Poor Students, Rich Teaching. Eric Jensen

is $28,410, and yet almost 40 percent of all American workers do not even bring in $20,000 a year (Social Security Online, 2016). See figure I.1 for a breakdown of the new normal workforce.

      Source: Social Security Online, 2016.

Figure I.1: The new normal workforce in America.

      Let me summarize this for you. From 2000 to 2014, the share of adults living in middle-income households fell in 203 of the 229 U.S. metropolitan areas. Think about that; in almost 90 percent of the United States’ metro areas, the middle class is shrinking (Pew Research Center, 2016).

      However, understanding all this is only where our battle begins. We must understand what poverty is in real terms.

       What More Poverty Means for Teachers

      Saying that someone is from poverty tells us nothing about the family. Is it fragmented or intact, caring or careless? We don’t know because, on the surface, all poverty means is having a low socioeconomic status, but it does not define the individual. My own definition is less focused on federal standards for annual income. Instead, I focus on the common effects of poverty via an aggregate of risk factors. Here’s how I define poverty in this book: poverty is a chronic condition resulting from an aggregate of adverse social and economic risk factors.

      Working with students from poverty means you’ll need to deeply understand what is going on around you. In short, many poor students are different because many of their experiences are wiring their brains differently. The brain’s neurons are designed by nature to reflect their environment, not to automatically rise above it. Chronic exposure to poverty affects the areas of the brain responsible for memory, impulse regulation, visuospatial actions, language, cognitive capacity, and conflict (Noble, Norman, & Farah, 2005).

      Evidence suggests the brains of children from poverty are more likely to differ via four primary types of experiences: (1) health issues from poor diet and exposure to toxins and pollutants, (2) chronic stress, (3) weaker cognitive skills, and (4) impaired socio-emotional relationships (Evans & Kantrowitz, 2002). Although not every single child from a household with a low socioeconomic status will experience all of these factors, the majority will.

      This means that you’ll see behaviors that show the effects of toxins (poor memory and distractibility) or chronic stress (learned helplessness, apathy, hypervigilance, and in-your-face aggressiveness). In a classroom, you’ll also see the results of less exposure to cognitive skills (deficient vocabulary, poor reading skills, and weak working memory) and impaired socioemotional skills (poor manners, misbehaviors, or emotional overreactions). Indeed, there is a powerful connection between emotion and cognition:

      When we educators fail to appreciate the importance of students’ emotions, we fail to appreciate a critical force in students’ learning. One could argue, in fact, that we fail to appreciate the very reason that students learn at all. (Immordino-Yang & Damasio, 2007, p. 9)

      Teachers who do not know what these behaviors really are may inappropriately judge a student as lazy, unwilling to follow directions, a poor listener, low achieving, and antisocial. This may foster classroom friction, a huge achievement gap, annoyed students, and even dropouts. And worse yet, the teacher may blame the behavior on the student. Conversely, when students feel a connection with their teachers and feel respect and trust, they behave and learn better.

      Student-teacher relationships have a strong effect on student achievement and are easily in the top 10 percent of all factors (Hattie, 2009). Relationships between students and teachers are more important to students who don’t have a loving parent at home. For comparison, teacher subject-matter knowledge is in the bottom 10 percent of all factors (Hattie, 2009). Students care more about whether their teachers care than what their teachers know.

       The Brain’s Changing Design

      As an educator who works with schools all over the United States, I’ve heard just about every story there is about why students from poverty supposedly can’t succeed. In rural Kentucky, I hear about coal mine closings that are causing student hopelessness. In New Mexico, I hear about how a lack of jobs fosters low expectations in students. In Hawaii, I hear about the beach culture that supposedly makes students more interested in surfing than learning. These, and many like them, are the devastating community-driven narratives that are killing the chances for student success.

      Likewise, you may know someone who has the impression that people don’t change. In other words, some people spread lies like, “A student who is a troublemaker at age eight will always be one.” This is also an example of a toxic mindset. Do you see the pattern?

      The fact is, humans can and do change. One of the more relevant properties in the human brain when it comes to teaching students is neuroplasticity. This property allows the human brain to make new connections, develop whole new networks, and even remap itself so that more (or less) physical space in the brain is used for a particular task. For example, there are changes in brain activation specifically associated with the practice of high-level cognitive skills (Mackey, Singley, Wendelken, & Bunge, 2015). Even just two hours of cognitive training shows changes in the brain (Hofstetter, Tavor, Moryosef, & Assaf, 2013).

      When people don’t change, it is often because others have given up on them, their daily environment is toxic, or others are using an ineffective strategy that doesn’t help. Often, teachers feel helpless to help students if there is a lack of support at home, but the truth is the classroom teacher is still the single most significant contributor to student achievement; the effect is greater than that of parents, peers, entire schools, or poverty (Hanushek, 2005; Rivkin, Hanushek, & Kain, 2005; Rockoff, 2004). Research also shows that above-average teachers (those who get one and a half years or more of student gains per school year) can completely erase the academic effects of poverty in five years (Hanushek, 2005).

      The stories at your school that are told and retold shape students’ expectations. When the stories are upbeat, affirming, and hopeful, the students and staff reinforce a positive message. In successful schools, staff members try to redefine their new normal. Mindsets matter a great deal, especially when addressing poverty. This book will help you identify the useful and powerful mindsets that can accelerate positive change to alter the future for your students.

      Before we dig in, there is one last thing you should know about the strategies that enforce these mindsets. In most sports, the team that scores the most points (or goals, runs, and so on) wins. This scoring system is simple and easily understood. In our profession, the scoring system that decides a winning classroom strategy is called the effect size. This number is simply the size of the impact on student learning. In short, it tells you how much something matters. The mathematics on it is simple: it is a standardized measure of the relative size of the gain (or loss) in student achievement caused by an intervention (versus a control) (Olejnik & Algina, 2000). See figure I.2.

      Source: Vacha-Haase & Thompson, 2004.

Figure I.2: Effect sizes made practical.

      Researchers simply measure the difference between doing something and doing nothing. Ideally, one uses an experimental group (using a new strategy) and a control group (using an existing norm). The strongest analysis includes large sample sizes and multiple studies with varied population demographics. Then, you know your data are very, very solid. This is important to you, and I connect many of the strategies in this book to their expected effect size, so please lean in and read closely.

      This is all about your teaching.

      Effect sizes are a common research-based way to measure the impact of a strategy or factor. While any intervention could have a negative effect size, most classroom interventions (teacher strategies) are positive. Classroom interventions typically have effect sizes between