"The first step to closing that gap is to believe, as I do, that high expectations are for all students. I believe intelligence is equally distributed throughout the world, but opportunity is not." -Bill Clinton

• • Ethics - Ethics are interpreted as the discipline of dealing with good and bad with commitment and moral duty. Ethics are well-established levels that make the measures right and wrong. It is classified as unique values such as integrity and discipline, honesty amid others, and applies them in daily routines. Ethics impacts the behavior and permits an individual to make the right options. To manage life and act responsibly is very hard without ethics, principles, and guidelines. The significance of ethics cannot be disregarded and it’s important that they are practiced and modeled for students in teaching. 

  • Accommodations - Accommodations are an alteration of the learning environment, curriculum materials or instructional format, or supporting equipment that allows any individual with a cognitive or learning difference or disability to gain access to the learning environment, instructional content, and/or complete assigned learning tasks. Accommodations allow students with differences and disabilities to pursue general classroom objectives alongside all their peers. Since accommodations do not alter what is being taught, teachers should be able to implement a similar assessment scale or rubric for ALL students. 

  • Differentiation - At its most basic level, differentiation consists of the efforts of teachers to respond to the diversity and variance among learners in the classroom. Whenever a teacher attempts to vary their teaching, based on considerations for the learners in their classroom, and in an effort to create the best learning experience possible, that teacher is differentiating instruction. Generally speaking, you don't need to "personalize" or "individualize" instruction to make sure that your instruction is differentiated. Rather, you need to consider the range of diversity present in a classroom and plan accordingly. 

  • Socioeconomic status - Socioeconomic status is the social standing or class of an individual or group. It is often measured as a combination of education, income, and occupation. Examinations of socioeconomic status often reveal inequities in access to resources, plus issues related to privilege, power, and control.

  • Achievement gap - The “achievement gap” in education refers to the disparity in academic performance between groups of students. The achievement gap shows up in grades, standardized test scores, course selection, dropout rates, and college completion rates, among other success measures. 

  • "At-risk" v. "At-promise" - The term “at-risk” comes from a mindset of deficit and focuses on what children lack to succeed. It is time we break down those barriers and transition to“at-promise” to better foster growth and emphasize every child’s immense possibilities.  As opposed to “at-risk,” “at-promise” promotes a more positive approach and has the chance to change the outcomes for our most vulnerable youth. It encourages individuals to interact with students by empowering them as people with the promise to succeed. 

A Hyperbole - This exaggerated Day 1 scenario is intended to make you think. Understand that similar situations happen all of the time in classrooms throughout student’s educational experiences. Try to understand the metaphor. 

Statistics on How Poverty Affects Children in Schools (*optional enrichment)

By the Numbers - In 2010, with an income limit of $22,314 for a family of four, 15 percent of families fell below the poverty line. When looking solely at the number of children living in poverty, the figure was 22 percent in 2010, with an increase for members of minority groups -- 38.2 percent of black children and 32.3 percent of Latino children living in poverty. Numbers were even higher in single-parent households, with a poverty rate for children of 42.2 percent in 2010.

Emotional Well-Being - Poverty's effects on the psychological and emotional state of children contribute to both student interest in school and overall happiness. Twice as many low-income parents suffer from depression as other parents. Depression in parents is often connected with poor behavior in school and problems developing relationships with classmates. Additionally, 16.4 percent of parents of low-income children reported behavior problems that lasted longer than three months. 

Brain Development - Homelife influences a child's educational growth, including vocabulary and language skills. Higher-income parents increased their vocabularies at twice the rate of children in poverty. Additionally, delays in brain development are 1.3 times more common in children below the poverty line nationally. Some studies have shown that 5 percent of low-income children experience delays in brain development and 8.3 percent have learning disabilities. 

School Achievement - More than one-third of low-income students begin kindergarten unprepared for school, and by the time they reach fourth grade, 50 percent will not be at grade level in reading. In high school, the dropout rate for students from low-income income families was 8.7 percent in 2008 compared to 2 percent from higher-income families. Low-income students repeat grades at a rate of 28.8 percent compared to 14.1 percent of higher-income families; 11.9 percent of low-income students are expelled or suspended from school, compared to 6.1 percent of higher-income students.

