their belief in themselves, or by a lack thereof?

In talking with black male teenagers over the years, I have learned that far too many feel that they will not live to see life beyond the age 21. They feel that it would be useless for them to expend much energy on trying to fulfill their aspirations, because they will never live long enough to see them come true. Sadly, this is a national problem. Why do so many black male students think along these lines? Your role as a classroom teacher is to change this destructive thinking so that your black male students can see themselves as young men with limitless opportunities and possibilities.

Experiences and Realities

Not long ago, a black male 9th grader was sent to my office because he reported to class without a pencil. I was aware that he lived in a neighborhood where it was a challenge just to walk to school every day. The simple fact that he showed up on time to school was to be commended considering his circumstances. After meeting with the student, I asked the teacher if she realized what he had to endure every day just to get to school. She said that she did not. I told her that his pattern of timely attendance bordered on miraculous.

Regardless of their ethnicity, teachers who have never lived in the inner city could probably never imagine much less endure the hardships that many of their students face. Many black males have to walk past street gangs every day just to get to school in the morning. On the day that I write this, one of my 9th graders was jumped, assaulted, and robbed on his way to our freshman summer enrichment program. Many young black males also have to endure the pressure to join gangs; some even end up joining gangs simply to remain safe and keep the gangs off of their backs.

You must make an effort to stay aware of your students' everyday experiences. You must also be mindful that your students may not openly and voluntarily discuss these experiences with you unless you ask. Even if asked, chances are good that they may still not want to disclose any information unless you first build trust with your students.

As we all know, black males in the United States have been the victims of extreme racism for generations. Your black male students are the products of this long and difficult journey. They are the ones who carry the scars. It is imperative that you consider the consequences of racism that your students must endure, because it has a direct impact on their motivation to learn. Take racial profiling, for example. As a black man, despite my professional accomplishments and status, I continue to find myself in situations where I am treated as a suspected criminal for no other reason than my skin color. Many of the students in your classroom face the same reality in their neighborhoods. Because of the wrongs of a few, many of them find themselves being profiled and harassed by the police for doing nothing more than walking down the street to their homes from school or hanging out with friends. Their frustration about this fact has a direct bearing on their motivation to excel in the classroom.

Needs and Interests

As a teacher of black male students, there is a great deal that you are required to know about them. Like every other group, black males have their own unique set of needs. One of the most important for you to consider is the need for black males to be accepted by their peers. Many black males are more concerned with being accepted by their peers than with being smart. Even in the new millennium, there are still many black adolescents who perceive being smart as corny, nerdy, or "acting white." You must challenge this line of thinking by consistently encouraging your students to strive to be the brightest that they can possibly be.

In addition to having particular needs, black males also have certain interests that may affect motivation and learning, and which you therefore must ascertain. A couple of times in two different schools, I assigned my entire staff to spend a portion of their summer listening to hardcore, unedited hip hop music. I reminded my staff that many of our black males were not only listening to this music, but aspired to become hip hop artists themselves. Upon returning to...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Table of Contents
• Dedication
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• Introduction
• Chapter 1. Learning About Black Male Students to Meet Their Classroom Needs
• Chapter 2. Learning About Yourself to Meet Your Black Male Students' Needs
• Chapter 3. Three Crises
• Chapter 4. "Who Am I?"
• Chapter 5. Developing a Young Men's Empowerment Program
• Conclusion
• Appendix A. 50 I's for Being a Serious Student
• Appendix B. 50 I's for New and Aspiring Principals
• Appendix C. 50 I's for Effective Teaching
• Bibliography
• About the Author
• Copyright