Resources for Teachers

Parents, Pre K - 12 Teachers, Undergraduate Students August 29, 2016

We Need to Talk About the Damage of Race-Related Trauma on Black and Brown Youth in Public Schools

Witnessing or experiencing race-related trauma damages the psychological wellbeing of minority youth. African American, American Indian, and Latino youth not only encounter race-related trauma in their neighborhoods but also in school.

Schools should be a safe space for all children, but some disturbing data prove otherwise.

  • Teachers, school personnel, and resource officers often enact violence against children of color. Hyman and Perone (1998) wrote about this understudied aspect of school violence more than fifteen years ago and while the CDC does not provide any indicator, a disturbing 2015 video captured a school resource officer at Spring Valley High School in Columbia, SC violently wrestling an African American female to the ground while other students numbly watched.

Minority youth not only witness or experience physical violence in school, they also deal with constant alienation, discrimination, and microaggressions. In our work with suspended youth, we have uncovered these encounters and are capturing them more intentionally through interviews with minority students.

  • Alienation manifests in our interviews with students like Natalie[1], a Latina, who mentioned, “I felt like I did not belong, like I wasn’t worth anything and didn’t mean anything.”
  • Discrimination—Teachers and school personnel discriminate against minority youth in discretionary discipline practices and recommendations for advanced courses. Racial discrimination can increase anxiety and depressive symptoms among youth (Chavous et al., 2008; Cogburn, Chavous, & Griffin, 2011).
  • Microaggressions (intentional or unintentional language and behavior that is derogatory or negative) are evident for students like Samantha, an African American female:

“I was the only black child, well the only black female in the computer engineering science class. And the teacher wouldn’t help me, he kind of pushed me [to] the side and he’s always like you can figure it out. But then Billy needed help so he just raised his hand and the teacher would assist him. But when I raised my hand he would overlook [me].”

When youth like Natalie and Samantha begin to internalize the belief “I wasn’t worth anything and I didn’t mean anything”, it is obviously a detriment to their mental health. While Natalie and Samantha survived and are in college now, the scars from feeling alienated, encountering discrimination, and emotional abuse in public school remain etched onto their psyche.

Unfortunately, a number of African American, American Indian, and Latino youth may not be able to survive the emotional assault; they will either lash out in aggressive or self-destructive ways or leave school completely. The National Center for Education Statistics reports African American and Latino youth between ages16 through 24 have the highest high school dropout rates.

How do we counter race-related trauma and build resilient youth and schools?

In order to decrease race-related trauma among children of color we will need to target the context in which they spend much of their time—schools. We offer a three-pronged approach to how schools can provide a context for intervention.

  1. Adopt Stress Reduction Practices in Schools

    Stevenson (2008) wrote, “…student-teacher relationships are stressful interactions that have the potential of being perceived as threats or challenges by both parties and that this primary appraisal is followed by a secondary appraisal of controllability or self-efficacy” (p. 356).

    Stevenson (2008) wrote, “…student-teacher relationships are stressful interactions that have the potential of being perceived as threats or challenges by both parties and that this primary appraisal is followed by a secondary appraisal of controllability or self-efficacy” (p. 356).

Adopting stress reduction practices, such as mindfulness, in schools to use with youth, teachers, and other school personnel can reduce tension and mitigate conflict. The work of the Holistic Life Foundation shows that mindfulness reduces stress-related behaviors by using meditative practices to improve attention, reduce stress, and increase self-regulation among adults and children. If we identify ways to adopt stress reduction practices in school, we can potentially reduce racial tensions.

  1. Support Advocacy through Youth –Adult Partnerships

Advocacy through youth-adult partnerships centers on improving community and civic engagement among youth. These partnerships can link youth to social support and provide opportunities for them to address racism and participate in decision-making in school. These types of activities can improve school engagement and build a number of skills for youth, such as social competence and self-efficacy (Zeldin, Christens, & Powers, 2013). In addition, training teachers and other supportive adults to model mindfulness in youth-adult partnerships only boosts the ways that youth manage stress and build resilience.

