Teaching with Poverty in Mind

Bear in mind that the whole point of education is to enrich the life of every student.

Good teaching can mitigate the effects of low socioeconomic status and lack of school resources.

You cannot afford to let disadvantaged kids receive substandard teaching. Select teachers who love children and love challenges, and provide them with all the tools and training that they need to upgrade their skills.

To maximize the rate and quality of change, students need consistent, coherent, sustained support in skill building.

Although studying arts and participating in athletics may seem to be “luxuries”, their positive impact on the brain and learning is undeniable.

Get kids who struggle with reading and math into sensory motor labs to engage in sequencing, attentional, and processing tasks that build cognitive capacity.

Ensure that every single student in your school participates in physical activity a minimum of 30 minutes a day, five days a week (with exceptions for illness, inclement weather, or serious disabilities).

It’s a fact: arts build the student brain’s academic operating system, and therefore should be integrated into all subjects.

Exercise increases the release of a specific protein that supports learning and memory function, repair and maintenance of neural circuits, and the production of brain cells that are crucial to forming the connections the brain needs to learn.

Theater, drama, and other performance arts foster participants’ emotional intelligence, timing, reflection, and respect for diversity, build memorization and processing skills, and help students win social status and friends.

Arts can build attentional skills, develop processing skills, and strengthen memory skills.

Teachers are more willing to become accountable when they have a say in the process involved.

Many teachers feel underpaid, undervalued, and overworked. Quit assuming that teachers are tireless volunteers and understand that they have emotional levels they bring to the job each day.

The best way to achieve accountability is to create a compelling, collaborative goal and then to administer assessments that provide useful, specific data demonstrating progress toward that goal.

Responsibility is an ethical sensitivity to the effects of our actions, and is a quality that teachers have to choose for themselves.

According to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, students cannot function at a high academic level when their basic needs—food, shelter, medical care, safety, family, and friendships—are unmet.

Health issues among poor students lead to school absences, increased tardiness rates, and illness during class. As a result, they are often missing key classroom content and skills.

When a body’s cells are besieged daily by stressors, they slow their growth trajectory. This is why the consequent adaptations that poor kids’ immune systems make diminish their ability to concentrate, learn and behave appropriately.

Health and achievement overlap: every cell in our body needs a healthy environment to function optimally.

Kids raised in poverty are often subject to such health and safety issues as malnutrition, environmental hazards, and insufficient health care.

Any student who feels “less than ordinary” is likely not only to struggle academically, but also to be susceptible to such secondary issues as acting out, getting bullied or becoming a bully, having lower self-esteem, and feeling depressed.

Poor children are less likely to be read to by parents, and they are also less likely to be coached in learning skills, helped with homework or to be taken to museums and other culturally enriching outings.

Reading skills aren’t hardwired into the human brain; every subskill, including (but not limited to) phonological awareness, fluency, vocabulary, phonics, and comprehension, must be explicitly taught.

Going hand in hand with language acquisition, reading is one of the most important factors affecting the development of a child’s brain.

By the time most children start school, they will have been exposed to 5 million words and should know about 13,000 of them. But that doesn’t happen in low-income homes where parents speak in shorter, more grammatically simple sentences.

The quantity, quality, and context of parents’ speech play a huge role in developing children’s language and vocabulary competence.

Behavior that comes off as rude may indicate feelings of hopelessness.

Exposure to stress shrinks neurons in the brain’s frontal lobes—an area that is responsible for such functions as making judgments, planning, and regulating impulsivity.

Compared with a healthy neuron, a stressed neuron generates a weaker signal, handles less blood flow, processes less oxygen, and extends fewer connective branches to nearby cells.

Children living in poverty experience chronic stress that exerts a devastating, cumulative influence on their physical, psychological, emotional, and cognitive functioning areas that affect brain development, academic success, social competence, and coping skills.

Beginning at birth, the attachment formed between parent and child predicts the quality of future relationships with teachers and peers, and plays a role in the development of such social functions as curiosity, independence, and social competence.

We can define poverty as “a chronic and debilitating condition that results from multiple adverse synergistic risk factors and affects the mind, body, and soul”.