Poor Students, Rich Teaching. Eric Jensen

and yourself. If you’ve ever put a mental limitation on any student (don’t worry, we all have), these chapters are must-reads. Your new, rock-solid positivity mindset will help your students soar.

      • Part four: The rich classroom climate mindset—Chapters 10 through 12 offer strategies to take all that positivity you’ve generated and use it to create an energetic, high-performing class culture, using the rich classroom climate mindset. You’ll learn the secrets that high-performing teachers use to build an amazing classroom climate.

      • Part five: The enrichment mindset—Chapters 13 through 15 focus on building breakthrough cognitive capacity in students. A big problem for students from poverty is their mental bandwidth, often known as cognitive load. Here, you’ll see the clear, scientific evidence that shows, without a molecule of doubt, that you can ensure your students build cognitive capacity in the form of memory, thinking skills, vocabulary, and study skills.

      • Part six: The engagement mindset—Chapters 16 through 18 dig into student involvement in a new way with the engagement mindset. You’ll gain quick, easy, and practical strategies for maintenance and stress, for buy-in, and to build community.

      • Part seven: The graduation mindset—Chapters 19 and 20 help you focus on the gold medal in teaching: students who graduate job or college ready. Each chapter centers on school factors absolutely proven to support graduation. You’ll learn the science of why these factors can be such powerful achievement boosters, and you’ll discover a wide range of positive alternatives to what your students are doing at school.

      Each part ends with a Follow Through section that asks you to consider your personal narrative in light of what you’ve read about the featured mindset and reflect on how you can use the mindset to improve your teaching practices. There’s much more for you to learn, but these seven mindsets and the accompanying strategies will make a world of difference if you implement them well. That’s my promise.

      This book ends with an epilogue that offers a quick-read summary of the book and offers organization tools for immediate application. On this book’s website (visit go.SolutionTree.com/instruction) you’ll be able to access three appendices with useful resources to support your implementation of the book’s tools, some tips on the important process of running your own brain, and a guide to rich lesson planning.

      This powerful book is packed with real science and real teachers using powerful strategies, and it absolutely will support you in making fresh, smart choices in teaching. As you read it, it will be up to you to pause and reflect often. Any single chapter can make a difference in your work. Ask yourself not, “Have I heard of this before?” but instead, “Do I already do this as a daily practice?” and “Do I do this well enough to get the results I want or need?” The fact is that all of us can get better. This book can take you down that path.

      Before we get into part one and all seven mindsets for change, let’s briefly look just a little deeper at the research that supports them and why you can believe in them.

      About the New Normal

      Books for educators typically just tell teachers what to do. This one is different because I explain why the suggestions in this book are relevant, important, and most of all, urgent. If you grew up in the United States, I know first-hand how many changes you’ve seen in your lifetime. If you live in another country, no doubt you have seen disruptive change as well. Many of the changes you must learn to regard as the new normal. We typically say something is normal meaning it’s just fine and pay less attention because we often take it for granted. We also say things are normal as if that is a good thing. But now I invite you to see the new normal as a threat to your job and your future. Poverty and mindsets (the topics of this book) play a big part in this new normal. This is no doomsday scenario. It is about what has already happened. You must understand this before you walk into your classroom again.

      At one school I was working with, a teacher shared some pretty serious frustrations. As she spoke, her eyes moistened, “You want us to do this and that, plus you say it might be hard—and it might even take months or years! For starters, do you even know how much we are being asked to do these days? Do you know how little support we get from leadership? How do we even know these things you suggest are possible? And, really, why should we even bother? After all, things will change again in a few years, and there’ll be some new flavor of the month that we all have to jump on board with again!” She was nearly in tears, and her pain was obvious. When teachers tell me, “Our jobs have changed,” they’re right. When teachers tell me, “Students aren’t like they used to be,” they’re right. When staff tell me, “The whole profession has changed,” they’re right. Lastly, when teachers like you tell me how frustrating their jobs are, I’m on your side. I’ve been a teacher. I work with teachers, and I know the profession well.

      So, let’s use that. Let’s drill down and learn some of the most relevant changes affecting your classroom when we talk about students from poverty. We’ll examine the hard evidence of the new normal, what the resulting poverty means to you, and how poverty may affect your students.

       Poverty and Hard Evidence of the New Normal

      Poverty in the United States is getting worse, not better. The new normal is this: we now have a majority of students in public schools who qualify as poor based on school data (Suitts, 2015). In the five most populated states (California, Texas, Florida, Illinois, and New York), 48 percent or more of public school students are in poverty (Suitts, 2015). Pause and wrap your head around this.

      But it gets worse. In 2016, two out of three student dropouts were from low-income families. Across the country, the graduation gap between the poor and nonpoor ranged from 3 percent to 24 percent. Nationwide, although many states have closed the graduation gap, almost one third of all states have seen increases in the gap (DePaoli, Bridgeland, Atwell, & Balfanz, 2018). This new normal is a mindset game changer for everyone, especially educators. The trend is not our friend.

      Also part of the new normal is the disappearing middle class. Gone are many good-paying jobs that required a high school diploma and hard work (manufacturing, mining, automobiles, oil and gas, and more). Technology (robots, automated software and websites, and smartphones) has replaced people for many of those jobs. Trucking is the most popular job in twenty-nine states (Bui, 2015). But around the world, multiple manufacturers are actively developing, testing, and deploying automated trucks, so those trucking jobs may be eliminated as soon as 2030 (Campbell, 2018). Imagine the disruption this will cause: the number-one job in over half the states will be automated (Bui, 2015).

      Often, poverty occurs when the cost-of-living increase does not keep pace with inflation, and real wages for the middle class and poor go down. Real middle-class annual wages (adjusted for inflation) have declined dramatically, from $57,000 a year in 2000 to just under $52,000 in 2014 (Economic Policy Institute, 2014). That means the average U.S. household has lost nearly 10 percent in wages to inflation since 2000. Even for the declining middle class, life has gotten harder and 2018 brings few signs of positive change (Drum, 2018).

      This is the new normal, and you’re not alone. Roughly 76 percent of Americans are living paycheck to paycheck, with essentially zero savings (Bankrate, 2012). The number of people on food stamps has doubled between 2008 and 2014 (U.S. Department of Agriculture, Food and Nutrition Service, 2016). About half of all children born in 2015 will be on food stamps at some point in their lives (Rank & Hirschl, 2015).

      Over half (51 percent) of all American workers make less than $30,000 a year. The federal