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February 2006
| Volume 63 | Number 5
Helping Struggling Students
The Silent Strugglers
Marge Scherer
If They'd Only Do Their Work!
Linda Darling-Hammond and Olivia Ifill-Lynch
High school teachers often have difficulty motivating struggling students to complete homework—especially in inner-city schools in which many students are discouraged by stressful living conditions. The authors consulted with successful urban educators who were involved with innovative, small high schools in New York City, and asked what strategies they recommended for engaging students in doing their schoolwork. Five effective approaches emerged: assigning work that is worthy of effort, making the work doable, finding out what students need to do the work, creating space and time for homework, and making work public. The article gives examples of how teachers in these successful schools collaborate to implement these five strategies.
The Dropout Problem: Losing Ground
Paul E. Barton
During the last two decades, estimates from the U.S. Census Bureau have suggested that the U.S. high school completion rate was steadily rising and nearing 90 percent. In the last few years, however, estimates from independent researchers have contradicted this rosy picture and found much lower completion rates ranging from 66.1 percent to 74.4 percent. In this article, researcher Paul E. Barton describes the results of his own analysis, which confirmed the other independent estimates. He also points out that the economic prospects of these dropouts have become more grim. Barton cites a General Accounting Office report that identified four factors correlated with low high school completion rates: coming from low-income and single-parent families, getting low grades in school, being absent frequently, and changing schools. He describes a number of successful programs and models that support students at risk of dropping out, and calls on school leaders to use this knowledge to guide reform efforts.
Students on the Move
Chester Hartman
Research shows that by the end of 3rd grade, one of six children in the United States has already attended three or more schools. During a four-year period, overall school stability can fall below 50 percent for many schools. Students—both those who move and those who remain behind—can suffer psychologically, socially, and academically from excessive mobility. Although internal factors, such as expulsion, can trigger these moves, research indicates that external triggers—such as the residential instability of the housing market—predominate. A caring school culture, school awareness programs, improved recordkeeping on student mobility, and strong links between housing and education can help reduce student mobility.
Bearers of Hope
Julie Landsman
Landsman explores the qualities that enable teachers to effectively work with students who are homeless or live in extreme poverty. The most effective strategy seems to be maintaining high expectations. Successful teachers “cut deals” with students, finding ways to connect school work to students’ life concerns and helping them successfully to complete requirements in spite of the obstacles that accompany living in poverty. Landsman shares stories of how teachers sensitively find out about the realities of students’ home lives and meet students’ day-to-day needs. She ends with a plea to resist current trends toward rigid, programmatic teaching approaches for low-income students. She exhorts teachers to become activists for equity in education—and make their students allies in the struggle.
Help Us Care Enough to Learn
Kathleen Cushman
Urban high school students want their schools to provide academic courses and extracurricular activities that challenge and interest them. Too often, however, these students chafe against “a system that shuts them off rather than recognizing and developing their potential,” writes Cushman. In her conversations with 65 students across the United States, the author got a clear idea of what high school students need to become engaged in their schools: a voice in determining course offerings; academic courses that relate to things they care about; respect for their nonacademic interests; inspiring role models; and opportunities to connect with the community. This article presents the voices of a group of articulate young people who describe how schools can truly engage them in learning—and in the process, raise attendance and achievement.
Connecting With Latino Learners
Eliane Rubinstein-Ávila
The English-only initiatives sweeping the United States are mainstreaming English language learners into content-area classes designed for native or fluent English speakers, with little, if any, English as a second language (ESL) support. This spells trouble for the ever-growing population of Latinos because ESL teachers are not likely to have the content experience necessary to work effectively with these students, and content-area teachers are not likely to have a background in second language acquisition. Many Latino students are low-income, experience gaps in their formal schooling, and attend overcrowded urban schools with limited resources. Effectively teaching these students means incorporating their funds of knowledge into the curriculum, encouraging them to use their knowledge of their home language to develop academic English, making them aware of content-area–related cognates, providing graphic organizers, incorporating input from multiple modalities, and encouraging students to engage face-to-face with one another to develop English literacy skills.
Engaging African American Males in Reading
Alfred W. Tatum
By selecting appropriate reading materials, teachers can engage African American adolescent males with text, particularly students who have not mastered the skills, strategies, and knowledge that will lead to positive life outcomes. This approach takes into account students’ four literacy needs—academic, cultural, emotional, and social—and relies on instructional practices that have proven effective with African American males. A meaningful program should include texts that lead to positive life outcomes and provide a roadmap that can help students resist nonproductive behaviors. Must-read texts for African American adolescent males have four characteristics: They are intellectually exciting for both students and teachers, serve as a roadmap and provide apprenticeship, challenge students cognitively, and help students apply skills and strategies independently.
Where They Are: Working With Marginalized Students
Montana Miller
Educators in a range of schools share tools and strategies for successfully working with youth who have become marginalized from school or are at risk of dropping out. The educators emphasize the importance of personally connecting with their students and nurturing the teenagers’ interests. They also discuss the challenges of trying to establish relationships of trust with teenagers who have learned to expect mistreatment and injustice from adults. Schools should work with students, not just on academics but on other issues as well, taking into account their students’ individual, family, and social contexts. For students to thrive, teachers must take every opportunity to single out a student for positive attention and feedback and hold all students accountable for their learning and their lives.