Students, regardless of their socio-economic status or poverty level, and regardless of any of these reported correlations, need support in the educational process. Students across poverty categories bring a range of strengths and assets into a learning environment, although those strengths may not be conceptualized as such (Milner, 2015). Students living below the poverty line are sometimes inaccurately viewed as incapable of academic and social success due to their material conditions. 

The research and conceptual literature is inundated with studies that attempt to capture the role of poverty in education. For instance, studies of poverty have been linked to school size (Coldarci, 2006), trust (Goddard, Salloum, & Berebitsky, 2009), students’ and teachers’ sense of community (Battistich, Solomon, Kim, Watson, & Schaps, 1995), classroom and school technology use and integration (Page, 2002), growth trajectories in literacy among English language learners (Kieffer, 2008), public high school outcomes and college attendance rates (Toutkoushian & Curtis, 2005), the ability of young children (ages 5–8) to self-regulate (Howse, Lange, Farran, & Boyles, 2003), and course selection and enrollment in rigorous mathematics (Klopfenstein, 2005). 

Although students living below the poverty line may face challenges, it is essential that we (as educators) recognize the potential, intellect, talents, creativity, resilience, and overall knowledge these students possess and bring into schools and classrooms. To be clear, supporting students living below the poverty line requires that we seriously rethink our mindsets, beliefs, and actions about them, and their capacity, and reject deficit conceptions— negative views, mindsets, and worldviews—and consequently practices that influence students. Deficit conceptions shepherd educators into focusing on what students do not have or may not currently be capable of rather than recognizing the many assets and talents that these students have. Indeed, students succeed when mechanisms are in place to support them (Anyon, 2005b; Howard, 2010; Milner, 2015). 

Things we should consider when thinking about poverty and influences on students:

• Deficit perspective - A perspective that attributes failures such as lack of achievement, learning, or success to a personal lack of effort or deficiency in the individual. This perspective does not fully take into account failures or limitations of the teacher, classroom, school, or education system or prevalent socio‐economic trends that impact students' abilities to learn. The deficit model of teaching, where the teacher provides the learning to fix a student, stands in direct contrast to the belief that the teacher's role is to draw out learners' inherent capabilities, support their local and cultural knowledge and develop a co-constructed understanding of the world through exploration, questioning, and facilitation.

• Student and family houselessness - Student and family home structures, particularly houselessness, have been shown to influence students’ experiences and outcomes in schools. Houseless individuals may experience changes in housing status that include being on the street, shared dwelling, emergency shelter, transitional housing, and permanent hospitalization and incarceration in correctional facilities. Houseless children are particularly at risk for poor educational outcomes, which can have lifelong consequences for their future livelihood and economic independence. If school systems do not provide special educational interventions to address the particular educational barriers that these children face, then it is likely that these children will stay marginalized in the lowest economic rung of society. 

• Geography and social contexts - Due to structural and systemic inequities (Anyon, 2005a; Haberman, 1991; Kozol, 1991, 2005; MacLeod, 1995; Milner, 2010) and what Tate (2008) advanced as geography of opportunity, the community landscape can shape where businesses, transportation, housing, and related resources are strategically located. One consequence is that students and their families may have limited educational and employment opportunities according to where they live. Students of color and those living in poverty are much more likely to be exposed to hazardous environmental conditions that can have an influence on their health and consequently their performance in schools. 

• Parental and family engagement - Parental and family engagement crosses the boundary between schools and communities. Family engagement can influence how well connected students are to academic and social expectations of schools. Many studies related to poverty and student success focus, to some degree, on the role of parents, families, and their engagement in their children’s education. Parental and family engagement goes beyond parents and families showing up to school at Parent Teacher Association (PTA) meetings. For instance, parental and family engagement can mean that parents are involved in home-based activities, such as ensuring that homework is completed; monitoring student progress and improvement through school visits and in the home; talking over the phone to teachers and administrators; planning activities for the school; participating in fundraising activities; attending and assisting with fieldtrips; attending extracurricular activities such as sports and plays; staffing concession stands; volunteering in the classroom; and serving on advisory boards. 

The first step to becoming poverty-responsive is for educators to engage in deep self-reflection. Reflection allows teachers to clarify their own beliefs and expectations about student learning and behavior and become more aware of how teacher beliefs and expectations shape student experiences (Weinstein, TomlinsonClarke, & Curran, 2004). Reflective practices are particularly important when working with students in poverty, as teachers’ negative beliefs and expectations about these students may place the students at a disadvantage in the classroom (Milner, 2015). 

