Compassion-Based Strategies for Managing Classroom Behavior

When Grace Dearborn started her career teaching high school students, she felt confident about how to teach but unprepared for managing behavior in her classroom. During more challenging disciplinary moments with students, she used her angry voice with them, thinking that would work. Instead, on one occasion, an escalated situation led to a student following her around the classroom for 15 minutes while she was teaching until security could come to escort the student out of the class.

It wasn’t until a few years into her job that a colleague saw how she was communicating with her students and suggested a different approach. Dearborn’s colleague noticed that she couldn’t keep frustration out of her voice and body language when she was having disciplinary moments with her students, which only heightened the tension. When her mentor teacher saw what was happening, she told Grace to soften the muscles around her eyes — as opposed to creating tension when furrowing your eyebrows. She said that keeping the muscles around the eyes completely neutral will soften any harsh tones in your voice.

Dearborn started to see her changed approach to behavior management create happier and more engaged students and other teachers noticed, too. She shared her strategies with colleagues at school and then branched out to consulting other schools through Conscious Teaching. She is also the co-author of “Yeah, But What About This Kid?” and “Conscious Classroom Management: Unlocking the Secrets of Great Teaching.” She shared some of her strategies at the Learning and the Brain conference in San Francisco last month. 

She reminds educators that students of all ages need to be taught appropriate classroom behavior with compassion. She said that educators need many options in how they manage behavior because not all kids respond to the same measures. She listed several tactics in four categories.

There’s a saying some educators use: “The best classroom management strategy is an engaging lesson plan.” That may be true, but there are often a few students who act out in class no matter how well the teacher prepares. Dearborn says when she started using compassion to help her students behave in school-appropriate ways, she had far more success. She often found that punishments embarrassed students and caused them to resent her deeply, damaging their relationship.

7 COMPASSIONATE BEHAVIOR MANAGEMENT STRATEGIES

Tone, Volume and Posture

Dearborn empathizes with students who feel shame when they are called out in front of the entire class. Whenever possible, she tries to discipline privately, but classrooms are hardly private, so she often uses a combination of tone, volume and posture to get students on task.   

First she adopts a calm and serious tone in her voice. Then, she squares her body to the student. She says this kind of communication can usually do the trick, but there are other steps if needed. For kids who might have oppositional defiant disorder or be emotionally disturbed, Dearborn advises a side posture with averted eyes so as not to trigger a violent response.  

Avoid Standoffs

Dearborn said that in moments of escalation with students, often the best strategy is to offer a few alternative choices to the behavior a child is showing and then walk away. Sometimes a small nudge is enough to redirect behavior, and teens especially may not follow the teacher’s direction if she hovers. Dearborn calls this “drive-by discipline.”

“Say the kid’s name superfast and then move on,” she said. “Sometimes it’s the right thing to do. It startles her, and then I move on before she can bait me into an argument.”

Look for the Subtext: I Don’t Care

When kids are acting in a confrontational, dismissive or volatile way, Dearborn suggests looking for the deeper message the student is communicating, whether they know it or not. She imagines an invisible subtitle running in front of the student that communicates what she really needs. When things get tense, “everything out of their voice and their face and their body, that is just interference getting in the way of me reading the invisible subtitles,” Dearborn said. She has had to practice ignoring the loud anger and hostility in order to look for the invisible subtitle.

“If you’re assuming the best about the kid, that they want to learn appropriate behavior, they want to be positively connected to you, but they somehow can’t, there’s something in the way. What can you imagine the invisible subtitle is for ‘I don’t care?’ ” Dearborn asked a crowd of educators at the Learning and the Brain conference.

“For me, the invisible subtitle for ‘I don’t care’ is, Mrs. Dearborn, I really, really care, but I can’t tell you that. Do you care?”

Reading the “subtitles,” as she calls them, has helped Dearborn to stop perceiving misbehavior as disrespect. That doesn’t make her a pushover, she said. It makes her an advocate for the student.

“So now when kids say, ‘I don’t care’ to me, I say, ‘That’s OK because I care, and I can care for the both of us right now, so let’s do this.’ ”

Approaching the student with the assumption that  they want to behave appropriately changes the communication dynamic.

“I’m not doing it because I’m frustrated and now I want to punish them. And even though the words and the consequences I’m giving might be the same in either case, it is the quality of interaction that shifts, and kids pick up on quality and our unspoken intention more than anything else in a disciplinary interaction.”

The subtext could also be simpler. Maybe a student is talking in class, and when the teacher calls her out on it, she denies talking. “For me, the subtitle for ‘I wasn’t talking’ is, ‘Mrs. Dearborn, I was totally talking. You know I was talking. I know I was talking. Everybody in the room knows that I was talking. But I’m embarrassed that you called me out about it right now, so if you walk away, I’ll stop.’ ”

Dearborn says to accept the student’s answer and move on.  

The Gentle Press: Head Down on the Desk

High school students often put their heads down in class either sleeping or refusing to participate. A teacher might tell say, “sit up” or “no sleeping in class,” but to Dearborn, those approaches don’t demonstrate care. Instead, she tried to express compassion, saying: “It’s OK to be tired, but you can’t sleep in class. Can you sit up and work on the assignment?”

If that gentle reminder doesn’t work, Dearborn knows a more private conversation is necessary. She would spend a few minutes with the student  in the hallway. Sometimes a walk outside is enough to wake the student up, but other times it’s a chance to reaffirm an offer to help or learn about deeper issues that are going on.

“This is called the gentle press — when you gently press forward at a student until either they’re in the academic work or you’re in a relationship-building moment,” Dearborn said. “Sometimes this doesn’t end in academic work. Sometimes the gentle press ends in relationship-building.”

She recounted a past experience with one of her students who had his head down. When they stepped outside class, the student burst into tears and said his brother had been deployed by the military.

“He’s not going to access the academics today. He’s in emotional crisis and we have to have some space for that.” she said. “If I had just gone by him and said, ‘sit up, no sleeping in class,’ what would that have expressed to him? ”

Choice, Timeline, Walk Away

Dearborn said that when people come to her workshops, they arrive with hopes of an exotic new solution that will solve everything. But changing behavior comes down to hard work. And to help students learn appropriate classroom behavior, she presents a series of choices that are connected to consequences, not punishments. Students can be given choices, including ones that lead to undesired consequences.

“The sooner we can get our students to internalize this truth — that their choices matter, that they are in charge of whether they receive the sweet or bitter fruit based on how they choose in any given situation — the sooner they internalize that concept, the better off they’re going to be.”

Giving students space to make their own choices means that sometimes they’ll choose to act in ways teachers wish they wouldn’t. But even in those moments, incidents that could lead to an office referral, students are testing whether their teacher cares enough to hold her accountable.

“[The student] understands I can go to the wall without abandoning or abusing, without lashing out,” Dearborn said. “And she for whatever reason needs to learn that lesson, apparently. So I can be that person. It’s not how I want it to go, but if we need to go here a couple of times so she can learn who we are together, that’s OK with me.”

It’s counterintuitive, but Dearborn said it would be easier for the student if she lashes out at them because then the student can blame her for how the interaction ends. That way, the student doesn’t have to confront her own actions.

“But if I just maintain choices, leave them with her, with kind eyes, in the end, even if she ends up out of the room, she understands at some level, maybe not consciously and right then, later, that could have gone differently,” Dearborn said.

