-- Dr. Becki
Cohn-Vargas, Not In Our School Director
As many of you are
gearing up for the new school year, we are highlighting an introduction to
creating identity safe classrooms, important teaching practices for valuing diversity
and creating inclusive classrooms for immigrant students and all students. This
is Part 1 of the 5-part Identity Safety Blog Series, a partnership project
of Not In Our Town and the Center for the Collaborative
Classroom (CCC). Watch the companion
webinar to this collaborative series and read the whole series here. Later this week we will feature what it means to
cultivate diversity as a resource.
The goal of most
American teachers is to successfully educate all students, but too many black
and Latino students underperform academically and fail to meet their potential.
Educating all students well is not only important for the students themselves,
but for our nation as a whole. We cannot have a just and democratic society
without fully educated citizens.
Among the many
remedies for student underperformance, we find didactic teaching aimed at skill
remediation and zero-tolerance policies. These remedies have not worked.
Disproportionate numbers of low-income students and students of color are
pushed out of school and fail to graduate. Our work on identity safe teaching
shifts our focus from the deficits of students to an examination of what we do
in classrooms that helps them succeed socially and academically.
Identity
safe classrooms are those in which teachers strive to ensure that students feel
that their social identity is an asset rather than a barrier to success in the
classroom, and that they are welcomed, supported, and valued whatever their
background.
A
Research-Based Approach to Identity Safety
Our work evolved from
the body of research on “stereotype threat” done by Claude Steele and
colleagues. They wanted to understand why black college students had lower
grade point averages than white students with the same ACT scores—at every
level. Stereotype threat theory states that people from negatively stereotyped
groups may fear, in situations that are relevant to them, that they might “be
judged or treated in terms of the stereotype or that [they] might do something
that would inadvertently confirm it” (Steele, Spencer & Aronson 2002, p.
389).
Literally hundreds of
studies have demonstrated the power of stereotypes to depress human
performance. For example, black students performed less well than white
students on an intelligence test when it was described as a test of ability.
But when the same test was called a game, they did as well as the white
students. Studies of women taking math tests had similar results.
In another set of
studies, white athletes did better than their black teammates when the task was
described as one based on “sports intelligence.” By contrast, the black
students performed better than the white athletes when it was described as a
“test of natural athletic ability.” (See reducingstereotypethreat.org.)
Our research, the “Stanford
Integrated Schools Project” on identity safe teaching practices,
explores how to lift the threat to improve success in elementary classrooms.
How can teachers reduce the sense of stereotype threat for students whose
social identities (race, gender, ethnicity) link them to low school outcomes?
Our question: Are there ways to incorporate social and academic practices so
students from all backgrounds feel a sense of belonging and purpose in the
classroom, so they can fully engage in learning?
What Identity Safe Teaching Looks Like
Our researchers
observed in 84 classrooms to document the arrangement of students and
materials, the nature of their relationships, the types of questions directed
toward students, the presence or absence of cooperative learning activities,
the level of student autonomy, and the teachers’ approaches to dealing with
misbehavior. We looked for evidence of the use of diverse materials and
activities as a resource for teaching, rather than a more color-blind approach
that ignores student differences. We discovered a link between identity safe
teaching and enhanced student performance. We found:
- Students in higher identity safe classrooms had higher scores on standardized tests than students in lower identity safe classrooms.
- The Student Questionnaire revealed that students from higher identity safe classrooms had an increased liking for school and motivation to learn, liked challenging work, and felt a sense of belonging compared to students from less identity safe classrooms.
This approach is based
on the assumption that teaching and learning are social processes that depend
on building trusting, positive relationships between teachers and students and
among the students—no matter what their social identities.
Social identities are
attributes in each of us—whether we are white or black, young or old, rich or
poor, gay or straight, Methodist or Muslim, etc. Everyone has multiple social
identities. Sometimes, because of our racialized American history, some social
identities are linked to school success and others are not. In identity safe
classrooms, student diversity becomes a resource for learning.
Identity safe teaching
is in stark contrast to schools whose curriculum is high on remediation and low
on inspiration, and whose discipline is punitive and based on heavy-handed
control that does not promote compassion, responsibility, and problem-solving.
By contrast, identity
safe teaching focuses on how what we do affects students’ experience in the
classroom. From our research, we learned there is a constellation of things teachers
can do that change life in the classroom so that students achieve at higher
levels and improve their liking for school, their willingness to work hard, and
their feeling of belonging in school. The components of identity safety fall
into four major categories: child-centered teaching, cultivating diversity as a
resource, classroom relationships, and caring environments. Read how to put the
components in practice here
and next week we will feature “cultivating diversity as a resource” on our
blog.
The components of
identity safety are:
- Child-centered teaching: promotes autonomy, cooperation, and student voice.
- Cultivating diversity as a resource: teachers provide challenging curriculum and high expectations for all students in the context of the regular and authentic use of diverse materials, ideas, and teaching activities.
- Classroom relationships: relationships are based on trusting, positive interactions with the teacher and among the students.
- Caring classroom environments: social skills are taught and practiced to help students care for one another in an emotionally and physically safe classroom.
This blog was
co-authored by Dorothy M. Steele, ED.D. Dorothy is co-author of the new book, Identity Safe Classrooms: Places to
Belong and Learn, and former Executive Director of the Center for
Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity at Stanford University. She is an
early childhood educator who is interested in public schools including teaching
practices that are effective for diverse classrooms, alternative assessment
processes that inform teaching and learning, and strategies that build
inclusive communities of learners in schools. Her work with the Stanford
Integrated Schools Project was an attempt to look at these various aspects of
schooling in a large urban school district.
Becki Cohn-Vargas, EdD
is currently the director of Not In Our
School (NIOS), designing curriculum, coaching schools, and producing
films and digital media on models for creating safe and inclusive schools that
are free of bullying and intolerance at national nonprofit the Working
Group. She also teaches online courses on bullying prevention for the
University of San Diego. Becki worked in educational settings for over 35 years
as a teacher and administrator. She co-authored the book Identity Safe Classrooms: Places to
Belong and Learn with Dr. Dorothy Steele. The book was
published by Corwin Press.
Recommended Lesson Plan: Educate, Celebrate and Empower: This one-week immigration community outreach project and lesson plan meets three objectives: 1) to educate students on the experiences of the immigrant population; 2) to celebrate and welcome immigrant students; and 3) to empower all students to implement a social justice project.
We encourage you to take a pledge to stand up to
hate, bigotry, and bullying. The American Immigration Council offers free lesson
plans, resources, book/film
reviews, and grants
to #teachimmigration. We also welcome student reviews and contributions to our
blog. Email us at teacher@immcouncil.org
and follow us on twitter @ThnkImmigration.
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