Teaching with Poverty in Mind by Eric Jensen Chapter 2 How Poverty Affects Behavior and Academic Performance Review by Felecia Creed This chapter is jam-packed with data that supports many things that we already know anecdotally. Jensen looks at four significant risk factors for children raised in poverty that can affect our students: · Emotional and Social Challenges · Acute and Chronic Stress · Cognitive Lags · Health and Safety Issues Emotional and Social Challenges Because low-SES students often experience an environment of emotional and social instability, they may not have seen appropriate responses to situations modeled for them. Jensen uses the term “emotional dysregulation.” Students in poverty may get more easily frustrated, give up more quickly, and have difficulty working in cooperative groups. I found the reference to the Emotional Keyboard interesting, particularly the reference to the five emotions that must be taught: · Sympathy · Patience · Shame · Cooperation · Gratitude Jensen recommends that as educators, we need to address these emotional /social challenges by taking some of the following steps: · Teach basic meet-and-greet skills. This summer I found that the website http://www.teachingchannel.org has some great morning meeting example videos that I think provide good ideas of how to teach these skills. · Embed turn-taking skills. · Remind students to thank their classmates. I think I may add a category to ClassDojo for “Thanking a Classmate.” · Create a familial atmosphere, with emphasis on using specific language such “our class” and “our school.” I liked having students write their names on our classroom windows during “meet-the-teacher night” to start building that sense of ownership. · Thank students for even small things they do for others or our class. ClassDojo again I think can be a quick and easy way to recognizing students in this area. Last year my class voted to add “taking care of our classroom” as a positive Dojo behavior. · Make sure we celebrate effort; praising students for reaching milestones on their way to a goal. I think many of the recognition activities we have implement at Willard South help to address some of these social/emotional needs. I know I need to take a step back at times and not assume that a lack of social skills or “manners” is not necessarily a lack of respect, but in fact a lack of experience with appropriate responses. Acute and Chronic Stress Learning that the stress hormone cortisol actually shrinks the neurons in the brain’s frontal lobes was one of the most interesting facts I learned in this section. When the prefrontal cortex is impacted, it can affect a student’s ability in making judgments, plan, and regulate impulsivity. Because stress can have such significant impact on the brains of our students, Jensen recommends that we “alter the environment” of our schools and classroom to help mitigate the impact. Suggestions include: · Reduce homework stress by incorporating time for homework in class or after class. · Include physical activities in the day. · Teach students how to “make it right” when they disrupt the class. I hope to incorporate the phrase “How can you make this right?” more often when discussing discipline with my students. · Model solving real-world problems by giving students a weekly “life problem” to solve. I was thinking of asking Sarah about some resources to do this. Cognitive Lags A powerful statement from this chapter is “the correlation between socioeconomic status and cognitive ability and performance are typically quite significant and persist throughout the stages of development….” However, it is followed by the statement “the good news is that brains are designed to change.” Deficits in language development are the most marked for students living in poverty and one that we work hard to address with students. Some of the specific skills that Jansen tells us we should be building address cognitive lags include: · Attention and focus · Short-and-long term memory · Sequencing and processing · Problem-solving · Perseverance and the ability to apply skills in the long term · Social skills · Hopefulness and self-esteem. I know that we routinely work on these areas with our students, but I think I need to be more purposeful about them. There are many on-line activities available to work on sequencing, processing, and problem-solving. I plan to work more closely with Nikki on specific skills I would like to work on, as she is a great resource for on-line skill development. My daughter introduced me to a new iPad app that I plan to use called “Flow” that is simple, but is a great focus on sequencing. (It is also very addicting, so play at your own risk!). I know need some help in the area of helping my students with “perseverance and the ability to apply skills in the long term” to help reduce the frustration of teaching a skill for a month then a few weeks later, some students seem to have lost it. Jensen also recommends posting in our classrooms a problem-solving process that we can refer students to when they need helping thinking through a challenge. Posting this process could work well with a “problem of the week activity.” Health and Safety Finally, Jensen tells us the health issues about lower-income students can lead to increased absences, tardiness, illness during class, and undiagnosed/treated health problems. He provides a list of activities to partner schools with health-care providers, many of which I know we have implemented in our district. One of the main take-aways I have from this section is “teachers may see students as uncaring or uninterested, when the real issue is that they are not in class enough to keep up.” After reading this chapter, I ran across a poster on Pinterest (the source of all knowledge!) by KTVee on Flickr. I thought it summed up the sentiment in this chapter well. Comments are closed.
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