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19
Don’t tell me anything more about students in Finland and how great the education system is there.
Filed Under "At-risk" students, Behaviour Management, Learning Strategies, motivating students, underachieving students | 9 Comments
I don’t want to read another thing about how successful the education system is in Finland . I congratulate Finland for their fine education system, but I don’t want my school in Mississauga to be compared to schools in Finland because doing that is like comparing apples to oranges. Mississauga is not the same as Finland. Finland has 2.5 % foreign citizens. Mississauga has many more. 46.62% of residents in Mississauga (almost 700 oo0 ) were not born in Canada. Apples to oranges. Apples to oranges for Pete’s sake.
Mississauga has one of the largest, if not the largest, cluster of ethnic groups in Canada. At my school, the student body speaks over 60 languages. All this diversity is what makes Mississauga so great. I love it. But, all this diversity brings with it challenges that a more homogeneous country like Finland doesn’t experience.
I don’t want to write a post outlining all the challenges new immigrants face that can affect the them as they enter our schools. But, some students who are immigrants come to grade 9 illiterate in their mother tongue, and we are expected to teach them so they will pass and earn 16 credits by the time they are 16 years old. Some parents are struggling to learn English themselves and can’t support their kids and help with homework or assignments. Some parents work at two jobs to put a roof over their children’s heads and food on the table and aren’t there for there for their kids after school.
O.K., O.K. I’m going to stop now because I’m starting to write a post about the challenges of being an immigrant living in Mississauga and that’s just what I didn’t want to do. I just don’t want apples to be compared to oranges.
photo thanks to Dano
Jul
8
You don’t have to be a superhero to teach kids who are academically at-risk
Filed Under "At-risk" students, Behaviour Management, Dealing With Stress, motivating students, positive climate, SOS for Teachers, Special Education, Teacher Support, underachieving students | 5 Comments
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Sometimes we can get the wrong idea about what it takes to successfully teach kids who are academically at-risk. You don’t have to be a superhero like Erin Gruwell in Freedom Writers. You just have to be “good enough”. I’ll explain what I mean by “good enough” in a minute.
For those of you who have seen the movie Freedom Writers, you’ll know what I mean when I say Erin, the teacher in the movie, is a superhero. For those of you who haven’t seen the movie, I’ve embedded a trailer here so you can have a better idea of what I’m talking about.
I mean no disrespect to Erin Gruwell, the teacher Freedom Writers is based on. What she did with her students was truly extraordinary. I’m in awe of her. But I think because she’s a superhero, teachers who watch the movie might get the mistaken notion you have to have super-teacher powers to teach students who are academically at-risk. You don’t. You don’t have to be a super-teacher. You only have to be “good enough”.
When I say teachers of students who are academically at-risk don’t have to be superheros they only have to be “good enough”, I don’t mean they can be mediocre. Far from it. Let me explain what I mean by “good enough” teachers. ”Good enough” teachers
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- have good emotional intelligence
- establish inviting student centered classrooms;
- have excellent listening skills;
- willingly treat their students with respect and demand the same from their students ;
- have expertise in the teaching subject;
- can differentiate teaching, assessment and evaluation strategies to suit students;
- help students be successful using the students’ strengths;
- are firm but fair;
- are creative;
- are life-long learners;
- are flexible;
- are skilled at teaching and assessment;
- realize and accept they’re not perfect;
- realize tomorrow is another day and another opportunity to get it right.
“Good enough” teachers realize it’s not their job to “fix” students who are academically at-risk; it’s their job to help students realize better choices will lead to better outcomes and help them develop their critical thinking skills so they can make better choices.
Erin Gruwell did all this and more. She is a superhero who teaches, but we can be just “good enough” and still be successful at teaching students who are academically at-risk. We don’t need to be superheros ; we can just be humans who teach. I want teachers to realize that.
If you’ve been teaching academically at-risk students, what do you think it takes. How would you define “good enough”?
Jul
3
Passing kids along who fail is being disrespectful of them
Filed Under Behaviour Management, Evaluation, positive climate, questions teachers need to ask, The way I see it, underachieving students | 4 Comments
What are we to do about high school kids who fail courses in grades nine and ten and don’t seem to care? We are being told if a student doesn’t earn 16 credits by the time he is 16 years old, there is an excellent chance the student will drop out of school and not graduate. In the province of Ontario where I teach, high school students are expected to earn eight credits in grade nine and another eight credits in grade 10 for a total of 16 credits.
There’s so much pressure on teachers to do what it takes to get these kids to pass courses. At the end of the semester when teachers are writing report cards, sometimes teachers are called down to the office and told strongly encouraged by the administration to change a failing mark to a passing mark. The word rigor seems to have no place in these conversations. Small wonder teachers are disillusioned and discouraged.
High school teachers are always complaining about the social promotion that goes on in the elementary schools where students who fail subjects in a grade still get to go (are socially promoted) to the next grade even though they’ve failed . These students come to grade 9 with huge gaps in their knowledge and skill sets. These gaps set students up for failure. I think socially promoting students is morally wrong. We’re not doing students any favors by passing them now when they haven’t mastered course content just to fail them later because the gaps in their knowledge prevent them from mastering the next grade’s content. That’s not being respectful of our students.
I know, I know there’s a huge debate about social promotion, about a kid’s self-esteem etc. I actually haven’t seen any studies on the topic of social promotion. I can only tell you what I know from my own personal professional experience. Maybe this summer I’ll search the literature to see what research says and share my findings here.