  1. Facilitate Truth and Reconciliation Groups

Truth and Reconciliation Commissions (TRCs) are a restorative justice process used in global human rights violations. Modeling TRCs into smaller groups in schools can potentially bring together multiple stakeholders such as youth, teachers, parents and other community members to address racial disparities in schools and develop solutions. These groups may not only foster partnerships between youth and adults, they may also increase opportunities for parents and other community members to inform school practices. Androff (2012) indicates TRCs can target problems states fail to address because they rely on individuals impacted by the issue and foster collective action—such as redesigning school discipline practices.

We can reduce race-related trauma in public schools, but it will require us to:

  1. Understand how it occurs and how often in order to
  2. Identify ways to reduce stress, racial anxiety, and support the capacity of minority youth, their parents/caregivers, and communities to drive decision-making in schools.

These are lofty goals but they can be accomplished if we work together to support youth of color and show them that they matter. Now, we turn the challenge over to you. What are some ways you intend to reduce race-related trauma for minority youth in your school or community?

Cross-posted with permission from the APA’s Public Interest Blog PsychologyBenefits

 References

Androff, D. K. (2010). Truth and reconciliation commissions (TRCs): An international human rights intervention and its connection to social work. British Journal of Social Work, 40, 1960–1977. doi: 10.1093./bjsw//bcp139

Chavous, T. M., Rivas-Drake, D., Smalls, C., Griffin, T., & Cogburn, C. (2008). Gender matters, too: The influences of school racial discrimination and racial identity on academic engagement outcomes among African American adolescents. Developmental Psychology, 44, 637–654. doi:10.1037/0012-1649.44.3.637

Cogburn, C. D., Chavous, T. M., & Griffin, T. M. (2011). School-based racial and gender discrimination among African American adolescents: Exploring gender variation in frequency and implications for adjustment. Race Social Problems, 3, 25–37.

Hyman, I. A., & Perone, D. C. (1998). The other side of school violence: Educator policies and practices that may contribute to student misbehavior. Journal of School Psychology, 36(1), 7-27.

Lanier, C., & Huff-Corzine, L. (2006). American Indian homicide A county-level analysis utilizing social disorganization theory. Homicide Studies, 10, 181–194.

National Center for Education Statistics. (2015). The condition of education 2015 (NCES 2015-144),Retrieved from the U. S. Department of Education website: https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=16

Stevenson, H. C. (2008). Fluttering around the racial tension of trust: Proximal approaches to suspended Black student-teacher relationships. School Psychology Review, 37, 354–359.

Zeldin, S., Christens, B. D., & Powers, J. L. (2013). The psychology and practice of youth-adult partnership: Bridging generations for youth development and community change. American Journal of Community Psychology, 51, 385–397. doi: 10.1007/s10464-012-9558-y

Any comments or feedback can be sent to dawnxhen@gmail.com.

[1] All names listed are pseudonyms assigned to protect the identity of the students.

Graduate and Postgraduate Students, Graduate and Postgraduate Teachers, Pre K - 12 Teachers, Undergraduate Teachers July 11, 2016

Is Research-Based Instruction a Reality in Education? The Example of Learning Styles and Dual Coding

Over the last quarter century, as public education has made a hard shift towards “accountability” and increased standardized testing, the trend towards the use of research-based instruction in classrooms has become nearly as ubiquitous as the Scantron sheets students are asked to bubble in multiple times each semester.

Undergraduate Students, Undergraduate Teachers May 31, 2016

You A Scapegoat? Answers to Who’s Accountable For Learning

We all like having someone to blame. Whether it is the state of the economy, security, sanctions (or lack thereof), it just seems to feel better if we can point a finger. Learning is no exception. Educators point fingers all the time. Americans bemoan the state of public education. States experiment with different ways to resurrect dropping exam scores and poor testing results. College faculty often blame high school teachers who often blame middle and elementary school teachers. Teachers also blame parents for not fostering good study habits or disciplining their kids, and blame students for not studying enough.

Many students badmouth teachers (take a look at Ratemyprofessor.com for some eye opening commentary). An educated citizenry is critical to a vibrant, successful, forward-looking, and successful America. If we are loosing the battle to other countries or if our students are not learning things will not end well. Who can we blame when students don’t learn? There are many scapegoats, but do we have any real basis to confidently identify the true scapegoats when learning is not taking place?

Yes.

