Engaging Students with Poverty in Mind

Practical Strategies for Raising Achievement

Eric Jensen

• Publisher: ASCD
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781416617242
• Topic: Éducation
• Subtopic: Éducation générale

In this galvanizing follow-up to the best-selling Teaching with Poverty in Mind, renowned educator and learning expert Eric Jensen digs deeper into engagement as the key factor in the academic success of economically disadvantaged students.

Drawing from research, experience, and real school success stories, Engaging Students with Poverty in Mind reveals

* Smart, purposeful engagement strategies that all teachers can use to expand students' cognitive capacity, increase motivation and effort, and build deep, enduring understanding of content.
* The (until-now) unwritten rules for engagement that are essential for increasing student achievement.
* How automating engagement in the classroom can help teachers use instructional time more effectively and empower students to take ownership of their learning.
* Steps you can take to create an exciting yet realistic implementation plan.

Too many of our most vulnerable students are tuning out and dropping out because of our failure to engage them. It's time to set the bar higher. Until we make school the best part of every student's day, we will struggle with attendance, achievement, and graduation rates. This timely resource will help you take immediate action to revitalize and enrich your practice so that all your students may thrive in school and beyond.

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Chapter 1

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The Seven Engagement Factors

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During the last 75 years, engaging low-SES students has been a challenge to public and private school teachers alike. Although most teachers have traditionally succeeded in reaching students who come from middle- and upper-income homes, they struggle to reach economically disadvantaged students.

This engagement gap is often blamed on ineffective local, state, and federal policies. It is widely acknowledged that poor students are more likely to attend schools that receive inadequate funding (Carey, 2005), pay lower teacher salaries (Karoly, 2001), have larger class sizes, provide a less rigorous curriculum, retain fewer experienced teachers (Barton, 2005), and are less likely to be safe learning environments.

But if these factors are so compelling, how do we explain the success stories? There is a key bit of evidence missing from this litany of adverse factors: over 50 percent of the academic outcomes of school-age children stem not from public policy but from what the teacher does in the classroom (Hattie, 2008). Teaching matters more than any other factor in a student's school years. In fact, research (Hanushek, 2005) tells us that quality teaching can completely offset the devastating effects poverty has on students' academic performance. Here's how: if any teacher performs at one standard deviation in quality (as measured by student achievement) above the district's mean adequate yearly progress rate for five years in a row, the resulting improvement in student learning would entirely close the gap between the performance of a typical student from poverty and the performance of a higher-income student. If you are serious about helping kids succeed, stop wishing for a miracle. Five years of strong teaching is the miracle.

Although it may be understandable to complain about the “system” or local politics, these complaints do not amount to a valid excuse. With so many Title I schools succeeding, blaming the system is hollow reasoning. Nobody is buying into the excuses anymore.

It is time to end our pattern of failure. But before we tackle solutions, it will be helpful to gain an understanding of why so many teachers have difficulty working with and graduating students who live in poverty.

The Seven Engagement Factors

In my broad survey of the research and through my many years of experience, I have uncovered seven factors that correlate with student engagement and that are strongly tied to socioeconomic status:

The Seven Engagement Factors

1. Health and nutrition
2. Vocabulary
3. Effort and energy
4. Mind-set
5. Cognitive capacity
6. Relationships
7. Stress level

How can we decide which factors are more significant than others? In addition to my own findings, there is a standardized scale that measures the relative size of an intervention or factor known as effect size. The effect size is particularly useful for quantifying effects from widely varying scales and for understanding the comparative influence of each. Throughout this book, I occasionally touch on an engagement factor or strategy's effect size as a way of showing its degree of impact. Generally, an effect size falls into one of five groups: negative, marginal, positive, substantial, or enormous (see Figure 1.1).

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Figure 1.1 Understanding Effect Size

Under 0.00 = negative effect

0.00–0.20 = marginal effect

0.20–0.40 = positive effect

0.40–0.60 = substantial effect

0.60–2.00 = enormous effect

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Let's review the research background of each of the seven key factors and its connection to socioeconomic status and student engagement. You'll see that growing up in poverty can affect students in wide-ranging ways that may surprise you.