I teach students who have been socially promoted, and I see many of these students continue to fail and be at-risk academically in grades nine and ten. They often do not earn 16 credits by the time they are 16. Academically at-risk students who continually fail courses are kicked out of regular high school when they reach 18 (legally they have to stay in school until 18) and sent to alternative schools to continue their education. Some of my students have come back to visit me and have told me that the alternative schools didn’t work for them either. Some students admit it’s their fault they didn’t succeed in high school, but some students blame the school system and certain teachers for their lack of success. They may have a point, but that’s a whole other can of worms.
I’ve been meaning to read Alexander Russo’s Stray Dogs, Saints, and Saviors for some time now and since school is out for the summer, I can. I’m enjoying it immensely as well as learning a lot about the challenges of school reform. Russo’s book is about school reform- a topic I’ve been thinking about a lot lately given my frustrations with 16 by 16. Specifically, Russo’s book is the story about the challenges Green Dot and its founder Steve Barr encounter while trying to reform Locke High School in South Central Los Angeles. Surprisingly, I hadn’t heard about the Green Dot story. It must have been on the news and in the papers. I don’t know how I missed it, but I did. I’m certainly going online to see what I can find to fill in my gaps about Green Dot and Barr.
While reading Stray Dogs, Saints and Saviors, I came across this passage that really spoke to me.
Letting a kid pass a class in which he’d barely learned anything, in the hopes that he’s catch up later and benefit from having moved along, or flunking a kid and making him dig in at least a bit, with the knowledge that such a might not happen? It was a difficult call- and an age-old question. Teachers-and schools-have been passing kids along for decades.( Russo, p. 93).
I naively thought this problem of passing kids along was a problem just in Ontario, Canada. I hadn’t realized that teachers in other jurisdictions are having to make the same difficult calls about passing or not passing academically at-risk students. What happens in schools in other countries like Japan, France, Germany, China, Scotland? What do they do with kids who really don’t pass? I’d like to know.
photo thanks to dullhunk
Jun
28
Teachers Can Transform Off-Task Behaviors into Powerful Learning Tool
Filed Under "At-risk" students, Behaviour Management, motivating students, underachieving students | Leave a Comment
Keeping students on-task is a challenge all teachers face. I know I’m always looking for strategies to help me. Lindsey Wright shares some of her ideas for keeping students on-task in her post below. Thanks Lindsey.
Lindsey Wright is fascinated with the potential of emerging educational technologies, particularly the online school, to transform the landscape of learning. She writes about web-based learning, electronic and mobile learning, and the possible future of education.
Some educators specialize in teaching at-risk youth, while others may have only a few members of a particular class who they would deem at risk. How is an at-risk student identified? The most obvious criterion for at-risk students is their grades. If they begin a new school year or term with low grades, this may be a sign of a child whose focus is not on education. A sudden drop in grades can be another indicator that a child’s focus has shifted away from education to make way for other matters that may seem more pressing to the student. Consistent tardiness or absenteeism are also common indicators.
If you teach at an online school you are in luck, as this is an issue that you probably only rarely encounter, if at all. However, if you teach in a tough school, many of these signs are likely all too familiar. In fact, all, or the majority, of your students may exhibit these behaviors. Students whose main focus is not on education during school hours are notoriously difficult to teach. Their minds wander, they pass notes, they act out inappropriately, and generally disrupt the learning process. In these situations it is easy to quickly become frustrated. Despite your best intentions, on some days it may just seem as though it is impossible for the class to make any progress.
However all is not lost. There are actually a variety of ways you can minimize in-class interruptions when working with at-risk students. For instance, many such students are living in poverty. Sometimes they act out at school or find it difficult to concentrate simply because they are hungry. If you can ascertain that a student cannot concentrate in the morning because they haven’t had breakfast, you might consider checking into getting the child enrolled in a breakfast program so they can start the day off right. Alternatively, keep a few healthy, nutritious snacks on hand if there is a particular child you know will be coming to school hungry. You might slip an apple or a granola bar into their desk before the day begins, giving them a chance to fuel up and be ready to learn.
If there are hungry students in your classroom, and it is causing disruptive behavior, take the opportunity to teach the children about proper nutrition and how it can affect their overall health and energy level. Many students bring home what they learn and lessons about proper nutrition may start up a dialog in a student’s home that results in better dietary habits for the whole family.
Another useful technique for redirecting inappropriate behavior is to relate your lesson plans to something that the children you are teaching will find familiar and interesting. You might teach a lesson about physics by using dirt bikes as an example, or explore the connections between a social movement and a popular television show. However you decide to bring it about, showing your students there is a connection between what they are learning in school and the world that surrounds them outside of the classroom can be a valuable way to redirect their focus and keep them concentrating on the subject at hand.
You can also change disruptive, off-task behavior by catching a typically misbehaving student doing something right. If you notice that a child who generally has difficulty focusing in class pays attention well during a particular class segment, recognize that achievement, while overlooking a minor infraction of the classroom rules. The positive reinforcement will often be very powerful for at-risk youth who frequently do not receive any kind of positive feedback from anyone in their lives. A few kind words from you can help change that child’s pattern of behavior, perhaps even outside of the classroom.
Teaching at-risk youth is always a challenge. Their focus tends to wander because they may have other, more pressing matters on their minds. However, you can take this off-task behavior as an opportunity both to get to know the student better and to help turn their distraction to collaborative learning effort. By setting aside a little class time for fun, making certain that the child’s basic needs are being met, using positive reinforcement and relating lessons to real life experiences, you can help at-risk students succeed in school and in life.
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