February 2010
| Volume 67 | Number 5
Meeting Students Where They Are
Marge Scherer
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Robyn R. Jackson
Starting where your students are means understanding how currencies are negotiated and traded in the classroom. Any behavior that students use to acquire the knowledge and skills needed in the classroom functions as currency. Teachers communicate the kinds of currencies they accept in their classrooms, such as getting good grades; students do their best to acquire and trade in the teacher's accepted form of currency. But students also have currencies they value, such as desiring the approval of their friends. By honoring their own and students' currencies, teachers can help all students more successfully access the curriculum. Teachers need to recognize alternative currencies, figure out the "soft skills" students need to succeed, and find a common currency that is satisfactory both to them and their students.
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Carol Ann Tomlinson
Great teachers approach their craft with humility. They are attuned to the guidance provided by theory, research, and experience—but at the same time, they know that the journey will never go as planned. Tomlinson, a highly accomplished educator, shares her memories of three students who challenged her "certainties" about instruction. By studying and responding to the needs of these individual students—by connecting the instruction with Scott's interest, allowing Golden to enter the curriculum at a place that made sense for him, and giving Geoff permission to pursue his passion and work at his own pace— Tomlinson expanded her expertise in differentiation and became better prepared to meet the needs of all students.
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Marilyn Burns
Having one-on-one interviews with students can reveal surprising information about gaps in student learning, enabling teachers to make appropriate instructional shifts and identify appropriate interventions. Four snapshots of interviews with elementary students about place value, missing addends, interpreting remainders, and adding fractions uncover important information about student misunderstandings that written work, on its own, could never have supplied. Spending time interviewing students will also have a spill-over effect on classroom teaching practices as teachers learn to more effectively probe student thinking.
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Patricia Gándara
Latinos now constitute the largest minority group in the United States and the fastest growing segment of its school-age population. Yet they are the least educated of all major ethnic groups. Poverty, lack of access to high-quality preschool, low levels of parental education attainment, and hypersegregated schools all play a crucial role. The evidence suggests that a continuing net of support for disadvantaged students—rather than isolated interventions—is likely to significantly improve students' academic outcomes and reduce achievement gaps. Supports need to begin in early childhood, with access to high-quality preschools, and continue throughout high school through programs that focus on dropout prevention and promote college attendance. Creating magnet schools that appeal to middle-class parents, working with health and social service agencies, and reaching out to parents in culturally appropriate ways can make a significant difference for many Latino students.
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Lee Ann Jung and Thomas R. Guskey
Teachers often grapple with the challenge of giving report card grades to students with learning disabilities and English language learners. The authors offer a five-step model that "offers a fair, accurate, and legal way to adapt the grading process for exceptional learners." The model begins with a high-quality reporting system for all students that bases grades on clearly articulated standards for student learning and that provides separate grades for three types of learning criteria: products, processes, and progress. Teachers then follow the five steps to identify standards for which a particular student needs special support, to develop modified standards when necessary, and to assign clear grades on the basis of performance on the modified standards.
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William Damon
All people are born with a natural moral sense. In this article, William Damon discusses the need for schools to use students' natural moral inclinations to guide them toward becoming ethical citizens. Students need guidance if they are to know how to apply their inherent moral capacities to real-life situations. When schools respond to student misconduct with moral language, they are providing the guidance students need, says Damon. They can expand on these efforts by instilling a sense of noble purpose in students.
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Jessica Towbin
The author, a high school language arts teacher, describes her move to a high-needs urban school after 13 years teaching in predominantly middle-class suburban schools. Unlike her former schools, in which a culture of compliance prevailed, her new school serves students who don't necessarily cooperate unless they see how the curriculum matters to them. Through several stories, Towbin shows how she has learned to listen to students so that she can discover where they are and what is important to them, thus engaging them in meaningful learning.
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Eric Sparks, Janet L. Johnson and Patrick Akos
To design effective dropout prevention programs, schools need to know who drops out, and why. Too often, schools target such programs to minorities and low-income students. This approach risks doing more harm than good by stereotyping students and delivering inappropriate services to those who don't need them. The authors of this article conducted a study in a large, southeastern school district to help identify potential dropouts more accurately. Their analysis showed that 9th grade dropouts were more likely than the general 9th grade population to have one or more of the following risk factors: being retained in any grade, scoring below grade level on grade 8 standardized math tests, and receiving a long-term suspension. Collecting data in this way can help schools identify the students most in need of intervention and provide the extra support these students need.
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Kathleen Cushman
Kathleen Cushman spent a year interviewing 150 ordinary U.S. teenagers about how they got good at some particular pursuit. Although they weren't selected for being exceptionally talented, all the teens she interviewed could easily identify an activity in which they excelled—everything from basketball to knitting—and speak articulately about what drew them to this activity and motivated them to keep practicing despite frustrations. Yet most of the motivating learning experiences they described occurred outside of school. Cushman describes "deliberate practice," lists the habits of excellence that interviewees identified, and explores how classroom teachers can set up learning conditions that motivate the kind of effective practice and the sense of "flow" that students experience in their out-of-school pursuits.