Visual Cues

When kids don’t follow through with a teacher’s verbal command, it might not be because they’re being defiant. Sometimes they’re not listening because of attention issues, learning differences or auditory processing issues. They could also be English language learners or they’re fatigued by a teacher talking too much.

“Because they’re hearing my voice too much, they’re tuning me out,” Dearborn said. “If I don’t have another way to communicate with them I’m losing half of them half the time.”  

This is where she can communicate expected behavior with an image. She has had kids line up, for example, in what they thought was a straight line. When she showed them a photo of how they were actually lined up, they did it again.

Managing a classroom of over 30 students is hard work and no one is perfect. But Dearborn has found these tips keep her in a compassionate frame of mind, looking for the best in her students, and checking her own assumptions before interacting with them. When she can follow he own advice, she finds she’s building students up, rather than tearing them down, and helping them to be accountable for the choices they make.

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Sparkle Unicorns And Fart Ninjas: What Parents Can Do About Gendered Toys

With Rainbow Butterfly Unicorn Kitty on one side and bulbous-headed Fart Ninjas on the other, the gender divide was impossible to avoid at the North American International Toy Fair in New York City back in February.

The light-up Barbie mermaids vying for space with Gatling-style foam-dart blasters in Manhattan’s Javits Center raised a question: Have toys really progressed since our grandparents’ days? And how do the toys we play with shape the people we grow up to be?

We set out to answer these and related questions in our latest episode of Life Kit’s podcast Parenting: Difficult Conversations, with help from Sesame Workshop.

Toys are getting more gendered

Researcher Elizabeth Sweet studied toy catalogs and ads over time and found that toys are actually more gender divided than they were half a century ago.

Rebecca Hains, a professor at Salem State University in Massachusetts, has written a book about it: The Princess Problem: Guiding Our Girls Through The Princess-Obsessed Years.

Disney characters, she points out, used to be more diverse: There was Cinderella, sure, but also Pinocchio and Bambi. When 1989’s The Little Mermaid made a splash, Hains says, “Disney realized profitability in girls.” Enter the juggernaut Disney Princess brand. Plus, marketers now cloak even gender-neutral toys like blocks in both primary and pastel shades in the hope of selling more sets.

Even with several women vying to be the United States’ next president, and even with a greater awareness of the spectrum of gender identity than we’ve ever had in our culture, Hains says, “it’s almost like kids are subject to stereotypes that we’ve evolved out of elsewhere.”

And these stereotypes can stick.

In a 2013 study of undergraduate women, one-third identified themselves as “princesses.” They placed a higher value on the physical attractiveness of a mate, were less likely to want to join the workforce after college and were more likely to say they wanted to marry a breadwinner. And when all the women were given puzzles to solve, the “princesses” quit faster.

(This study, a conference paper, is described and cited in this paper, co-authored by Sarah Coyne, which similarly showed that girls who preferred playing princesses showed more gender-stereotyped behavior a full year later.)

Researchers haven’t proved that all little girls who like tutus will grow up to be entitled quitters. But play does prepare children for life, so boys and girls both need broad options, says Rosemarie Truglio, a developmental psychologist and vice president of education and research for Sesame Workshop.

“It’s OK for me to like pink things and pretty things and frilly things, but it shouldn’t define who I am and shouldn’t define what I will be in the future,” Truglio says. “Anyone who is singly defined doesn’t make a really interesting person.”

Here are our takeaways for how to handle toy problems.

1. Bans will backfire — no pun intended.

You can certainly outlaw a toy that makes you uncomfortable, but consider this:

“I don’t think banning anything is the answer,” Truglio says. She found this out the hard way as a mom herself. At first “we had the rule: No [toy] guns in our home,” she says. But she realized that all her young son’s friends were playing with them, typically in the hallway of their apartment building.

Group play and the friendship that comes with it are so important for kids, Truglio believes, that she decided to allow the toy gun, with conditions. Besides, if you say no, the odds are that the toy will become even more coveted, she says.

2. How they play is more important than what they play with.

No toy is inherently good or wicked, says Lisa Dinella, a gender studies professor at Monmouth University and co-author of the aforementioned 2013 princess study. With a gun, “you can be really, really aggressive, or you can just be shooting targets.” Equally, a princess game could be all about being pretty, or it could have a sophisticated plot.

One red flag, Truglio says, is when there’s no variety to a child’s play. For example, if your child wants to play with only toy guns, and the play is always aggressive, then that could be a sign for you, as a parent, to step in and find out what’s really troubling the child.

3. Parents can counter sexist messages.

Dinella says kids start learning gender stereotypes before they’re out of diapers. “Between 18 months and 2 years is the first time we’re starting to see their awareness.”

They learn by watching us. Studies show that parents perceive newborn girls as more delicate and newborn boys as being stronger. On the playground, mothers intervene with girls, seeing physical risks, more often.

“So it’s really hard to separate out toy preference from gender socialization that is so insidious,” Hains says.

Dinella has done several experiments on how heavy gender branding influences kids’ toy choices. In one, she and her team painted a bunch of toys white. Without color cues, both boys and girls gravitated toward neutral playthings like Play-Doh and the Etch A Sketch.

In another experiment, titled “Pink Gives Girls Permission,” Dinella and her co-authors flipped the traditional color patterns: pink trucks and camouflage-clad baby dolls. She found that “there’s a bigger barrier to boys playing with girl things and acting like girls than for girls to be able to venture into some of these cross-gender plays.”

Dinella says you can see this inequity in how hard our culture still comes down on the little boys who love princesses and sparkly things.

This is too bad, she says, because toys can teach important and sometimes unexpected skills. Dolls prepare boys for future roles as fathers and help them practice empathy. Acting out a tea party can help children learn “cognitive sequencing of events: the beginning, the middle and the end of a task.” In other words, a tea set can introduce one of the foundations of computer coding.

So Dinella suggests that, when toy shopping, strive for gender balanced as well as gender neutral. Try saying something like, “You have four dolls already, so how about … also getting a truck?”

Or, “Can we get it in the white version so that all of the kids, when they come to our house, can play with it, instead of just the pink version?”

4. Talk to your kids directly, and share your values around toys.

Dinella is also a mother, and she didn’t ban toy guns either. But she does let her children know that she’s not wild about them. “I’m never going to say, ‘Hey, we haven’t played with the Nerf guns a lot lately! Let’s get those out!’ ”

In other cases, she says, you can be more direct. “You can say, ‘This dress-up toy that was given to you, although it’s really sparkly … it does really talk to you about being pretty. And I would rather you spend time trying to get smart.”

5: Join in your child’s play to further expand the possibilities.

If a foam-dart shootout is getting out of hand, ordering the combatants to timeout isn’t all that effective, says Truglio. Instead, “maybe you take on a character role … who is going to stop this type of aggression.”

Hains tells the story of a father who played princesses with his daughter — but would get out the firetruck and send the princesses out on rescue missions.

The good news is that we may be getting a little more help these days from pop culture. Characters like the powerful Elsa, the adventurous Moana, Wonder Woman and the new Captain Marvel, played by Brie Larson, are pushing the envelope for female heroines.

Another of Dinella’s studies suggests that they are having an impact. She asked preschoolers — both boys and girls — to describe themselves and also to describe what they knew about princesses. Not surprisingly, they described princesses as the typical girly girl who needs to be rescued.

