I’ve come to the frightening conclusion that I am the decisive element in the classroom.
It’s my personal approach that creates the climate. It’s my daily mood that makes the
weather. As a teacher, I possess a tremendous power to make a child’s life miserable or
joyous. I can be a tool of torture or an instrument of inspiration. I can humiliate or
humor, hurt or heal. In all situations, It is my response that decides whether a crisis will
be escalated or deescalated and a child humanized or dehumanized.
~Haim Ginott
The expectations that teachers and schools have of students are also important, and
these unfortunately are sometimes related to students; racial and social class
backgrounds. Educator Mano Singham has cited research that concludes that the impact
of teacher expectations is three times greater for Black and Latino students than for
White students. This too is part of the sociopolitical context of the “achievement gap.”
~ Nieto and Bode, 2008
Teachers and schools alone cannot alleviate the poverty and other oppressive conditions
in which students may live. It is far more realistic and promising to tackle the problems
that teachers and schools can do something about by providing educational
environments that encourage all students to learn.
~ Nieto and Bode, 2008
The term self-fulfilling prophecy, coined by Robert Merton in 1948, means that
students perform in ways the teachers expect. Student performance is based on both
overt and covert messages from teachers about students worth, intelligence, and
capability. For instance, teachers’ beliefs that their students are ‘dumb’ can become a
rationale for providing low-level work in the form of elementary facts, simple drills, and
rote memorization. Students are not immune to these messages.
~ Nieto and Bode, 2008
Successful teachers of the urban poor did not blame students for failure and had
consistently high expectations of their students.
~Martin Haberman, 1995
Successful educators in impoverished urban educational settings have an educational
philosophy and a set of practices related to issues of discipline, interaction with parents,
time on task, and homework that are not typically present in teachers who are
unsuccessful in urban impoverished schools. For instance, Haberman concluded that
unsuccessful teachers stressed numerous rules and regulations when teaching
impoverished children at the expense of relationship building and time spent on
academic tasks, whereas successful teachers had fewer rules that focused on creating
mutual respect and course work that kept students engaged.
~Martin Haberman, 1995
Effective urban teachers, on the other hand, believe it is their responsibility to find ways
of engaging all their students in learning activities. The continuous generation and
maintenance of student interest and involvement is how star teachers explain their jobs
to themselves and to others. They manifest this persistence in several ways. They
accept responsibility for making the classroom an interesting, engaging place and for
involving the children in all forms of learning. They persist in trying to meet the
individual needs of the problem student, the talented, the handicapped, and the
frequently neglected student who falls in the gray area. Their persistence is reflected in
an endless search for what works best with each student. Indeed, they define their jobs
as asking themselves constantly, "How might this activity have been better -- for the
class or for a particular individual?"
~Martin Haberman, 1995
Star teachers believe that, regardless of the life conditions their students face, they as
teachers bear a primary responsibility for sparking their students' desire to learn. They
do not blame students for failure and have consistently high expectations of their
students.
~Martin Haberman, 1995
The most common characteristics of effective teachers in urban schools are (1) a belief
that their students are capable learners and (2) an ability to communicate this belief to
the students.
~Kenneth Zeichner, 2003
Caring for students does not just mean giving hugs and pats on the back. Care means
loving students in the most profound ways: through high expectations, great support,
and rigorous demands.
~ Nieto and Bode, 2008
A critical task in becoming an effective teacher of diverse students is coming to
understand individual young people in non-stereotypical ways while acknowledging and
comprehending the ways in which culture and context influence their lives and learning.
~Darling-Hammond, 2002
Students’ experiences in classrooms offer much more fertile ground to plow for solutions
than heredity or poverty or some other deficit lurking in a child’s background. Instead of
looking at students’ inadequacies as the sources of the gap, educators, researchers, and
policy makers alike should attend more keenly to how these children are taught.
Academic failure of children….may be due more to inadequate instructional practices and
policies than to the effects of poverty.”
~Jencks and Phillips, 1998
Studies of intelligence, learning, and instruction now reject conceptions of low-income
learners as inherently culturally deprived, lacking in ability, unmotivated, and at risk.
Instead, research shows that it is much more productive for educators to regard such
students as culturally diverse, capable, motivated, and resilient.
~Williams, 1996