Poor Students, Rich Teaching. Eric Jensen

the student has outside school? Do you know what the student wants to do when he or she gets older?

      Consider the three preceding strategies as a quick start. Additionally, use the following three quick strategies as add-ons to show you care: (1) connect early, (2) connect late, and (3) connect with students’ home lives.

       Connect Early

      During the first few minutes of class (or before it starts), make “the rounds” with students. Assess how students are doing on the opening activity, and take a moment to check in with them emotionally. You can build rapport, connect, and show empathy even with brief conversations.

      Some teachers will engage in friendly small talk with students (for example, about their favorite sports team and if that team lost or won). You may politely compliment a student on his or her new hairstyle or new shoes or ask about an upcoming community event or a family activity. Use the first three to seven minutes to see if anyone is struggling academically and needs extra help.

       Connect Late

      When students are leaving class, check their body language. Often their nonverbal signals will indicate their emotional state without you even needing to ask. For example, if a student is dragging himself out of class, maybe he or she does not want to go to his next class, maybe the student does not understand how to do homework, or maybe he or she is sorting out a big emotional issue. This is the time to check in. Ask, as a student leaves, “Have you got a second?” Then say, “You know I’m always here for you, right? If something’s going on, maybe I can help things move along a little easier.” Your student will either talk or he or she won’t. At least you reached out, and you planted that seed. Maybe next time you say that, he or she will open up.

      Many high-performing schools, especially secondary, use the last school period for an all-student homework hour. Although research on the value of homework is mixed, at the secondary level, the effect size is strong—0.64 (Hattie, 2009). You can use this time to show students empathy. Each day, select a different student to invest a few minutes with—to not just help with homework but to listen and let him or her know you care. If your school does not have this valuable option in place, use classroom seatwork time to connect.

       Connect With Students’ Home Lives

      There are many ways to widen your relationships with students outside the classroom. Because the time you invest to build relationships with your students is critical, do things early in the year or semester to show you care. On a deeper level, learn about your students’ lives (without any judgments) in ways that help foster insights and different ways of thinking, acting, and feeling, as well as an appreciation of where they’re coming from. This comes from quality time.

      You might attend something that students do outside of school, such as go to a sporting event, the mall, a movie, a concert, a pick-up basketball game, a funeral, or an activity in the park. Understanding their home lives allows you to show that you really do care. This may seem like asking a lot, but remember, investing one to two hours early in the year (or semester) can have a bigtime payback the rest of the year and throughout students’ lives.

      FOLLOW THROUGH

      LOCK IN THE RELATIONAL MINDSET

      In this part, you saw that students rarely care about passing a test or getting good grades until teachers care about them first. Many teachers at your school probably assume they were just hired to teach. Yet, research studies conclusively show the value of relationships as a strong academic achievement catalyst. That’s right; lock that thought in your brain because relationships really do matter. In addition to the strategies I presented in this part, use the following two sections on changing your narrative and engaging in reflection to help you lock in your own relational mindset.

       Change the Narrative, Change Your Teaching

      Consider that every day you get up and come to work, there’s a narrative in your head. The narrative is you making plans for what will happen, what you will do, and how others might respond to you. Now ask yourself, “Was that an average day?”

      What if you could have a great day every day? You can, and some people do. But to get there, you’d have to make the changes in your life that would fulfill the criteria for a great day. What would you need to do differently? Would you get up ten minutes earlier? Would you do a brief workout? Eat a smarter breakfast? Learn something new?

      The point here is not to tell you what to do. This is all about your daily narratives, which is an ongoing story comprised of your past, present, and future intentions. It’s about who you are and what you will do each day, and it has a high predictability of what will actually happen (Wilson, 2011). When you remember that you have a choice in life, you can change your life story. In so doing, you can change your students’ stories because you are their role model, and you can change your own.

      When you connect, empathize, and care about your students, you will teach well. In each of the upcoming chapters, you’ll notice that strong teachers purposefully manage and, when needed, change their narrative. In turn, they also purposefully influence their students’ narratives to better their lives. What mindset narrative do you have?

      Fill in the following blanks with your name and a strategy from this mindset. Repeat the phrase daily until it’s automatic.

      I, ______________. am committing to developing the relational mindset with my students every single day. I will begin with one of the strategies mentioned, which is______________. I will continue this until I have mastery and it’s automatic. At that point, I’ll learn something new to foster student success.

       Reflection and Decision

      All meaningful and lasting change starts with a mirror. Self-assess first. Reflect, “Is this topic an issue in my class?” If so, what is the evidence? If not, what is your evidence? Are you ready for a change? In other words, do you want students to graduate job ready or college ready or not? In the end, that’s what it boils down to, doesn’t it?

      Your decision to help students grow means that you generate a new narrative that includes the relational mindset. Begin with a fierce urgency, and choose one of the chapters’ strategies to get started with better relationships. Encourage colleagues to help, and set goals for progress, using a site such as Stickk (www.stickk.com). Once the message is in your heart, and you’ve built the activities into your lessons, the mindset will become automatic.

      Remember, quality relationships are not a make-or-break situation for every single student and every school. However, for most students from poverty, connections are the only reason they even come to school. Help them make that happen, and enjoy the rewards of the relational mindset.

      PART TWO

      WHY THE ACHIEVEMENT MINDSET?

      The achievement mindset asks you a simple question: “Are your students’ brains stuck for the rest of their life at their current cognitive level, or can they be lifted?” If their brains are not stuck, then you are invited (and maybe even compelled) to help each student develop his or her drive, effort, and intention. Start with the mindset that every single student can and will learn and then help them learn it. This is a way to frame equity from the conversation to action steps. In this part of the book, you’ll learn how to develop steady motivation to help foster student efforts to produce greater achievement by choice.

      Many teachers complain that their students lack effort. At the same time, it is a simple fact: a student who appears lazy or unmotivated for one teacher will often work hard for another teacher. This simple fact shows us that the student is different with a different teacher. It is the teaching that makes the difference, and the achievement mindset changes everything. The achievement mindset says, “I can build student effort, motivation, and attitudes to succeed. They are all teachable skills.”