Researchers then showed the children video clips of more recent princesses, like Merida from Brave, taking action and being powerful. Then they asked the same questions again.

Watching those images changed the children’s perceptions of princesses, and, Dinella says, it changed kids’ own self-descriptions too.

After seeing princesses being powerful, both the girls and the boys described themselves as more multidimensional: “They [would] say: ‘I am strong. I am powerful. I am a leader.’ But also, ‘I am caring, and I share.’ ”

In other words, when kids anywhere on the gender spectrum spend time with characters who are more complex, it can change the way they see themselves.

Truglio sums it up this way. “Kids play what they see. If you can see it, you can play it — then one day you can be it.”

Copyright 2019 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

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Baby Chick Chocolate Cake

I finally decorated a cake. It’s been forever and I don’t really know why other than I enjoy decorating little treats. I guess I feel pressure to get a design right and with a cake you only have the one shot, but with mini treats, I can make lots of mistakes. But not today. Not with this cake. I’m really happy with how cute this little yellow chick chocolate cake turned out.

I used this chocolate recipe and baked it in two 6-inch cake pans instead of the 9-inch that the recipe calls for. The recipe yields enough batter for a 6-inch 2-layer cake with enough batter for six regular cupcakes left over. I also made two batches of the frosting to make sure I had enough for decorating.

I tinted the buttercream yellow with the consistency somewhat thick and piped frosting on the bottom layer first and then the sides before smoothing it out with a cake scraper and offset spatula. I did it this way to eliminate the need for a crumb coat. By piping on a thick layer first and then leveling it out smooth, I was able to avoid getting crumbs in the outside layer of frosting.

It took me a little while since I’ve been out of practice, but I finally got it all smooth.

At this point I thought the chick was going to be cute, but I also wanted to up the springy-ness, so I broke out some of my spring sprinkle medleys from Sweetapolita to decorate a band around the bottom of the cake.

First I chilled the cake in the freezer for a few minutes to avoid messing up my smooth frosting. Then I wrapped a piece of wax paper around the cake and taped it so it would be secure. Since the cake was chilled and firm on the outside, the wax paper wouldn’t mess it up.

Then I gently pressed the sprinkles into the frosting over a cookie sheet pan so it would catch any stray sprinkles that fell off.

When you’re done. Gently remove the wax paper.

So pretty! Sweetapolita has the cutest color combinations.

Okay, now that that’s done, it’s time to decorate. Before tinting my buttercream frosting yellow. I reserved some to color orange for the beak, pink for the cheeks and black for the eyes and feet. And I also made sure to save some of the yellow frosting to use for wings.

I started with the eyes and feet first. Just pipe black frosting on top of the cake. If you want to be really exact, try using a toothpick to gently make marks in the frosting for starting and stopping points.

Next… the beak. I piped orange dollops on a piece of wax paper and placed in the freezer for a few minutes to firm up so I could shape it. Sorry, forgot to take a photo, but here is the finished beak in place.

I also piped pink frosting on wax paper for cheeks. I knew I wouldn’t be able to pipe nice circles, so I folded the wax paper over the piped circles and pressed it down so the frosting was even and flat. Then I placed them in the freezer for a few minutes to firm up and used a large decorating tip to cut out perfect flat little circles for the cheeks.

Chill them again if necessary before removing from wax paper and then simply lift them off and place in position.

Wings! Again, I piped frosting on wax paper and chilled it so I could reshape the frosting slightly into two pretty similarly shaped wings.

Gently attach to the cake to see the whole look come together.

You can even add a few dollops for feathers sticking up on top of this sweet little chick’s head.

Look at those sprinkles. I guess it’s time to cut it open.

But I can’t! It’s too cute.

But I did! And it was really, really good.

Hope you enjoy! Chirp!

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Can Inuit Moms Help Me Tame My 3-Year-Old’s Anger?

Six months ago, I found myself preparing for battle.

I was lying in bed at 5:30 a.m., going over in my head how to handle the next encounter with my 3-year-old daughter, Rosy.

Goodness knows, I love her so much. But there’s a fire in that little belly. And to be honest, I have no idea how to handle all the anger — the tantrums, the screaming and, most of all, the hitting.

When she’s angry and I pick her up, she has a habit of slapping me across the face. Sometimes it really hurts. I’ve even started ducking like a boxer when I lift her up.

At first, I reacted as my parents did, with bluster and sternness. That only backfired. All she did was arch her back and fall on the ground.

Then I consulted Dr. Google and decided calm and firm was the “correct way.” But Rosy could tell I was still upset and trying to control her.

Slowly, a wall was rising up between Rosy and me. And I began dreading our time together. Ugh.

Then back in early December, I had an opportunity of a lifetime. I traveled to the Canadian Arctic to report on a story about the Inuit and their remarkable ability to regulate anger. During the trip, I got the chance to hear advice from arguably the calmest, coolest moms in the world: Inuit moms.

It was like these moms had handed me the manual on how to communicate with small children. And their advice completely shifted how I discipline.

She’s not ‘pushing your buttons’

For thousands of years, the Inuit have raised children in one of the harshest places on Earth. During that time, they’ve developed a suite of powerful parenting tools to teach children emotional intelligence, especially when it comes to anger.

At the center of these tools is a major tenet: Never shout at small children.

“Yelling? There was no yelling at kids [in traditional Inuit culture],” says Martha Tikivik, 83, who was born in an igloo and has six children.

In fact, there’s no reason for a parent to get angry at a small child, Tikivik says: “Anger has no purpose. It’s not going to solve your problem. It only stops communication between the child and the mom.”

When a child is misbehaving or having a tantrum, the child is too upset to learn, says 89-year-old Eenoapik Sageatook, whose family was forced to settle in a town when she was a little girl. So there’s no reason to scold or shout during these moments.

“You have to remain calm and wait for the child to calm down,” she says. “Then you can teach the child.”

In other words, cool your jets, Mama Doucleff. Stop blowing your fuse. Stop taking the toddler’s behavior personally. And stop thinking that Rosy is “pushing your buttons,” says Inuit mom and radio producer Lisa Ipeelie.

“You think little kids are mad at you,” she says. “That’s not what’s going on. They’re upset about something, and you have to figure out what it is.”

OK. I admit that following this advice was really hard. I mean really, really hard. It took weeks of practice (and another trick I learned about anger). At first, I just stopped saying anything to Rosy when she had a tantrum or hit me. I knew that if I opened my mouth, the words would be tinged in anger. So I would just close my eyes to calm myself down and then wait for Rosy to calm down herself.

Once I learned not to be angry with Rosy, I began trying to help her with her own anger by loving her. I’d ask if she needed a hug, or I’d hold her really tightly.

Then after she calmed down, I took inspiration from the Inuit moms and turned discipline into fantasy and theater.

Tell a story

Instead of yelling or telling kids what to do, Inuit parents traditionally discipline through storytelling, says Goota Jaw, who teaches an Inuit parenting class at Nunavut Arctic College in Iqaluit, Canada.

For example, she says, to get kids to stay away from the dangerous ocean, parents tell them about a sea monster that lives in the water. If you go too close to the water, the parents say, the monster will put you in his pouch, drag you down to the ocean and adopt you out to another family.