Once teachers possess the self-awareness that comes through continuous reflection, they can tailor learning experiences to meet the needs of students living in poverty. Self-reflection can help teachers become familiar with the privileges, issues, and experiences that have shaped them as people, including those related to socio-economic status (Gay & Kirkland, 2003; McIntosh, 1990). 

Recognizing your own story is one effective way to engage teachers in self-reflection (Milner, 2015). Through this process, teachers critically examine how they came to see themselves as individuals with a particular background. The following questions about socio-economic status can be starting points:

• What is my socio-economic background? How do I know? 

• What was my socio-economic background growing up? 

• How has my socio-economic background influenced my educational opportunities? 

• In what ways does my socio-economic background shape my worldview, what I do, how I experience the world, what I teach? 

• How does my socio-economic background influence decisions I make about what to emphasize in course content and how to teach it? 

• How might students of socio-economic backgrounds different than my own respond to my instructional choices? 

• How does my personal experience with regard to family structure and family life patterns growing up shape my expectations of student behavior? 

• How do my beliefs about personal and community responsibility inform the expectations I have about how my students treat the school’s physical space? 

• What are the experiences that you have had in school?  Who are you and what experiences have you had prior to and outside of school?

The goal is for teachers to deeply understand how they approach teaching and how students living in poverty respond. Once teachers have this self-awareness, they are well on their way to becoming poverty-responsive: discontinuing teaching practices that do not support students living in poverty and replacing them with practices responsive to student needs.

Helping us to explore these questions will be three important concepts:

• Students' lives, experiences, and lived context influences their academic journey.

• Analysis of these experiences and contexts will help us to understand where they are coming from.

• Knowledge, understanding, and empathy will help us make professional decisions as a teacher that may positively influence students and reduce the negative impact that contextual factors might be having on students opportunities to find success.

Here is an example from a film called Boys of Baraka....

In this film, boys from an urban school district, Baltimore City Schools, are allowed to attend a unique school outside of their community context. We should acknowledge that Baltimore City and Baltimore county have the largest graduation/success gap among any two neighboring counties in the USA. In 2004, Baltimore County graduated about 67% of their black male students, while Baltimore city black males graduated at about 27% rate.  This has changed over the years and in overall categories, but the challenges remain. 

The federal government and educational professionals have identified the following factors as contributing to challenge to educational achievement, often times describing students as "at-risk".  After identifying these factors, engage in a reflective process by answering the questions on the following survey to get a picture of the "reality" we experience, and recognizing that we all have experienced these educational factors, begin to think about students as "At-promise", rather than "At-risk". In order to be labeled at risk, students usually have 5 or 6 of these factors going on at one time in their lives. 

• Family money

• Family time

• Family resources

• School and community relationship and organizational culture

• Diversity of students and students ethnicity

• Students abilities and disabilities

• Students successful participation in school each academic year

• Parental education

• Home language and level of language proficiency

• Family structure as single, nuclear, or extended

• Transience, as immigration and emigration from the neighborhood

• Abuse in the form of violence, sexual, drug, or emotions 

Overall, students experiencing poverty are exactly just like other children, but they can encounter resource limitations and social barriers that can make it harder to learn in school settings. As educators, we must do our best to make sure each child knows how special they are and that no matter what problems they may face, there is someone who loves and believes in them.

In order to understand how teachers support students from diverse backgrounds, let's first consider something that we should do for ALL students...

Concrete Ways to Help Students Living in Poverty

As educators, we come across a vast number of students from all walks of life. In Statistics On How Poverty  Affects Children in Schools (*optional enrichment) author Jana Sosnowski shared, “Approximately one in five children in the United States live in poverty, according to the American Psychological Association, a status that affects more than housing status and food supply.” This is something that has triggered lots of talk about educational reform.

Many circumstances students living in poverty encounter are beyond their control. They can face many challenges that affect their brain development, emotional well-being, relationships with others, and school achievement. When serving in schools with students living in poverty, it is important to know how to do our best to help and empower our students.