Factor 1: Health and Nutrition

Physical, mental, and emotional health support engagement and learning. Sadly, the lower a child's socioeconomic status is, the greater the health risks he or she faces (Sapolsky, 2005). The lower parents' income is, the more likely it is that children will be born premature, low in birth weight, or with disabilities (Bradley & Corwyn, 2002). Compared with their higher-SES counterparts, people living in poverty are less likely to exercise, get proper diagnoses of health problems, receive appropriate and prompt medical attention, or be prescribed appropriate medications or interventions (Evans, Wells, & Moch, 2003). They experience a higher incidence of such conditions as asthma (Gottlieb, Beiser, & O'Connor, 1995), untreated ear infections and hearing-loss issues (Menyuk, 1980), tuberculosis (Rogers & Ginzberg, 1993), and obesity (Wang & Zhang, 2006). In addition, people living in poverty are more likely to live in old and inadequately maintained homes with peeling paint and outdated plumbing, which increases their exposure to lead (Sargent et al., 1995), and their neighborhoods are less likely to provide high-quality social, municipal, and local services (Evans, 2004). A study of 3,000 subjects found that low-SES people are also more likely to have mental health problems (Xue, Leventhal, Brooks-Gunn, & Earls, 2005).

Each of these health-related factors has a significant effect on cognition and behavior. For example, exposure to lead correlates with poor working memory and a weaker ability to link cause and effect. That means that although your students may know the behavior rules, they won't necessarily understand when and how those rules apply. Students with ear infections may have additional trouble with sound discrimination, making it tough for them to follow directions, engage in demanding auditory processing, or even understand the teacher.

Many of the health problems experienced by lower-SES people can be linked to poor nutrition. In 2010, 14.5 percent of U.S. families were food insecure (Coleman-Jensen, Nord, Andrews, & Carlson, 2011). Skipping breakfast is disproportionately prevalent among urban minority youth, many of whom live in poverty. Recent research suggests it has had a clear negative impact on their academic achievement by adversely affecting cognition and absenteeism (Basch, 2011).

In addition to inadequate quantity of food, food quality is also an issue: children who are raised in poor households typically eat a low-cost, low-nutrition diet that can have adverse effects on the brain (Gómez-Pinilla, 2008).

Poor nutrition poses a strong risk to students' learning and engagement. When kids don't eat well, or when they don't eat at all, their behavior suffers, and they have a tougher time learning. Poor nutrition at breakfast affects gray-matter mass in kids' brains (Taki, 2010). Deficiencies in minerals are linked to weaker memory, and low levels of certain nutrients such as omega-3 fatty acids are linked to depression.

The two most important fuels for the brain are oxygen and glucose. To get a stable supply of glucose to the brain, kids ideally should eat either a high-protein breakfast including, for example, lean meats, eggs, or yogurt, or one that includes complex carbohydrates, such as oatmeal. Either of these breakfasts will stabilize and manage the levels of glucose over several hours. In contrast, simple carbohydrates such as sugary cereals, pastries, PopTarts, pancakes, or fast food—which are often what poor children eat for breakfast—create wide fluctuations in blood sugar. Unstable glucose levels, whether too high or too low, are linked to weaker cognitive and behavioral outcomes (Wang, Szabo, & Dykman, 2004).

Although hunger does have an adverse effect on academic performance, food quality is more important than quantity (Weinreb et al., 2002). Cognitively, it's better to eat less but better-quality food. The brain actually produces more new brain cells on a restricted-calorie diet than on an ordinary one (Kitamura, Mishina, & Sugiyama, 2006).

Although the factor of health and nutrition is the least directly addressed engagement factor in this book and is not easily “fixed” by teachers, I include it because it strongly affects most of the other six engagement factors. Poor health and nutrition cannot be ignored; nor should they be used as an excuse for letting students underperform. Before you assume that poor nutrition is the irreparable cause of your students' unsatisfactory behavior or academic performance, consider this: thousands of teachers succeed with low-SES students who don't have ideal diets but who nevertheless demonstrate appropriate behavior and earn high achievement scores. You have a greater effect on your students' performance than you may think. Creating a highly engaging classroom can help compensate for behavioral and cognitive issues resulting from poor nutrition. Chapter 7 discusses strategies you can use to help regulate students' glucose and oxygen levels.