There are stories to get kids to listen to adults, wear hats in the winter, not take food without asking and go to bed on time.

At first, these types of stories sounded too scary for a 3-year-old. Then a few weeks after returning from the Arctic, I flipped my opinion 180 degrees.

One afternoon, Rosy and I were in the kitchen, preparing dinner. I was trying to get her to close the refrigerator door. I deployed my typical strategy: adult logic followed by nagging. I explained several times how she is wasting energy.

It was like I was talking to a wall.

After a few minutes, I found myself in the all-too common predicament of arguing with a proto-human. I was ready to blow a fuse when my thoughts turned to Goota Jaw and the sea monster. So I said, with a half-serious, half-playful tone, “You know? There’s a monster inside the refrigerator, and if he warms up, he’s going to get bigger and bigger and come get you.”

Then I pointed into the refrigerator and exclaimed, “Oh my goodness. There he is!”

Holy moly! You should have seen the look on Rosy’s face. She closed the door lightning fast, turned around and said, “Mama, tell me more about the monster in there.”

Since that moment, storytelling has become a go-to parenting tool in our home. Rosy can’t get enough of these stories and even asks me to make them scarier.

Here are a few popular ones right now:

1. Sharing Monster: Living up in a tree outside the kitchen window, the sharing monster grows bigger and bigger when little kids aren’t sharing. At some point, he could come up, snatch you and take you up in the tree.

2. Yelling Monster: He lives in the ceiling and comes down to snatch little kids who yell and are demanding.

3. Shoe Monster: She makes sure kids get their shoes on in the morning — quickly — or else she’ll take you down into the heating vent.

4. Dress Spiders: Back in January, Rosy wore the same pink dress day and night for about five days. I couldn’t get her to take it off. I tried talking logically: “Rosy, if we wash it tonight, it won’t have stains on it for school tomorrow.” She looked at me as if I were speaking French.

Finally, I got close to her and whispered, “If the dress gets too dirty, spiders will start to grow in it.”

Rosy didn’t say a word and slowly slipped the dress off. When I pulled the dress out of the dryer, I held it up and exclaimed, “See? So nice and clean!”

Rosy didn’t miss a beat. “And no spiders,” she emphasized.

Overall, storytelling has opened up a huge communication channel between Rosy and me. I feel like I’m finally speaking her language. She couldn’t care less about kilowatts of power or stains on the dress. But a monster that grows and spiders that crawl — those ideas she can wrap her head around.

Put on a play

Storytelling has definitely decreased the yelling, nagging and blown fuses in our home. But the stories didn’t stop the hitting. For that, I needed inspiration from another Inuit strategy, which anthropologist Jean Briggs studied for more than 30 years ago.

In a nutshell, here’s how the approach works:

When a child misbehaves — hits someone or has a tantrum — there’s no punishment. Instead, the parent waits for a calm moment and then acts out what happened during the misbehavior.

Typically the performance starts with the parent tempting the child to misbehave. For example, “Why don’t you hit me?”

Then the child has to think: “What should I do?” If the child takes the bait and hits, the parent doesn’t scold or yell but instead acts out the consequences. “Ow, that hurts!” Mom or Dad might exclaim, to show that hitting hurts.

Briggs documented that the parent continues to emphasize the consequences by asking follow-up questions such as “Don’t you like me?” or “Are you a baby?”

The goal is to give the child a chance to practice the proper behavior at a time when the child is open to learning and not emotionally charged. Throughout the drama, the parent keeps a playful tone and a wink in the eye.

With Rosy and her hitting, I definitely had not been reacting in a playful way. Just the opposite: I was stern and serious. So with a hefty dose of skepticism, I abandoned that strategy and gave this playful approach a try.

Each time Rosy hit me, no matter how hard she slapped and how infuriated I was, I didn’t get angry. Instead, I said in a dramatic way, “Ooo, that hurts! Goodness that hurts!” to show that hitting hurt me physically and emotionally.

Then I asked her this one question, with an exaggerated sense of pain and suffering: “Don’t you like me?” (To hear what I sound like, take a listen to the radio story).

Immediately, this fun tone changed Rosy’s behavior. The tension between us melted away, and the hitting decreased. I could see the little gears in her brain churning. “Wait! Am I hurting Mom’s feelings?” she seemed to be thinking. (And I could see that Ipeelie was right. Rosy wasn’t pushing my buttons. She cared about my feelings.)

So I thought I’d try putting on a little drama by asking her, “Why don’t you hit me?” The first few tries were rough. She would wallop me. But I stuck to the script, and slowly I could see her thinking before she struck. She started to play-hit me or stopped mid-swing. After about a month, a tiny miracle occurred.

We were in the kitchen, having a snack, and I said, “Rosy, why don’t you hit me?”

“No,” Rosy responded.

“No? Why not?” I asked.

“Because I love you,” she whispered.

“Because you love me?” I said, in complete shock. “That’s very nice.”

Nice — and a testimony to teaching kids through stories, play and practice.

Copyright 2019 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

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How to Teach Students Historical Inquiry Through Media Literacy And Critical Thinking

Many students are not good at evaluating the credibility of what they see and read online according to a now-famous Stanford study that was released just after the 2016 election. And while it’s true that 82 percent of middle schoolers couldn’t tell the difference between a native advertisement and a news article, neither could 59 percent of adults in a study conducted by the advertising industry.

Sam Wineburg, the Stanford professor who led the middle school study, is worried that everyone is “profoundly confused” right now and that schools aren’t doing enough to teach students the skills they need to be effective citizens and digital consumers.

“We blame our kids for not knowing the difference between ads and news stories, but the kinds of skills we are talking about are not widely taught in schools,” Wineburg said on KQED’s Forum program while discussing his new book Why Learn History (When It’s Already on Your Phone). “So we can’t blame young people for not knowing things they haven’t been taught.”

He thinks the most logical place to insert more digital media literacy is in the history curriculum, where students already should be learning to question dominant narratives, find good evidence and practice strong research skills. To do that, Wineburg said teachers need to ditch textbooks.

“We teach kids facts as ready-made without giving them the capacity and cultivating the capability to ask what is the relationship between claim and evidence,” Wineburg said. He and others argue that asking students to memorize precise dates does very little to give them a broader sense of the arc of history.

“I think that the lessons of history are exactly the kind of thing we should be talking about in history class,” Wineburg said. “But rather than teaching them as rules or things fixed in time or set in amber, these are precisely the kinds of things that are worthy of debate.”

Today, most people look up information they don’t know on the internet, including students. So it’s even more important that students have tools they can use to make educated decisions about what they trust online.

IN THE CLASSROOM

Will Colglazier, a U.S. history teacher in the San Mateo Union High School District, is taking this call to action to heart at Aragon High School. He, like so many teachers, feels pressure to cover all his content and keep to the pacing guides, but he also thinks students need fundamental digital literacy skills in order to continue learning history into the future.

“Less is more and you have to cut content in order to make room to bring in the skills that you deem essential,” Colglazier said. “This isn’t the only time they could access information. It’s not like their ability to learn US history ends in May.”

Colglazier balances the curriculum coverage pressure with cross-cutting skills by thinking carefully about his course goals. He establishes those at the beginning of the year so that if he ends up cutting a unit to make time for something else, he can be sure he’s still hitting those goals. Especially in his Advanced Placement classes he feels pressure to get through all the material, to make sure his students get high scores, and thus succeed. But at some point he decided enough was enough.