Create a positive classroom culture. Making sure you have a classroom that exudes positivity and community is important. Be sure to teach your students to be compassionate and respectful toward one another. It can be helpful to have specific conversations about not judging others, especially on outward appearances. Team building exercises, modeling kindness, having mutual respect, and sharing the importance of accepting others are great ways to make this happen in your classroom.

Have high expectations. When you have students who are living in poverty, compassion is important. But, it does students an injustice if you do not hold them to high expectations. As educators, we want our students to do their best and succeed in our class and life. Holding students to high expectations allows them to work toward reachable goals that can empower them with intrinsic motivation. This is important because once a student leaves your class, hopefully, you have instilled in them the power to work hard toward their goals and rise to the occasion.

Here are some strategies to try:

• Give students the opportunity to set goals (*optional enrichment) Then, coach them to achieve their goals.

• Hold students accountable for classroom expectations. Have conversations about why they are important to follow.

• Expect the best out of students when it comes to their work.

• Be a role model. Share your goals and high expectations for yourself with your students.

Expose students to places outside of the classroom. Many times students’ experiences can be limited due to their means and their parents/caregivers experiences. It is integral to show students the world around them and open their eyes to what the world has to offer. Be sure to connect learning in the classroom to real-life experiences. This will truly enhance your students’ perspective as they learn and move through life.

Here are some  (*optional enrichment) strategies to try:

• Teach students about different career options, arts-related or not.

• Bring in artists and other career professionals to speak to your class.

• Get students off school grounds and take a field trip to a local museum.

• Use the web to take a virtual field trip through museum websites or videos.

Build relationships with your students and their families. Building relationships is a key aspect when it comes to creating a positive learning environment. It also helps foster mutual respect and trust with your students and their families. One factor those living in poverty often face is high mobility due to unstable living situations. Be a source of consistency. Let your students and families know they can trust you and make them feel welcome. You can explore a variety of activities for building trust and engagement including how to use art processes to build positive social and emotional skills.

Teach them social-emotional learning strategies. Students who live in poverty can have trouble focusing in school because of things troubling them in their personal lives. It’s important to teach positive social and emotional skills that can build trust, respect, community, and personal growth. These skills can also help students learn to regulate their feelings and transition to a mindset ready for learning. Let’s take a look at three ideas.

• Beach Ball - Have students pretend they are holding an imaginary beach ball. When they inhale they pretend the ball is expanding. While they exhale they pretend the ball is squeezing inward.

• Square - This breathing technique simply has students take their finger and trace a square in front of them in the air. As students make the first line for the top of the square, they inhale. As students make the second line of the square going down, they exhale and so on. You can repeat this as many times as you want.

• Bunny Breath - This is a great breathing strategy, especially for your youngest students. Have your students pretend to be rabbits. They will need to take three quick sniffs in the nose, and one long exhale out the nose. A great way to teach students how to regulate their emotions is to take a step back and do some breathing techniques. If your school does not already teach breathing techniques, you can easily do this in your classroom.

• Calm Down Corner - A space in your classroom that allows students who are not regulated or in the proper mindset to begin learning to go and regulate themselves. You can have students use a stress ball, glitter bottles, or breathing techniques to begin to calm down. You may also want to have a self-reflection sheet available to help students process their feelings.

• Classroom Circles - One way to build community is through classroom circles. This technique involves students getting in a circle and sharing based on a prompt given by the teacher.

Mike Rose, a professor of education at UCLA, has written several books on schooling and educating children who come from more challenging socioeconomic environments.  He writes about how we should understand what it means to be a child from these circumstances and that, as a result, we will have a much more positive and supportive perspective of students who have environmental challenges. 

Mike recently passed away during the pandemic. I am sad because I will no longer email him to tell him how much we appreciated his story and how it has positively impacted our community.  

• Do you think he would have made it to where he is without his experiences? 

• Don’t let the previous educational experiences of your students dictate their future!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

• Supplemental Reading - Lives on the Boundary

• Supplemental Reading - Ruby Payne's Framework for Understanding Poverty

• Supplemental Reading - Donna Beegle's A-Z Educating Kids from Generational Poverty

• Leeward CC - Learning Resource Center, online writing tutors.

• Leeward CC - Learner Support Services

• Leeward CC - Laulima Orientation

• Explore this idea for a second - BRAINS IN PAIN, CANNOT LEARN

Chapter 4.1b - Managing Student's Learning Differences (Link to Google Sites)