Here is a follow-up to the column above. It is a review I wrote for my Multiply site that I sent to the other teachers at my school and put on our school's website. It contains links to some of Dr. Payne's articles.
As teachers, we don't always get the best from all of our staff developments. Sometimes that's because of weak presenters, sometimes it's our own attitudes or preconceptions. More often than not it's simply because we just don't have the time, support, or resources to implement what we've learned in meaningful ways. My hope is that this article review will help supplement one of our professional development areas for you.
I was first captivated by the Aha Process company's work on generational poverty when my wife, an elementary guidance counselor in another district, told me about a workshop she had attended. Our administrators echoed her enthusiasm at Leadership team meetings, after they had attended similar seminars.
Because I taught at a parochial school in Los Angeles before coming to Iowa, many people ask me about the cultural differences. Actually, neither going from Church school to public school or from West coast to Midwest was as traumatic as going from a private school of mostly (not entirely) middle-class to a public school with part middle-class and a large proportion of severely poor students. It was a greater difference than going from a multi-cultural/multi-lingual school to a mostly homogeneous one. At L.A. Lutheran, even the poorest, and the most dysfunctional families (not synonymous) still had to scrape up their monthly tuition- that could, on occasion, have leverage when it came to behavior and learning.
Ruby K. Payne Ph.D. has written a series of four articles for teachers and educators to help them get a grasp of her framework for understanding generational poverty. I read them and listened to recorded readings of them and found them very helpful. In any school district with a reported free-and-reduced lunch rate in the forty percentile like ours, any strategies we can muster will be valuable.
The first article reviews the 8 assets needed to escape poverty and the "secret rules" of surviving in poverty, the middle-class, and wealth.
The second article focuses on the 5 registers of communications and how children of generational poverty need "mediation," or language plot-structures as an infrastructure for helping them move from concrete thinking to the abstract reasoning that is necessary for academic success.
The third article is a tremendous help in understanding what to expect from students of generational poverty and strategies for classroom management and discipline. This article includes the 3 voices; child, parent, and adult. I think that much of what she writes about fits well with the principles of "Love & Logic" espoused by other experts like Jim and Charles Fay.
Finally the fourth article suggests school-wide strategies including the use of lots of graphic organizers. I think this is where our emphasis on literacy and vocabulary can integrate well across the curriculum and in every discipline.
Download pod-casts of each of Payne's four articles for listening to on your computer or your MP3 player. Free from Payne's website.
Download a PDF of all four articles to read for yourself free from Payne's website.
Visit Payne's website to explore other resources, including an opportunity to purchase her book, A Framework for Understanding Poverty.
I haven't read it yet myself, but I'm thinking seriously about it. Trends may come and go, God willing NCLB will at least evolve, even if we can't get rid of it, but poverty will always be with us. All our students suffer, so long as there are two tiers of learners. I believe we have to do whatever we can to help kids be able to succeed in the middle class morass that is school and work. Dr. Payne's articles will at least be a powerful start.
_______________________________
http://ted.mallory.googlepages.com/home.html
http://tmal.multiply.com
"The gospel is meant to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable." ~Garrison Keillor
No comments:
Post a Comment