“I kept getting frustrated teaching the course and having my unit tests aligned with what the AP test is like,” Colglazier said. That led to boring assessments and a boring class. Instead, he decided to mix in more historical inquiry into his classes, with plenty of practice on the AP-style test questions as well.

He started asking more controversial, open-ended questions and asked students to find information to support their claims about those topics. He wanted students asking questions and engaging in the activities of real historians, so he pushed students to engage their critical thinking skills, put issues into context, and gave them opportunities to close read for perspectives and silences. He thought those historical skills would transfer to the digital space — but he was wrong.

“The hypothesis that it would just transfer for all is not true,” Colglazier said. “It must be explicitly taught.”

His students didn’t do well on the Stanford test to determine ads versus news stories. But they were doing a lot of online research in class already, so Colglazier decided to spend some time explicitly teaching students how to fact-check websites, to read laterally, and go beyond slick-looking web design.

“They don’t like to be duped,” Colglazier said of his students. “That’s an intrinsic desire of anyone. You don’t want to look like an idiot. They want support and they’re pretty willing to accept it. Some of it is not rocket science, it’s just about explicitly teaching it.”

Now, Colglazier regularly replaces multiple-choice or short-answer questions with activities that require students to mimic the experience of online research. He’ll ask a broad question and send them to an article that may not be from a reliable site. Students have to figure out if they can trust the information and, if not, find more reliable sources to back up their claims.

Colglazier doesn’t think these types of activities stray too far from his curriculum. Whereas before he might have distributed several documents he’d found and ask students to work at their desks to use the documents to back up a claim, now he’s sending them online. And he’s not curating the resources for them. He expects students to have a better reason to trust a source than “the teacher gave it to me.”

“One thing I have found is that it’s messy,” Colglazier said. “And it’s certainly less efficient than if I just told them the information. But it’s about the skill development and cutting content to provide that space where the messiness occurs.”

Colglazier is also trying to be clearer with students about how these skills apply to both history and life. Often students get nihilistic at first, thinking that every time they visit a website they’ll have to go down a research rabbit hole. That may be the price of living in a world with so much information at their fingertips; they have to ask questions about their sources. The textbook itself is ripe for interrogation in Colglazier’s class. Textbook can be a useful course skeleton, he says, but he wants students to question its silences and framing as well.

“When students read the textbook, they mine it for facts without thinking meta about it,” he said. “And we want to teach them to do that with all their information. You’re protecting them from learning to some degree” if you don’t.

LONGER TERM SOLUTIONS

Sam Wineburg at Stanford doesn’t blame teachers for not immediately knowing how to teach these crucial digital media skills, but he hopes studies like his will prompt changes. In the short term he wants everyone — adults and kids alike — to learn to use the internet like fact-checkers do. On top of that, he’d like to see social studies teaching shift away from covering every unit in a huge textbook, and toward critical inquiry about history. Beyond all that, he thinks we need a dramatic change in how we consume information.

In a Twitter thread capturing these ideas Wineburg writes, “Of course, in our Civics classes we need new approaches. But if we think this issue is only about Civics, we’re deluding ourselves. This is about how we teach EVERY subject.”

10/13 We need professional development for teachers, who sometimes are as confused as their students. We need to overhaul teacher education, so that new teachers feel prepared when they tell kids to open their Chromebooks. https://t.co/KjxG46G0k8

— Sam Wineburg (@samwineburg) January 15, 2019

And a few tweets later in the thread: “We need professional development for teachers, who sometimes are as confused as their students. We need to overhaul teacher education, so that new teachers feel prepared when they tell kids to open their Chromebooks.”

Without this type of dramatic change to teaching, Wineburg worries democracy itself is at stake. If society can’t determine what a fact is, he argues, then we have no basis for a justice system and the propagandists win.

“That’s a slippery slope to a non-democratic form of government,” Wineburg said.

Colglazier is doing his best to prevent that from happening by making sure the next generation of voters know better. “What I’ve tried to instill with them is the concept of evidence-based and holding both sides accountable,” he said.

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‘I Can Exist Here’: On Gender Identity, Some Colleges Are Opening Up

Take a look at a class roster at the University of Vermont. You’ll see the usual stuff there — last name, student ID and class year. But you’ll also see something else. Next to some names, there are pronouns: “he” or “she,” but also the gender non-specific “they” or “ze.”

They may seem like a few more words on paper, but for some students, like Jeane Robles, having pronouns on the roster means a lot.

“Just having the option to do that makes me feel like I can exist here,” says Robles, a graduate student whose pronouns are they/them. If there was a fear that a professor might use the wrong pronouns, Robles says, “I [wouldn’t] be able to fully be present.”

A decade ago, the University of Vermont became the first school in the country to give students the ability to enter pronouns into campus data systems. Today, UVM is not alone — at least 20 colleges and universities give students that option, according to the Campus Pride Trans Policy Clearinghouse.

Even more schools, over 50, allow students to change the gender listed on their campus record without evidence of medical intervention, and more than 180 schools enable students to use a first name other than their legal name on campus records.

Advocates say one aim is to reduce the incidences where trans and gender nonconforming people are misgendered — referred to with pronouns that don’t match their gender identity.

“It’s very invalidating, and it makes me feel invisible,” says Genny Beemyn, who directs the Stonewall Center at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and coordinates the Trans Policy Clearinghouse. Beemyn, whose pronouns are they/them, says they get misgendered “all the time.”

In many ways, the growth of these policies on some campuses is part of a larger trend that’s also showing up in the workplace, and on the radar of lawmakers.

The Maryland General Assembly recently approved a bill that could make it the sixth state (along with Washington, D.C.) to include a gender-neutral option on driver’s licenses. Many companies now include gender identity and expression in their non-discrimination policies.

But it’s on campuses in particular where pronouns, and conversations about pronouns, have taken off. And it’s not just trans and gender nonconforming people sharing them; cisgender people (who identify with the gender they were assigned at birth) are, too. At some schools, pronouns are a part of the culture in every space. People put them in their email signatures and introduce themselves with their names and pronouns in meetings. They’re shared commonly in classes and at campus events.

“There’s certainly more of a movement around the visibility of pronouns [on campus],” says Z Nicolazzo, a professor of trans* studies in education at the University of Arizona. Nicolazzo, whose pronouns are she/her or ze/hir, is the author of Trans* in College: Transgender Students’ Strategies for Navigating Campus Life and the Institutional Politics of Inclusion. (She uses an asterisk after “trans” to “make the term trans as [broad] as possible.”)

But while the movement toward gender inclusivity has come to some schools, the transition has not always been smooth. In some cases, efforts to allow students to enter pronouns into campus records have sparked protests, especially over concerns that faculty and students would be required to use them.

In 2016, for example, a student at the University of Michigan selected “His Majesty” as his pronoun when the school implemented a new system. And last summer, the University of Minnesota became embroiled in a debate about pronoun use and free speech.

Beemyn, with the University of Massachusetts Amherst, says instances of protest and backlash are generally uncommon: “I think young people recognize the importance of this issue, and want to be respectful of people who identify as transgender or gender nonconforming.”

Student data systems need to catch up

One challenge for institutions is that revising their student data systems can be slow and expensive. And any new policy must come with significant education for faculty and staff, Beemyn says.