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Amy Baeder
Teachers rarely live in the same neighborhoods as their students and the natural connections that once came from living nearby have eroded. This change makes it hard for educators to get to know students' families beyond formal connections like Back to School Night. The gap between teachers' and students' worlds is especially worrisome when there is a socioeconomic, racial, or linguistic divide between a school populations' home culture and most teachers' home culture. Teachers at Cleveland High School in Seattle attempt to bridge this gap; since 2007, all teachers have been required to visit the homes of at least five of their students. The goal is not to deliver information or discuss problems, but to get to know families and especially gather information on the strengths, abilities, and interests families possess that teachers can work into the classroom. The school finds that opening up such home-school connections makes students feel recognized and engaged. Baeder describes how Cleveland High's teachers draw on Moll's concept of "funds of knowledge"—skills and talents all households possess—and Ginsberg's recommended process for conducting family visits. She shares suggestions for making home visits work logistically in high schools.
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Miriam Hirsch
Hirsch argues for an approach to student questioning that mitigates the pressure to push students for quick, clear-cut answers; "decoupling" answers from questions. Students, she believes, are being cheated of the chance to think a question over before answering, to ponder dilemmas in depth, even to realize that some questions are unanswerable. She recommends three approaches that will show students it's worthwhile to reflect long and hard on certain questions: (1) Ask students to wait for a day or more before answering a question, keeping the question in their "kup" (Yiddish for head); (2) acknowledge that grappling with questions is hard—but natural; (3) model how to live with unanswered questions.
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Caltha Crowe
Students with behavioral issues are challenging for teachers and classmates alike. Author Caltha Crowe presents several classroom strategies elementary teachers can use to help these students overcome their emotional obstacles and get their learning on track. The fundamental approach behind all of the strategies is to get to know the students personally. Learning interventions for children with challenging behavior are most effective when students believe their teachers care about them as individuals.
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Twelve high school students from the Howard Gardner School in Alexandria, Virginia, describe how their best teachers get to know them and respond to their learning needs.
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Carl Glickman
Noted education writer and speaker Carl Glickman recounts how, as a high school student with a stutter, he dreaded teachers calling on him in class. Glickman's teachers observed a "hidden contract" with him: He would do all his work, and they wouldn't put him on the spot by calling on him—until Mr. Matheson. As this teacher continued to call on Glickman—and let the self-conscious teen know his insights were worth waiting for—Glickman realized that his disability didn't need to interfere with sharing his ideas. This teacher's persistence enabled him to begin speaking confidently in public.
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Robert J. Marzano
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William M. Ferriter
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Tracy A. Huebner
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Joanne Rooney
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Dana Aguilera
A group of four kindergarten and 1st grade teachers in an ethnically and socioeconomically diverse elementary school decided to visit the homes of all their students to see whether the visits would help them cultivate a more united classroom community. The teachers visited each student's home for one hour; these visits enabled teachers to become better acquainted with the students and their parents. They also chose a few students with academic and behavioral problems to visit multiple times. The students and parents responded positively to the visit. Student attentiveness and motivation appeared to improve, and parents said that they were more comfortable with their child's teacher after the visit.
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Sandra Ransel
The combination of the high dropout rate from U.S. high schools and a harsh economy puts too many uncredentialed young people at great risk, argues Ransel, principal of an alternative high school in Las Vegas. The education community must intervene to keep high school dropouts from floundering in the workplace and passing a pattern of failure on to their children. Ransel describes how Desert Rose High School structures learning in a way that meets the life needs of youth who have given up on traditional high school, using a competency-based, continuous enrollment set-up. Ransel decries the fact that many alternative high schools are themselves at risk. Such schools face a catch-22 as they struggle to open doors for high school dropouts: if they hold onto features like continuous enrollment that maverick dropouts need, they can't fit their student data into the rigid tracking systems that applications for government funds require. Yet if they don't conform to the systems required for government funding, they may not secure enough resources to operate effectively.
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Selma Wassermann
Effective classroom discussions promote higher-order thinking skills by encouraging students to invent, create, imagine, take risks, and dig for deeper meaning. The author describes five keys to create a climate for such discussions: (1) make a commitment to listen, attend, and apprehend, concentrating fully on what the student is trying to communicate; (2) help students communicate better by asking them to clarify their ideas; (3) give students time to think; (4) refrain from the natural tendency to judge students' ideas; and (5) avoid the search for "right" answers and accept lack of closure. Discussions that use this approach, writes Wassermann, are an important part of balanced classroom instruction.
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Adrienne M. Floro
Over the course of an entire school year, 5th grade students study a topic of personal interest—their "it" that inspires them—and become experts in the process. The students select their own topics, get approval from their families, choose how they will document the project along the way, and decide on how they will showcase their learning at the end-of-year "It" Fair. The works cited page that students create during their year-long research project serves as their diploma of expertise. Student-led conferences keep the teacher apprised of students' progress along the way. Students practice their presentation in a dress rehearsal, receiving student and teacher feedback that helps them improve their final presentation.
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Naomi Thiers
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