Understanding and Engaging Under-Resourced College Students

Feb 24, Rachel rated it really liked it. The first part of this book is really useful and eye-opening. It gives some language and frameworks for working with under resources student arms and talking about what those resources actually are. But the last few chapters felt like an infomercial for the curriculum they were selling. This curriculum could only really be taught in economics, policy, student services, etc. May 26, Monique rated it it was amazing Shelves: Great book about how to help educate under-resourced students.

Elyse rated it really liked it Apr 12, Megan rated it really liked it Mar 20, Kym rated it it was amazing Apr 21, Sonia Rudolph rated it it was amazing Aug 02, Carrie The Wade rated it it was amazing Jan 07, Aubrey rated it really liked it Feb 14, Donna Parkhurst rated it it was amazing Apr 05, Maria rated it it was amazing Dec 18, Anita rated it it was amazing Apr 12, Maria rated it really liked it Jan 12, Rebekah Davis, rated it really liked it May 04, Susan Goldstein rated it liked it Sep 07, Michelle rated it it was amazing Jun 07, Teresa Thompson-pinckney rated it it was amazing Feb 27, Christie marked it as to-read Oct 19, Penelope added it Oct 28, Jessica marked it as to-read Mar 06, Ltclibrary marked it as to-read May 24, Shoshannah marked it as to-read Mar 09, Educators often tell students that the rules they come to school with aren't valuable anywhere.

That isn't true, and students know it. For example, to survive in many high-poverty neighborhoods, young people have to be able to fight physically if challenged—or have someone fight for them. But if you fight in school, you're usually told to leave. The simple way to deal with this clash of norms is to teach students two sets of rules. I frequently say to students, You don't use the same set of rules in basketball that you use in football. It's the same with school and other parts of your life. The rules in school are different from the rules out of school.

So let's make a list of the rules in school so we're sure we know them. One teacher alone cannot address all students' achievement issues. Monitoring and intervening with at-risk kids must be a schoolwide process. Take the following steps: Chart student performance and disaggregate this data by subgroups and individuals. Keeping in mind your district's learning standards, determine which content you need to spend the most time on. Bloom found that the amount of time devoted to a content area makes a substantial difference in how well students learn that content.

Set up a collaborative process for teachers to discuss learning standards and make these determinations.

Plan to use the instructional strategies that have the highest payoff for the amount of time needed to do the activity. For example, teaching students to develop questions has a much higher payoff for achievement than completing worksheets. Use rubrics and benchmark tests to identify how well students are mastering standards; discuss the results. Identify learning gaps and choose appropriate interventions.

Interventions can include scheduling extra instruction time, providing a supportive relationship, and helping students use mental models. Schedule these activities on the school calendar regularly. To succeed in school, students need to move easily from the concrete to the abstract. For example, a kindergarten teacher may hold up a real apple and tell students to find a drawing of an apple on a given page. Even though the two-dimensional apple on the page doesn't look like the real apple, students come to understand that the drawing represents the apple. In math, students need to understand that a numeral represents a specific number of items.

Teachers can help students become comfortable with the abstract representations characteristic of school by giving them mental models —stories, analogies, or visual representations. Mental models enable the student to make a connection between something concrete he or she understands and a representational idea. For example, in math, one can physically form a square with the number of items represented by any square number.

We can teach students this concept quickly by drawing a box with nine X s in it. The student can visually see that 3 is the square root of 9, because no matter how the student looks at the model, there are 3 X s on each side. Excellent teachers use mental models all the time, although they may not call them that. I have found that using mental models decreases the amount of time needed to teach and learn a concept.

When you have asked a student what part of a lesson he or she didn't understand, have you heard the reply, "All of it"? This response may indicate that the student has trouble formulating a specific question. Questions are a principal tool to gain access to information, and knowing how to ask questions yields a huge payoff in achievement Marzano, In their research on reading, Palincsar and Brown found that students who couldn't ask good questions had many academic struggles. To teach students how to ask questions, I assign pairs of students to read a text and compose multiple-choice questions about it.

Many low-income parents are so overwhelmed with surviving daily life that they can't devote time to their children's schooling.

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Even when time is available, the parent may not know how to support the child's learning. It is essential to create a welcoming atmosphere at school for parents. Ask yourself these questions about the kind of experience parents have when they enter your building: How are parents usually greeted?

With a smile, a command, a look, or the parent's name? What is the ratio of educators to parent in meetings? Six educators to one parent? Many parents experience such a situation as being "ganged up on. This is much better than having the parent walk into the room cold.

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When the meeting is over, have all the educators leave the room and don't have another obvious consultation in the parking lot. The person who met the parent ahead of time should walk the parent out of the building, ask how he or she is feeling, and find out whether the parent has more questions.

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Is the language used in parent meetings understandable, or is it "educationese"? Are parents often asked to make interventions they do not have the resources to make? Do parents realize that people at the school care about their children?

How to Engage College Students in the Learning Process

Parents want to know first whether the school cares about and respects their child. Communicate this message early in the conference.



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It also helps to say, "We know that you care about your child, or you wouldn't be here. I recommend doing home visits. Arrange to have a substitute for a particular day and send a letter home to a few parents saying that because teachers always ask parents to come to school, a pair of teachers would like to come by their house, say hello, and bring a gift.

Understanding and Engaging Under-Resourced College Students

The gift should be something small, such as a magnet listing the school's name, phone number, and hours. If a parent wants to have an in-depth talk about the child, schedule a time that's good for both parties to talk further. Schools that have taken this approach, such as East Allen County Schools in Fort Wayne, Indiana, have strengthened the rapport between parents and teachers and lessened discipline referrals.

Educators can be a huge gift to students living in poverty. In many instances, education is the tool that gives a child life choices.



A teacher or administrator who establishes mutual respect, cares enough to make sure a student knows how to survive school, and gives that student the necessary skills is providing a gift that will keep affecting lives from one generation to the next. Never has it been more important to give students living in poverty this gift. Human characteristics and school learning.

Meaningful differences in the everyday experience of young American children. The styles of the five clocks. The art and science of teaching: A comprehensive framework for effective instruction. Discourse features of written Mexican Spanish: Current research in contrastive rhetoric and its implications. Hispania, 74 2 , — The reciprocal teaching of comprehension-fostering and comprehension-monitoring activities. Cognition and Instruction, 1 2 , — Ruby Payne is President of aha!

Her most recent book is Under-resourced Learners: Eight Strategies to Boost Student Achievement aha! Process, ; RubyPayne msn. Subscribe to ASCD Express , our free e-mail newsletter, to have practical, actionable strategies and information delivered to your e-mail inbox twice a month.

Nine strategies help raise the achievement of students living in poverty. Build Relationships of Respect James Comer puts it well: Make Beginning Learning Relational When an individual is learning something new, learning should happen in a supportive context.