Factor 2: Vocabulary

A child's vocabulary is part of his or her brain's toolkit for learning, memory, and cognition. Words help children represent, manipulate, and reframe information. Unfortunately, the vocabulary differences among children of different socioeconomic status are staggering. A six-year study by Hart and Risley (2003) found that by age 3, the children of professional parents were adding words to their vocabularies at about twice the rate of children in welfare families. Both the quantity and the quality of phrases directed at the children by caregivers correlated directly with income levels. Here's another stunning illustration of the vocabulary chasm: toddlers from middle- and upper-income families actually used more words in talking to their parents than low-SES mothers used in talking to their own children (Bracey, 2006).

Low-SES students' smaller vocabularies place them at risk for academic failure (Gonzalez, 2005; Hoff, 2003; Walker, Greenwood, Hart, & Carta, 1994). It's up to teachers to try to build low-SES students' vocabularies. Otherwise, these students will struggle and disengage. When students don't understand many of the words used in class or in their reading materials, they may tune out or believe that school is not for them. Often, they won't participate because they don't want to risk looking stupid, especially in front of their peers.

Vocabulary building must form a key part of the enrichment experiences for students at school. Academic vocabulary—the vocabulary students need in order to understand the concepts and content taught in the various subject areas and to succeed on tests—is particularly critical. Teachers must be relentless about using nonverbal communication, visual aids, and context to add meaning and incorporate vocabulary building in engagement activities whenever appropriate.

Factor 3: Effort and Energy

The sight of kids slouching in their chairs, inattentive to the goings-on of the class, is a familiar one to many teachers. But uninformed teachers often interpret the reasons behind the disengagement differently according to SES. Whereas they may label middle-income students as “not reaching their potential,” they often assume that low-income students are simply lazy, or that they show little effort because their parents are lazy.

Yet people living in poverty typically value education as much as middle-income people do (Compton-Lilly, 2003), and they spend at least as many hours working each week as do their higher-SES counterparts (Bernstein, Mishel, & Boushey, 2002). In fact, almost two-thirds of low-income families include at least one parent who works full-time and year-round (Gorski, 2008). There is no “inherited laziness” passed down from poor parents to their children. Poor people simply work at lower-paying jobs.

Students living in poverty are practical about what motivates them. They want to know who the teacher really is, and they want the teaching to connect to their world. When teachers cannot or will not connect personally, students are less likely to trust them. Teachers must make connections to low-SES students' culture in ways that help the students see a viable reason to play the academic “game.” When teachers remain ignorant of their students' culture, students often experience a demotivating disconnect between the school world and their home life (Lindsey, Karns, & Myatt, 2010). As a result, they give up. Who you are and how you teach both have a huge influence on whether low-SES students will bother to engage.

Effort matters a great deal in learning. If you see motivational differences in the classroom, remember your own school days. When you were affirmed, challenged, and encouraged, you worked harder. When the learning got you excited, curious, and intrigued, you put in more effort. We've all seen how students will often work much harder in one class than in another. The difference is in the teaching. When you care about your students, they respond. When kids like and respect you, they try harder.

A student who is not putting in effort is essentially telling you that your teaching is not engaging. Give that same kid an engaging teacher, and a whole new student will emerge. The teacher has the power to make a difference. Take control and be the determining factor in the classroom.

Factor 4: Mind-Set

Research suggests that lower socioeconomic status often correlates with a negative view of the future (Robb, Simon, & Wardle, 2009) and a sense of helplessness. Positive response outcome expectancy (“coping”) is associated with high subjective SES, whereas no expectancy (“helplessness”) is associated with low subjective SES (Odéen et al., 2013). In short, poverty is associated with lowered expectations about future outcomes.

