went to three elementary schools, four middle schools, and two high schools. At one count, I had 153 teachers. And this is the G-rated version. The viewpoint I learned from my father was, “Stop complaining, and focus on what’s important.” For me, that meant survival.
I am telling you this because I know what it’s like to grow up in a toxic environment. I have had a loaded, cocked gun held to my head and heard, “Do what I tell you, or I will shoot.” I acted out in class and got in trouble often. My K–12 grades were poor, and I finished high school with a C+ average. The odds of me succeeding in life at that stage were not good.
So how did I find a way to succeed? First, I was born with white privilege. I did not experience daily additional stressors from racism, gender inequality, or classism. Second, I was lucky. At age thirty, I started meeting amazing adult role models and, for years, I made them a part of my life. I started to learn what success in life was really about.
This book is personal for me, and I am hoping to make it personal for you. You must make a choice to understand the mindsets of those who grow up with adversity and, more important, make a choice to learn the new mindsets to help your students succeed.
Ultimately, that’s what this book is about: choice. Everyone gets knocked down; for some, it is more often and more traumatic than others. The next time you have a student in your class who acts out, who is frustrated by how your class is going, remember: I was one of those students, and I took it personally when a teacher did not help me succeed. When my teachers did not help me, I just stopped putting in the effort. On the flip side, when teachers cared about and helped me, I worked hard and had a good attitude. Although my own K–12 experience was not good overall, a few good teachers were different, and slowly, I began to get glimpses of hope. Their mindsets were different. I felt the impact of relationships and good teaching.
Many of your students are in school mostly because it’s the law and their friends are there. It was that way for me. But my teachers chose to teach. They chose to be at my school. They chose the subject and grade levels. On top of that, they were being paid to help me graduate. The choices you make do matter. These choices come from a teaching mindset focused on student success, and that’s what this book is about. I know you are likely to be underpaid, underappreciated, and undersupported, but you still have to make choices every day of your life. Your students need you. So, will you help them graduate?
The easy way out is to say, “No, I don’t have a choice. You wouldn’t believe my monthly expenses and how small my paycheck is. You don’t know how hard it is just to get by.” Yes, I do know hard it is to get by. I’ve lived on oatmeal and potatoes in a rented laundry room for two years, just to get by. I have been a caretaker and a hotel maid, and I went bankrupt. But I never complained or took a handout or an unemployment check. You always have a choice. You can choose to get better at your daily work practices, you can make smart decisions, and you can build your skill sets and help students graduate.
If you don’t know how to do your job well, it can be painfully hard. But in this book, I’ll introduce new mindsets and show you how to teach differently. You’ll start loving your job again. By the way, I’m not telling you the path of changing mindsets is easy; I’m telling you that it can be done, it’s worth doing, and you can do it. I promise this resource will be part of your success. Let’s get started!
Introduction
This book’s major theme is developing greater awareness and action to engage students with a different mindset. It is also about something that many poor students are not getting: rich teaching. Here, the word rich means full, bountiful, and better than ever. Teachers can make a difference in students’ lives with richer teaching. Every student that you help graduate means one less dropout, which means one less student at risk for entering the juvenile justice system, depending on welfare, or going to prison (Latif, Choudhary, & Hammayun, 2015). It’s also one more voice that will contribute to our culture and world, making it a better place. You can ensure all students, regardless of background, graduate college and career ready.
All of us have narratives in our head about teaching. Teachers who struggle with poor students often have mentalities that reinforce scarcity, blame, and negativity. For example, a teacher may say, “Last year, I just couldn’t make any progress with Jason. You know, those students just don’t get any parental support, so what can I do?” Notice how the teacher ends with a story about why he or she couldn’t make progress. In this book, you will discover the rich strategies that high-performing teachers use to alter the course of these destructive narratives and help students succeed through richer and more abundant teaching.
Year after year, your K–12 Title I school culture either reinforces hopelessness and assumptions that the deck is simply stacked against you or it fosters optimistic possibilities and successes with uplifting narratives. I could fill this book with stories of real high-poverty schools that are succeeding, as I have done in other books. Yet, how many schools would you need to read about before you say, “OK, that’s enough. I believe it”? I hope reading this book helps to reframe any negative narratives you struggle to carry.
Yes, poverty is a big problem. But committed teachers and whole schools across the country are finding that equity is the solution. This book is all about fostering equity for all by fostering the same success mindsets for all students. Where equality at school gives all students the same treatment, equity gives all students access to the same opportunities. Here are two examples, from two different grade levels.
1. In elementary school, many teachers have a deficit mindset, thinking that students from low-income families don’t have the smarts for higher-level cognitive thinking. That’s a big mistake. Many successful K–5 schools offer computer coding at school. There are dozens of free apps that teach coding starting at a first-grade level (which builds processing speed, memory, thinking, and decision making) in a fun, game-like format. This is an easy way to offer equal access to the opportunities that students from middle- and upper-class families get. Considering the booming job market that needs coders, that’s nearly criminal to not teach coding.
2. Many secondary schools use programs to build college readiness. But some school leaders have decided that their students from poverty are not qualified, leaving many students without the resources that quality programs provide. That’s not equity. There are many secondary schools that do put 100 percent of their students in this program. They may need to provide some additional tutoring, but the mission is the same—success for all. Yes, your mindset does matter, and it matters a lot. The measuring stick is equity.
My advocacy is for teachers like you. I’ll do anything to help you grow and succeed. I see teachers as the single most critical factor in helping the United States survive and thrive. Regardless of what our policy makers do, we all need tough, gritty teachers who are willing to make hard choices to help students from poverty succeed. To kick things off, we’ll take a quick tour of how I’ve organized this book and then support the need for its mindsets and strategies with a look at the new normal as it pertains to poverty, its effect on students, and why you can change their futures for the better.
About This Book
This book combines and updates the best of two books—Poor Students, Rich Teaching and Poor Students, Richer Teaching. For this edition, I included the most critical knowledge from each of the seven high-impact mindsets in both of those books so that you’ll have access to one effective and research-driven resource that contains all the tools you need to improve your teaching mindsets and help all your students in need to graduate.
Even if you have been successful before, my promise is that through this book, you’ll become a richer teacher. To complement this book, I’ve also written
