http://www.jensenlearning.com/workshop-teaching-with-poverty-in-mind.php
- Relationships are important.
- Certain events can literally add new brain cells at double the rate, which leads to better learning and memory.
- Build hope and optimism.
- Have high expectations for all students.
- Use intensely focused/targeted instruction that is connected to brain research.
- Develop empathy from staff to students.
- Understand that the brains of students living in poverty are different because of the life experiences they have had.
*Taken from A Framework for Understanding Poverty
- The focus in schools should be on learning.
- Instruction in the cognitive strategies should be a part of the curriculum.
- Staff development should focus on a diagnostic approach rather than a programmatic approach.
- Efforts to promote learning should pay greater heed to what is in the student's head.
- Insistence, expectations, and support need to be guiding lights in our decisions about instruction.
Suggested Instructional Interventions and Cognitive Strategies:
- Use graphic organizers.
- Identify methods of having a systematic approach to the data/text.
- Establish goal-setting and procedural self-talk.
- Teach conceptual frameworks as part of the content.
- Use a kinesthetic approach.
- Use rubrics.
- Teach the structure of language.
- Teach students to make questions.
- Sort relevant from irrelevant cues.
- Teach mental models.
Other Instructional Strategies:
http://www.tolerance.org/magazine/number-31-spring-2007/question-class
- Assign work requiring computer and Internet access, or other costly resources, only when we can provide in-school time and materials for such work to be completed.
- give students from poverty access to the same high-level curricular and pedagogical opportunities and high expectations as their wealthy peers.
- Teach about classism, consumer culture, the dissolution of labor unions, environmental pollution and other injustices disproportionately affecting the poor, preparing new generations of students to make a more equitable world.
- Develop curricula that are relevant and meaningful to our students' lives and draw on their experiences and surroundings.
- Fight to get our students into gifted and talented programs and to give them other opportunities usually reserved for economically advantaged students and to keep them from being assigned unjustly to special education.
- Direct teaching to build cognitive structures necessary for learning.
- Hidden rules must be taught so students can choose the appropriate response if they so desire.