For example, before the University of Massachusetts Amherst adopted a system in 2018 enabling students to indicate their pronouns, Beemyn “spent more than a year going around to every faculty department” to prepare them for the change.

‘Much more needs to be done’

And even at schools that work to incorporate pronouns into campus life, Nicolazzo, of the University of Arizona, says there’s sometimes not a deep understanding of why pronouns are important in the first place.

“I really worry that it becomes almost like a checkbox kind of way of thinking about diversity and equity work,” she says.

Many in higher education still approach gender as a binary thing — on campus, there tends to be a “false dichotomy between man and woman,” Nicolazzo says. It’s this binary, upheld through things like sex-segregated athletic teams, that can have especially negative consequences for trans and gender nonconforming students.

Policies involving pronouns are necessary steps forward, she adds, but “much more needs to be done.”

Copyright 2019 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

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What ketosis is and what ketosis is not

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Why Schools Should Be Organized To Prioritize Relationships

Over many years researchers in the learning sciences, psychology, anthropology and neuroscience have learned a lot about how humans learn. One of the key properties is malleability. The brain changes in response to relationships and experiences, continuing to develop through young adulthood. And while the children in any class will develop differently based on their experiences, the brain will grow and change with the right inputs.

“What’s most interesting is a child can become a productive and engaged learner from any starting point, as long as we intentionally build those skills,” said Dr. Pamela Canter, founder and senior science advisor of Turnaround for Children, in an Edutopia video on bring learning sciences into the classroom.

Strong relationships can prime a person to learn. And for those who have adverse childhood experiences, strong relationships can mitigate the negative effects of trauma. Schools organized with relationships as a priority can benefit children in many ways. In this Edutopia video, teachers share how they make time and mental space to connect with students.

“I prioritize relationship building, because getting to know them is the best part of the job,” said English language arts teacher Catherine Paul.

But it isn’t always easy to show up in the vulnerable, open ways that lead to authentic connections with kids.

“It starts from so much honesty and transparency with kids. It’s really easy to strive to be this like idealized, always ready to go, elementary school teacher. And that’s not real, and that’s not human,” said teacher Lindsey Minder. “My students connect most with me when they see that I also struggle, and I also have challenges. It takes a lot of vulnerability on my part.”

One easy way to start the day with connection is to greet students at the door.

“During that time I’m just trying to connect with them, help them with their transition from home to school, and just kinda take a pulse check on where they are,” said Falon Turner, a kindergarten teacher at Van Ness Elementary School.

It’s an intentional way to look each child in the eyes every morning and let them know that who they are, how they feel and what they bring to the classroom matters.

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Building Teens Into Strong Readers — By Letting Them Teach

Two afternoons a week, Mikala Tardy walks six blocks from Eastern High School to Payne Elementary School, not far from Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C.

She signs in at the front desk just after 3:30 p.m. and makes her way to a classroom, where she’ll be tutoring second- and third-graders who are full of energy after the school day.

Today, Mikala and three students work through an exercise about communities and the building blocks that create them. They learn how to spell people and playground — two essential components of any community, they decide.

Mikala, a senior at Eastern High, began this work back in the ninth grade.

It’s run by Reach, a Washington, D.C., nonprofit, that trains high school students like her to be reading tutors for elementary school students.

“It’s a tutoring program that works in two directions,” says former social worker Mark Hecker, who founded Reach in 2009. He says it’s serving a vital need in the city: Two-thirds of students in D.C. public schools can’t read and write at grade level when they start high school. Reach helps these older students become better readers — by giving them the tools to teach younger kids.

Tutoring and mentorship programs that pair up younger and older students are common. But most rely on high-achieving students. Reach turns the idea on its head: Hecker says most of the teenage tutors start the program reading between a fourth and sixth grade level.

The tutors receive training in literacy instruction because for them, Reach isn’t just an after-school program — it’s a job. They get paid for the time they spend reading and writing with kids.

“We work to position them as community assets and role models,” Hecker explains. That’s not how teenagers — especially teens of color — are usually treated, he says.

Struggling teenagers, he notes, are often given work written for younger students. But they can tell when they’re reading something that was meant for young kids.

“Kids don’t like to feel stupid,” Hecker says. With Reach, teens are given the responsibility of helping a younger student. That’s a big deal for them.

“We trust teens to be responsible for things that they care about. And often, that makes education real in a way that the classroom doesn’t always,” Hecker says. But that trust, he adds, must go both ways: “You can’t get kids to be vulnerable enough to work on really hard things — like reading — if they don’t trust you.”

Reach, he says, is all about establishing consistent relationships — and being a steady force in the lives of students. That’s crucial in a city where three-quarters of students receive free or reduced-price lunches. Many face poverty and the traumas that come with it.

In addition to after-school tutoring, Reach provides summer opportunities and preparation for college and future careers. Hundreds of students in the city are involved.

Hecker and the Reach staff have made a commitment to stick with teens through their high school years — even as some face transfers, family troubles, homelessness and anything else that might come up.

“They’re not going to be perfect,” Hecker says, “because they’re navigating many, many things in their personal lives.”

Through the program, students also write their own books. In 2015, Reach won a major Innovations in Reading Prize from the National Book Foundation.

Hecker says he plans to grow the nonprofit over the next few years, to serve more students and partner with more schools and sites in D.C. And, one day, Reach may expand to more places around the country.

Mikala Tardy says she likes reading a lot more than she did when she started almost four years ago. And when she’s working with kids, she feels like a teacher. She’s on track to graduate and plans to head to college in the fall.

Mikala hasn’t decided on her plans after college, but she does know one thing: She wants to work with kids.

Copyright 2019 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

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How to Develop a Greater Sense of Motivation in Students

Teachers can know their content backwards and forwards. They might have put hours into their lesson plans. But if their students aren’t motivated, learning won’t happen.

Often, childhood experiences may make motivation harder for students, according to a new working paper from the National Scientific Council on the Developing Child, a multidisciplinary research collaborative housed at Harvard University. The paper takes a look at the machinery of motivation: what’s going on in children’s brains when they’re motivated, and what’s holding them back?

The researchers identify two types of motivation: approach motivation, which steers us toward a reward, and avoidance motivation, which prompts us to avoid damage. Ideally, they balance each other out. Approach is foundational to most forms of learning, while avoidance can inhibit higher-level learning by forcing us to fixate on our immediate response to a task, rather than a long-term goal. Ultimately, to survive, we need both, but when they’re out of balance, it can lead to impulse-control problems, anxiety, or depression, among other mental health struggles.

Our motivation systems are partially laid out by genetics, but they’re also shaped by experiences. High levels of stress and a dearth of positive relationships with adults can affect how children’s brains respond to different tasks. Caring adults can help students develop the motivation systems that will serve them well, long into adulthood.

How to Build Healthy Motivation

Elicit curiosity and encourage exploration. Beyond their basic needs, children are intrinsically motivated by exploration, play, mastery, and success — all of which lay the groundwork for meaningful learning. Adults can reinforce these motivations through positive feedback of kids’ natural tendencies, rather than tampering these tendencies by dismissing opportunities to explore, or being overly fearful that children will get hurt — fears that can rub off. Caring adults whom children can trust can help them figure out what to actually be afraid of and avoid. Children from more volatile or abusive environments, perhaps lacking that caring adult influence, might become more highly attuned to avoidance and lose interest in healthy exploration.

