Page 73 - Powerful Social Studies for Elementary Students 4th Edition

CHAPTER 2
How Can I Build a Learning Community in My Classroom: Strategies for Including All Children 45
Supporting Motivation of Low Achievers
Some students struggle to keep up due to limitations of ability or because they have dis- abilities that impede their progress, or because they are bored due to lack of challenge. A strong learning community emphasizing high expectations with strong socio-emotional and instructional supports can go a long way in helping all students realize success. Tools such as co-constructing visual prompts for self monitoring, social stories, strategic groupings for specific tasks, and peer mentoring are examples of these supports.
Typically classroom teachers who build strong learning communities exhibit patience, encouragement, and support. However, with the multiple classroom challenges that exist, it is too easy to drift into maladaptive patterns. Brophy (2010) identifies 18 ways some teachers communicate low expectations to low achievers. Having been documented in various studies and reviewed by Good and Brophy (2008), they include the following:
How Some Teachers Communicate Low Expectations to Their Low Achievers:
1. Waiting less time for low achievers to answer a questions (before giving the answer of calling on someone else).
2. Giving answers to low achievers or calling on someone else rather than trying to improve their responses by giving clues or repeating or rephrasing questions.
3. Inappropriate reinforcement by rewarding inappropriate behavior or innocent answers by low achievers.
4. Criticizing low achievers more often for failure.
5. Praising low achievers less often for success.
6. Failing to give feedback following the public responses of low achievers.
7. Generally paying less attention to low achievers or interacting with them less
frequently.
8. Calling on them less often to respond to questions, or asking them only easier, non-
analytic questions.
9. Seating them farther away from the teacher.
10. Generally demanding less from them, such as attempting to teach them less than they are capable of learning, accepting low-quality or even incorrect responses from them and treating them as if they were correct responses, or substituting misplaced sympathy or gratuitous praise for sustained teaching that ultimately leads to mastery.
11. Interacting with low achievers more privately than publicly and monitoring and structuring their activities more closely.
12. Giving high achievers but not low achievers the benefit of the doubt in grading tests or assignments.
13. Being less friendly in interactions with low achievers, including less smiling and fewer other nonverbal indicators of support.
14. Providing briefer and less informative answers to their questions.
15. Interacting with them in ways that involve less eye contact and other non-verbal com- munication of attention and responsiveness (e.g., forward lean, positive head nodding).
16. Less use of effective but time-consuming instructional methods with low achievers
when time is limited.
17. Less acceptance and use of low achievers’ ideas.
18. Limiting low achievers to an impoverished curriculum, such as low-level and repetitive
content, factual recitation rather than lesson-extending discussion, drill and practice rather than application and higher-level thinking. (Brophy, 2010, pp. 108–109).
Brophy (2010) points out that some of these differences are due to the behavior of the students while some forms of differential treatment may represent appropriate
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