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For Your Head: Poor Students, Rich Teaching

In his 2019 book, Poor Students, Rich Teaching, Eric Jensen defines poverty as "a chronic condition resulting from an aggregate of adverse social and economic risk factors" (p 7). Chronic exposure to poverty, and the distress that frequently accompanies it, leads to significant differences in the brain. These differences could present in many ways in your classroom: poor memory/weak working memory, distractibility, learned helplessness, apathy, hypervigilence, in-your-face aggressiveness, deficient vocabulary, poor reading skills, poor manners, misbehaviors, or emotional overreactions. Jensen's work addresses some of the mindsets that can have a valuable impact on the success of students who experience the stress & instability that poverty often brings with it. One of those mindsets is related to building relationships.

Establishing connections & relationships with students who are distressed by risk factors commonly associated with poverty - through respect, listening, and empathy - has to happen before learning will occur. According to Jensen, the relational mindset is summed up in this way, "We are all connected in this life together. Always connect first as a person (and an ally) and second as a teacher" (p 11). The more stability students experience in their home lives and family relationships, the less their success in school will depend on this relationship with an adult at school. One source Jensen references indicates that the "effect size on student achievement from effective relationships is stronger for behaviorally and academically higher-risk students and for students of color than for low-risk learners" (p 13).

For Your Heart: Eric Jensen

For Your Hands: Strategies for Relationship Building

Taken from Poor Students, Rich Teaching by Eric Jensen

1. Create a Culture of Personalization: Connect in a personal way, making the student relevant in the classroom. Being honest, genuine and real is also an important part of creating this culture.

• Create a 'Me' Bag - fill a paper bag with small objects or items you collect about yourself. Share them and their stories with your students. 
• Share an Everyday Problem - about once a week, share a piece of your world, a slice of teacher life. Talking about adversity - a challenge or problem you've recently encoutered - gives others permission to share their stories and gives students a real-world model of how to live as an adult. You can ask them to brainstorm ways they might have handled the situation or responded to the challenge, then share with them what you did and why you chose to address it in the way you did.
• Share Progress on Goals - share your personal goals with students and the progress you're making towards achieving them over time, including celebrations & setbacks. It shows students a realistic example of working towards improvement, experiencing and overcoming obstacles, and that our goals are worth an investment of time and effort.

2. Connect Everyone for Success: Research Jensen discusses in his book suggests that connecting with people is one of the few things that makes people even happier than money. Creating a sense of belonging and providing opportunities for cooperative learning in your classroom can help cultivate a feeling of acceptance for students, which is especially true for minority students and for minority students who are exposed to damaging environments or social threats. To do this in your classroom, consider the Fifty-Fifty Rule: split class time equally between social and individual time.

• Collaborative Strategies - interdependency, where student success depends on another student's success, raises everyone's effort level.
• Cooperative Groups & Teams - creating such structures in the room, and creating systems to guide their behaviors, can provide connection and a sense of belonging for students. Build in opportunities for social status & camaraderie, give students within them unique & valued roles, set norms for behavior, and make sure they function together in some way each day.
• Study Buddies - assign semi-permanent partners who take responsibility for each other's success. There are a number of ways to intentionally pair students, build their capacity for working & communicating together, and raise the stakes in their work so that they form a mutually beneficial bond.
• Student Mentors - provide access for your students to older students who can offer guidance, encouragement and leadership.
• Temporary Partners - direct students through an activity to pair them with someone random in the classroom for a short task or discussion.

3. Show Empathy: Research indicates that students from poor families tend to experience more stressors and have fewer tools & strategies to cope with them. Prolonged exposure to these stressors can alter the brain, but "positive relational experiences can change it for the better" (p 28), by decreasing cortisol and increasing serotonin. Empathy is the emotional support needed to create these conditions.

• Empathy Tools - "I am sorry to hear that." (Accompanied by a sad face shows you care.) "This makes me sick." (Be sad, upset, or very concerned for the student.) "We were worried about you." (Say that many others cared about the student; be worried.) "Are you OK?" (Physically check on the student's safety and well-being.) "That's awful. I don't know if I could handle that as well as you are." (This tells the student that the problem was a tough one and that you are showing empathy and admiration.)
• Quick-Connect Tools - One and Done: do one favor, make one connection, or show empathy that is so powerful that an individual or whole class remembers it. 2X10: identify a student who seems to especially need a connection and focus on spending 2 minutes a day for 10 days in a row engaging that student in a conversation unrelated to class or school work. Three in Thirty: ask enough questions over the course of your conversations with students to learn at least 3 things about each of them in the first 30 days of class.
• Connect Early - in the first few minutes of class, make your way around the room to check-in and do a quick assessment of how students are. This may mean making small talk with students and paying attention to non-verbal cues.
• Connect Late - check body language as students prepare to leave the classroom. If non-verbals suggest there's an issue, try to pull the student aside to check-in and offer assistance.