When it comes to success in school, mind-set is a crucial internal attitude for both students and teachers. A student's attitude about learning is a moderately robust predictive factor of academic achievement (Blackwell, Trzesniewski, & Dweck, 2007). Taken together, student mind-set and teacher support can form either a significant asset or a serious liability. When both teachers and students believe that students have a fixed amount of “smarts” that cannot be increased, students are far more likely to disengage. Conversely, when students have positive attitudes about their own learning capacity, and when teachers focus on growth and change rather than on having students reach arbitrary milestones—a strategy that leaves students more vulnerable to negative feedback and thus more likely to disengage from challenging learning opportunities (Mangels, Butterfield, Lamb, Good, & Dweck, 2006)—student engagement increases.

Often, teachers underestimate the prevalence of negative emotions in their students' lives (Jordan et al., 2011) and misinterpret these emotions. For example, they may view anger as a sign of students' insubordination or lack of self-control, when it is more likely to be a symptom of depression. Teachers may unknowingly reinforce false assumptions that certain students don't have the “mental strength” or “staying power” to succeed, and that belief can hurt students' performance (Miller et al., 2012) and substantially affect students' ability to recruit their cognitive resources to sustain learning over time.

Therefore, teacher support is essential to the academic success of low-SES students, many of whom do not believe in their capacity to learn and grow. Teachers' positive, growth-oriented mind-sets can help compensate for students' negative mind-sets. Gradually, with teacher support, students will begin to believe in themselves and in their capacity to reach their goals and thus increase their own learning success.

Factor 5: Cognitive Capacity

Cognitive capacity is highly complex. It can be measured in many different ways and is affected significantly by socioeconomic status. Socioeconomic status is strongly associated with a number of measures of cognitive ability, including IQ, achievement tests, grade retention rates, and literacy (Baydar, Brooks-Gunn, & Furstenberg, 1993; Brooks-Gunn, Guo, & Furstenberg, 1993; Liaw & Brooks-Gunn, 1994; Smith, Brooks-Gunn, & Klebanov, 1997). Studies show that low-SES children perform below higher-SES children on tests of intelligence and academic achievement (Bradley & Corwyn, 2002; Duncan, Brooks-Gunn, & Klebanov, 1994) and are also more likely to fail courses, be placed in special education, or drop out of high school (McLoyd, 1998).

Poverty affects the physical brain. In poor children's brains, the hippocampus—the critical structure for new learning and memory—is smaller, with less volume (Hanson, Chandra, Wolfe, & Pollak, 2011). A 2008 study (Amat et al.) showed a correlation between hippocampal volume and general intelligence.

Adverse environmental factors can artificially suppress children's IQ. For example, poor children are more likely to be exposed to lead, which correlates with poor working memory. The majority of children with low working memory struggle in both learning measures and verbal ability and exhibit such cognitive problems as short attention spans, high levels of distractibility, problems in monitoring the quality of their work, and difficulties in generating new solutions to problems (Alloway, Gathercole, Kirkwood, & Elliott, 2009).

The good news is that a brain that is susceptible to adverse environmental effects is equally susceptible to positive, enriching effects. IQ is not fixed, and we can influence many of the factors affecting it. Students with low cognitive capacity are ripe for an engaging teacher who is willing to teach the core cognitive skills that lead to academic success.

Factor 6: Relationships

All children need reliable, positive adults in their lives. When a child's early experiences are chaotic, or if at least one parent is absent, the child's developing brain often becomes insecure and stressed. This insecurity is more pronounced among children living in poverty. Marriage rates have dropped by half in the last two generations among low-SES populations (Fields, 2004). Almost three-fourths of all poor parents with children are unmarried, compared with about one-fourth of higher-SES parents (Bishaw & Renwick, 2009).

Strong and secure home relationships help support and stabilize children's behavior. Children who grow up with positive relationships learn healthy, appropriate emotional responses to everyday situations. Children raised in poor households often fail to learn these responses because of absent or stressed caregivers. Learning these responses requires countless hours of positive caregiving (Malatesta & Izard, 1984), which poor children are less likely to receive than their high...