Don’t rely on incentives. But extrinsic feedback by itself is insufficient to drive motivation — the goal is to help kids develop their own inner fire to learn. Children have been shown to stop engaging in activities of their own accord once they’ve been given a tangible reward for it. “Systems focused solely on external rewards and punishments are unlikely to achieve sustained, productive motivation,” the report’s authors warn; “those that balance intrinsically motivating activities — such as creative problem-solving and playful learning — with positive feedback are more likely to support healthy motivation over the long run.”

Remind children that success is possible. We’re unlikely to be motivated to do anything if we think it’s impossible. A growth mindset — the belief that we can change and improve through practice, and that our talents and skills aren’t fixed — enables children to get motivated.  

Prioritize social interaction. From babies to adolescents, social interaction is a key to motivation, releasing natural opioids — dopamine and serotonin — that activate the brain’s reward system. One study showed that babies learned language more quickly through face-to-face interactions with a caregiver than by watching that caregiver on video. In our digital world, apps and screens can be supplements for learning, but in-person interactions remain essential.

Remember that we all have different intrinsic motivators. A child intrinsically motivated to play sports might respond well to constructive criticism from a coach, eager for the internal sense of satisfaction from doing well. But another student might respond more to encouragement and get discouraged by criticism. Be mindful that these different motivation systems may be due to children’s genes and their life experiences, and that they might require different approaches to motivate.

Grace Tatter is a staff writer for Usable Knowledge, which translates education research and well-tested practices so they’re accessible to practitioners, policymakers, and parents. Usable Knowledge is based at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. 

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One Reason Rural Students Don’t Go To College: Colleges Don’t Go To Them

The sunrise in rural central Michigan reveals a landscape of neatly divided cornfields crossed by ditches and wooded creeks. But few of the sleepy teenagers on the school bus from Maple Valley Junior-Senior High School likely noticed this scene on their hour drive to Grand Rapids.

They set out from their tiny school district of about 1,000 students, heading to the closest big city for a college recruiting fair. About 151 colleges and universities were waiting.

The students, from Nashville and Vermontville, Mich., were going to the recruiters because few recruiters come to see them.

For urban and suburban students, it’s common to have college recruiters visit their schools — maybe they set up a booth in the lunchroom, or talk with students during an English class. But recruiters rarely go to small, rural schools like Maple Valley, which serves fewer than 450 seventh- through 12th-graders.

“When we think about an urban high school, a college recruiter can hit 1,500 students at a time,” says Andrew Koricich, a professor of education at Appalachian State University. “To do that in a rural area, you may have to go to 10 high schools.”

Rural households also have lower incomes than urban and suburban ones, the Census Bureau reports, meaning that rural students are less profitable for colleges, which often have to offer them financial aid.

“People tend to overlook the rural areas. I think it’s kind of disappointing because some able students could get looked over,” says David Hochstetler, one of the Maple Valley students riding the bus to Grand Rapids. He’s interested in pursuing engineering or computer science in college.

One recent study by researchers at UCLA and the University of Arizona found public high schools in affluent areas receive more college recruiter visits than schools in less affluent areas. Those researchers also found recruiters from private colleges concentrate disproportionately on private schools. Rural areas usually have neither wealthy families nor private schools.

David Morrow, principal of St. Francis Community Junior/Senior High School in the northwestern corner of Kansas, says only a few public regional institutions visit his combined middle and high school of about 130 students. Kansas State University visits, but in the last five years, the University of Kansas visited the school only once.

In Sparta, Ga., just a few regional institutions visit the 230-some students at Hancock Central High School, according to counselor Carlton Stewart. The University of Georgia doesn’t come, Stewart says, and Morehouse College only recruits for a summer program for high schoolers, not for admission.

This anemic outreach is among the reasons comparatively low numbers of high school graduates from rural areas end up in college the following fall — 59 percent, compared to 62 percent of urban and 67 percent of suburban high school grads, according to the National Student Clearinghouse, which tracks this.

At Maple Valley, graduation rates are above the national average, but only 45 percent of Maple Valley’s 2018 graduates enrolled in college.

Why rural recruiting matters

“Providing greater postsecondary opportunities for rural residents isn’t simply a matter of equity or moral obligation — it’s a matter of continued national prosperity,” says Appalachian State’s Andrew Koricich. He points out that our economy relies heavily on rural communities and workers.

Colleges that get most of their students from urban centers have only recently begun to consider rural student outreach as a deliberate part of their recruitment strategies, says David Hawkins of the National Association for College Admission Counseling, or NACAC.

Some selective colleges are noticing the importance of rural America, perhaps spurred by a dramatic enrollment decline and the attention that came with the 2016 elections..

According to Patricia McDonough, an education professor at UCLA, they’ve realized that “selective institutions should have a broader range of representation of types of students related to the types of adults we have in America.”

The challenges of rural recruiting

Colleges that do try to recruit at rural high schools or regional recruiting fairs have cultural obstacles to overcome, too.

In her research, McDonough has found even the smartest rural students tend to be reluctant to move far away to go to college. “It’s kind of a golden cage,” she says. “You don’t want to leave home, family — a way of life that you know and love.”

“I’m used to smaller settings, not bigger settings,” explains Britani Shilton, a Maple Valley senior and four-sport athlete. Going to a big state school would be really overwhelming, she says. “I went to Michigan State for a basketball camp one time, and there were so many people there. I was like, ‘Whoa! I don’t know what to think about this.’ ”

Rural parents can also be skeptical of higher education in general, says Julia DeGroot, Maple Valley’s college counselor. DeGroot is the daughter of Grand Rapids white-collar professionals and went to a private high school. For her, she says, “college was never, ‘Are you going?’ It was, ‘Where are you going?’ ” But at Maple Valley, she says, “That’s not the case for these kids.”

“One of the biggest struggles is getting the parents to see that big picture where, ‘It’s OK if my kid goes away to college for four years. It doesn’t mean that they’re never coming back.’ ”

Overcoming such perceptions means not only reaching rural students where they live, but getting them to visit campuses, says Andy Borst, director of undergraduate admissions at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign.

“Students come to campus with reluctance, feeling that it may be too big. Once they get there and talk one-on-one to a current student, faculty person or admissions staff, they tend to be less frightened,” Borst says.

But it’s not always easy for rural students to visit a campus. “You have to drive a long distance to actually get somewhere that’s an actual place,” explains Maple Valley senior Sarah Lowndes.

‘A community of nerds like me’

David Hochstetler, the Maple Valley student interested in engineering, met with representatives from Michigan Technological University at the college recruiting fair in Grand Rapids. That meeting helped him decide to attend. The school also sent him an invitation to apply as a “select nominee.” He applied and was accepted early and given a yearly academic scholarship.

He was also able to visit the campus in Houghton, more than eight
hours away by car, because his family vacations on the Upper Peninsula. There, he took a college tour and connected with current students over his passion for engineering.

“Around here [home], there aren’t that many people on the engineering or computer side of things, ” he says. “I thought it would be cool to go into a community of nerds like me.”

This story about rural college-going was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education.

Copyright 2019 The Hechinger Report. To see more, visit The Hechinger Report.