And no, there’s no app for that but just good old fashioned scholarship on teaching and learning. Like any empirical study, perhaps we cannot be 100% certain, but there is empirical evidence to maintain a high degree of confidence. A wealth of research on learning nicely highlights what some of the main factors influencing learning are. Ken Bain wrote about What the Best College Students Do and Beth Schwartz and I summarized large swathes of the empirical literature in Optimizing Teaching and Learning and Evidence Based Teaching for Higher Education. These tomes make for good reading if you have a few days to spare but some of the answers are quick to share.

Of course, there are the usual suspects: Effort, ability, motivation, goals, study habits, mind set. Each of these are the no-brainers of learning. Students need to work, care about the outcomes, have goals, good study habits, and believe that intelligence is flexible and not fixed. Most teachers can generate this list from their experience. Some of the predictors of learning are somewhat surprising: Social support and self efficacy (the belief that you can successfully accomplish something). Teachers may not think of the value of support and rapport enough but it is clearly a key component of successful learning. In a recent Gallup-Purdue study of successful college students, 63% of the over 30,000 students sampled cited having at least one professor who made them excited about learning as being critical to their success. Feeling teachers cared and having a mentor who encouraged them to pursue goals and dreams were also important.

Fine, fine, you may say. I promised some definitive finger pointing so let me get to it. Beyond oodles of research studies in psychology and education that shine the spotlight on different parts of the learning puzzle, there is one granddaddy of them all. John Hattie, then at the University of Auckland, New Zealand (now at the University of Melbourne, Australia) gave us some big answers. Hattie took a close look at over 65,000 studies of student achievement. Studies involved close to a quarter of a billion students. Yes, 250,000,000. He then used a statistical methodology known as meta-analysis where he essentially combined the findings to create a measure of the relative significance of different educational factors. This analysis yielded a metric called an effect size which allows us to get a strong sense of just how important a certain factor is. It lets us allocate blame or praise.

Hattie’s work provides a treasure trove of findings for students, teachers, administrators, politicians, and the public in general. In a recent publication in Scholarship of Teaching and Learning in Psychology (Hattie, 2015), Hattie provides a table listing the top 195 factors influeScreen Shot 2016-03-18 at 12.25.52 PMncing education. Most important factors to blame (with low or negative effect sizes) include depression, television watching, and home corporal punishment. Some important factors to praise (those with highest effect sizes) include teacher estimates of student achievement, teacher efficacy, study skills, and classroom discussion. Class size? Not a big deal. Single-sex schools, gender, or type of testing? Next to no effect.

Wait. It gets better.

Hattie took all the data and calculated the main categories of factors that influenced learning. Carving nature at its joints, he provides a stark vivid picture of just who is to blame. The lion’s share belongs to the student. Evidence from millions of students suggests that close to half, 50%, of what predicts learning is what the student brings to the classroom!! Before teachers enjoy too many sighs of relief and get fingers ready to point, note that the next largest chunk of influence was teacher qualities. What teachers do, their training, their characteristics, accounts for 20-25% of the variance in learning (see Figure below). The rest can be attributed to peers (5%), home factors (5%), and a number of other smaller contributors.

Fifty percent. Half of learning depends on what students do. As someone who has taught for 20 years or so I can tell you that far too often students look to us faculty as keepers of the keys to learning. I show my students a pie chart with each of the percentages described above but without the labels. I ask them to predict who the data says is responsible for 50% of their learning. Without fail, they think it is teachers. If I only had a better teacher they say. They quickly assume that poor teaching is the lion’s share of the issue. We educators become the scapegoats.

I also know that some teachers put the onus completely on the student. When I ask attendees at teaching workshops to guess how much of variance in learning is due to students, they often guess as high as 80-90%. If students only worked harder they say. Hattie’s data is a stark reminder that BOTH students and teachers have to work together to cultivate learning. I work tirelessly to provide the best instruction for my students and I like to inspire my students to similarly be accountable and participate in their own learning too. Yes, there are many skills both students and teachers can adopt, but the message is clear.

There is no one scapegoat for poor learning. Let’s stop pointing fingers and provide students with the skills to learn and teachers the tools to teach well.

Re posted with permission from the author. Read more here.