They Can Because They Think They Can
Richard T. Vacca
Drawing on his “crisis of confidence” in reading academic texts as a graduate student, Vacca explains that self-efficacy—a belief in one’s ability to succeed—provides the key to struggling readers’ ability to comprehend texts outside their comfort zone. Self-efficacy and comprehension are interrelated. If students believe they have a good chance to understand what they are reading, they are likely to be more motivated to engage in reading and to persevere. Vacca discusses the importance of prereading strategies to create a sense of purpose and thus increase students’ motivation—strategies that involve arousing curiosity, evoking predictions and creating anticipation, generating problems to be solved, and eliciting student-generated questions. He gives examples of innovative ways that teachers have primed students’ personal interest and feeling of purpose before they plunge into assigned readings.
The Arts Make a Difference
Nick Rabkin and Robin Redmond
The arts survive at the margins of education primarily as curriculum enrichments. However, evidence is emerging that shows that arts education can have powerful effects on student achievement, with the greatest gains for students in the lowest socioeconomic status quartile, those most at risk of academic failure. Arts integration is an instructional strategy that brings the arts into the core of the school day and connects the arts across the curriculum. Integrating art with content brings about the greatest gains in student achievement. In arts-integrated classrooms, work more often clearly and meaningfully connects to students’ own experiences and feelings. Students create a product for an audience that matters to them, develop aesthetic standards, and experience a great sense of accomplishment. The best programs draw on the artistic resources of their communities; view student achievement and school improvement as pivotal to their mission; engage teachers, arts specialists, and artists from all disciplines in serious inquiry, reflect each school’s particular strengths, and raise funds from outside the school system to support their arts-integration work.
Breaking Through to Reluctant Readers
Bill Clarke
With 70 percent of its student body entering school reading below grade level, Blackstone Academy Charter School realized that teachers needed to make literacy a pillar of the school’s culture. This 9–12 urban high school administers a reading evaluation developed by the Northwest Evaluation Association each fall and spring to all incoming freshmen and to upperclassmen who have problems with reading. Seeing how their scores changed—or remained flat—energized students to improve their own reading skills. School literacy specialist Bill Clarke recounts how Blackstone met that enthusiasm by instituting daily silent reading, openly discussing with students their need to improve reading skills, and requiring certain readers to take one of three intervention classes that the school created. The school also began stressing a particular literacy strategy schoolwide each quarter and encouraging teachers to openly share their literacy teaching practices. All students targeted as having reading problems increased their scores on the NWEA reading assessment by at least two grade levels, and students’ resistant attitudes toward reading improved.
Helping Writers Find Power
Jeff Anderson
The writing teacher’s foremost job is leading students to see the valuable ideas they have to express. Writing is a way to share those ideas with the world rather than a way to be wrong, Anderson asserts. Teachers and parents too often focus on errors in student writing. This focus gives students the impression that writing well is about avoiding errors, and their initial zeal for writing turns to avoidance. Anderson recommends demonstrating to students that you value their writing by finding a gem to praise before making any corrective comments, pushing students to write every day, and urging them to hunt down and share stellar sentences that they encounter in their own and others’ writing. He views errors as valuable clues to understanding students’ underlying “pseudo-concepts” about grammar and mechanics; for example, he celebrates errors that reveal a writer is moving to a new level of skill, such as from simple to complex sentences. Anderson works with students to distill underlying grammar principles and create wall charts that show such principles in an accessible format. He plasters these charts around the room, providing visual reminders that help students learn principles of grammar and conventions.
Promoting Respectful Learning
Jo Boaler
In a four-year, longitudinal study conducted between 2000 and 2004, the author followed 700 students as they progressed through three high schools: a diverse, urban school as well as two suburban schools. Although incoming freshmen at the urban school scored significantly lower in mathematics than incoming students at the two suburban schools, by senior year, 41 percent of the urban school’s students were taking calculus, compared with approximately 27 percent of students in the other two schools. The urban school’s approach encouraged both relational equity and high achievement. Important dimensions of the mathematics teachers’ work included working collaboratively to design curriculums and teaching methods, a shared commitment to equity, heterogeneous classes, and a teaching approach in which students worked on complex conceptual problems in groups. These positive and respectful intellectual relations—which the author refers to as “relational equity”—depended on students’ committing to the learning of others, respecting the ideas of others, and learning to communicate.
The Year of Writing
Sheila Gaquin
Sheila Gaquin describes how she used the Six Traits + 1® writing system to help elementary students from an Eskimo village in Point Hope, Alaska, become avid writers. Many of the children faced limited English ability and problems at home, but their biggest hurdle in writing was hatred and avoidance of the act. She broke through resistance by having kids write on laminated paper with dry-erase markers, making writing a daily routine, and accepting every attempt. Gaquin eased students into the writing process by helping each student make one or two simple edits every day and guided them in gradually adding introductions, transitions, and conclusions. Training students in assessing others’ writing was key to sharpening their eye for quality. By the year’s end, students’ scores on a writing assessment were highly improved. More important, they grew to love writing and were eager to pursue new projects.
Assessment for Learning: An Endangered Species?
W. James Popham
Technology to Help Struggling Students
Heidi Silver-Pacuilla and Steve Fleischman
Rekindling Our Energy for Neglected Children
Joanne Rooney
Accelerating the Learning of Low Achievers
Deborah Perkins-Gough
Educational Leadership's Themes for 2006–2007
ASCD Community in Action
Helping Struggling Students
Klea Scharberg
Helping Struggling Students
Naomi Thiers
Copyright © 2004 by Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development
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