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As Elite Campuses Diversify, A ‘Bias Towards Privilege’ Persists

Elite colleges are making strides to diversify their student bodies, both racially and economically. In the past few years, we’ve seen most top schools commit to enrolling more low-income students through financial aid, recruiting efforts and programs for high school students aimed at expanding the pipeline.

But once those students arrive on campus, says Anthony Abraham Jack, they often find the experience isolating and foreign.

“There’s a difference between access and inclusion,” explains Jack, an assistant professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and author of the new book The Privileged Poor: How Elite Colleges Are Failing Disadvantaged Students. “Universities have extended invitations to more and more diverse sets of students but have not changed their ways to adapt to who is on campus.”

For his book, Jack profiles low-income students at an unnamed elite college. He puts them into two groups: Those coming from prep schools, and those coming from under-resourced public schools.

In those two groups, he finds key differences but one common problem: “We have paid less attention to what happens when students get on campus than their moment of entry and where they go once they graduate.”

Fixing the problem, he argues, means creative and thoughtful solutions, such as keeping dining halls and dorms open during holiday breaks — because not every student can afford a ski trip, or even a bus ticket home.

I spoke with Jack recently about his ideas for improving life — and outcomes — for these students. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Back in 2015, you wrote an opinion piece about how elite schools were recruiting low-income students from elite prep schools. You called those students the “privileged poor,” which is now the title of your new book. How did that come to be?

I was a Head Start kid who went to public school up to 11th grade, and my senior year was an anomaly in a private school. I thought my senior year was just a detour; a one-off. But when I got to Amherst College, turns out that prep school was an HOV lane for poor students.

A lot of my classmates were poor like me, but they went to Andover and Exeter, Saint Paul and Choate. All of these boarding schools that I had never heard of. They were talking about studying abroad for their junior year to learn the language. They were talking about snow-tubing trips that the school paid for. In graduate school, we started reading a lot of the sociology of education, and I didn’t see my classmates in the literature.

Your research shows that those students have a different experience on campus than low-income students coming from underserved public schools. Can you explain?

There are two groups of low-income students on campus, and they have two sets of experiences. I’ve termed them the doubly disadvantaged and the privileged poor. The biggest difference between the two, according to how students told their stories, is: one group felt more at home, and the other felt culture shock.

The privileged poor, the students who went to the private schools, they knew the hidden curriculum, the hidden rules that govern these places. They felt more comfortable, and they directed themselves in a way that was more similar to their middle-class peers. The doubly disadvantaged, they felt out of place and experienced that culture shock and isolation.

So the doubly disadvantaged are low-income students who don’t have this institutional knowledge. How does that manifest?

We have been teaching students from more privileged backgrounds for so long, that we take a lot for granted on a college campus. Mental health offices, career service offices, they are so used to students being more proactive and entering their doors because they’ve been taught that if you want something, you go out and get it. The fact that you have to go seek things out, that’s an unspoken rule on a college campus that disproportionately hurts low-income students from disadvantaged high schools. There is a bias towards privilege on a college campus that permeates so many things that we do.

The folks making policy in higher education tend to be folks where the system worked for them. Your book seems to push readers to try and change their perspective.

I hope that anyone who reads this book asks one important question: What else do I take for granted? The big thing I uncover in the book is the hidden curriculum that operates on the college campus. On the academic side, how does one engage with different faculty members? The expectation is that students are the ones who are proactive, and yet we use terms like office hours. Professors often say when office hours are, but never what they are. Only a certain segment of the population has ever heard the term, let alone had the opportunity to master what skills you need to make the most use out of office hours.

It’s not just what students know that we take for granted; it’s also what they can afford. Spring break is a perfect example. “Oh, spring break! You’re going to go home or you’re going to have some fun in the sun!” Often times, that’s actually not the case. For a lot of our students, home is not necessarily the place you want to go.

Universities are actually saying, “Come here. Money will not be a barrier to your entry or what you want to do.” That is what these colleges are saying, but what’s actually happening is, when students get on campus, they realize just how the social undercurrents of this place, and the official policies of the place, make them feel like second-class citizens in a first-class world.

It has implications not just for your GPA and retention, but also for your use of resources on campus. It’s about who feels comfortable going into the career service office to get help with the résumé, who feels comfortable getting help with a mental health diagnosis, who feels comfortable doing all those little small things that are the foundation for one’s future when you leave college.

As colleges recruit more low-income students, there have been efforts to integrate these students into campus life. In your book, you talk about how some of those initiatives are well-intentioned but sometimes do more harm than good. Can you give me an example?

At the school that I study, there was a program that gave students free tickets to events. That’s actually a good thing because those extra university events can quickly add up over the course of a semester. The school decided to protect low-income students from being viewed as getting a scholarship ticket, so they created a separate line to pick up tickets for those who are on scholarship. How that ultimately plays out in public is that a whole bunch of white and Asian students are in the paying line, and then on the opposite end of the room, you have a line of people who are picking up the free tickets. That line is mostly black and Latino with Asian and white students sprinkled in. It becomes the opposite of invisible; it becomes highlighted. You are literally separate from your peers. You can’t help but think about the Jim Crow South.

Those kinds of policies undercut moments where students feel they are full members of the community. It cuts at the trust that students have not just with the institution, but with the people who are in positions to help them.

There are about 20 million students going to college today — and only a very small percentage of them go to an elite school, like Harvard or Yale. So why should we care about what happens on those campuses?

A lot of things that I study happen at all schools. The miscommunication between faculty and students has been documented across higher education, at community colleges and four-year schools.

I tried to remove all of the things that we know hurt students’ integration into college, like living off campus, commuting and working. I’m showing you that even at a place like this, even under the best of conditions, higher education still privileges a narrow set of experiences that are more likely to be held by those of middle-class and upper-middle-class families.

If I’m able to show that food insecurity exists at schools like Yale, Harvard, Penn and Princeton, how then do you think it manifests itself at the University of Wisconsin or at Texas Tech, or at the regional college? Yes, I study the elites. But more importantly, I study how poverty and inequality shape how students make it to higher education, and how they move through it.

So if the privileged poor are more comfortable and prepared for college, might that be a solution? Especially considering the Education Department’s push to increase school choice and allow public dollars to be spent on private schools.

Putting students in private schools is not a social policy; it’s an abdication of responsibility. Social policy would be trying to figure out how do we get our underserved K-12 schools to be able to compete, not just with their suburban counterparts, but what if they aspired to be something greater. What would happen if our public schools actually looked more like some of the private schools that we know have a ton of resources? One thing this book actually shows is that when you give low-income students the resources and the experiences of those from more affluent backgrounds, they enter college with the skillset and the orientations to navigate the place successfully. They take advantage of the resources that are available.

It shows that the privileged poor is what happens when you are actually given a shot to succeed and not just a whole bunch of extra weight to hold you down as you try to climb up the ladder that is the American dream. But, I think just sending students to a private school is not scalable, and we’re not actually helping all the students that we are here to help.

So the book is about college, but not really?

The university is just my site to study something greater. This book is about poverty and inequality. I’m just bringing it to higher education. As universities diversify their campuses, their connections to neighborhoods that previously were overlooked — low-income communities, predominantly minority communities, predominantly immigrant communities, and rural communities — all of those connections become stronger and stronger. And we need to understand how poverty and inequality work, not just to understand a student’s education trajectory, but also to understand what can we do for the students who do make it to these schools.

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