What are we, as educators, doing to help students, especially students of color, become believers in themselves as achievers?
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What are we, as educators, doing to help students, especially students of color, become believers in themselves as achievers? Avoiding the negative Pygmalion behaviors which we describe in the Expectations chapter will be a good start, but what’s next? A steady stream of authors and researchers are telling us that new curricula and new, tougher standards are not enough.
“First, without a doubt, the indispensable characteristic of successful teachers in low-income-area schools is a positive attitude. It is not enough for a teacher to use the right words. The critical question is, what implicit and explicit mes- sages are students getting from the teacher about their ability to learn?” (Frick, 1987, p. 20). No wonder Hattie (2009) finds that teacher efficacy has the highest effect size of all the behaviors he reviews. The more teachers can press for and attribute success to ability and effort as students go through school (rather than luck or easy work), the more success we will have with all students. “If you have a C average or below, you should spend three hours studying for this test” means, “That’s what it will take to get an A, and you can do it.” This conviction about student capacity makes it incumbent on teachers to teach students how to exert effective effort; many come to school not knowing how to do so. That adds a new dimension to the job of teaching.
Maybe, each school needs a person to shepherd that new job, a person in charge of “exceeding expectations,” someone who shakes us up and goes around pe- riodically reminding us to re-examine what we are expecting and demanding of students in the way of performance. Perhaps, that will be one effect of this chapter on you. In the end, the hope and the promise of this area of performance is that it will elicit better performance from students and give them more equal and fair school experiences.
10. Belief: Racism in our society and a dearth of cultural proficiency in our classrooms exert a downward force on the achievement of students of color that must be met with active countermeasures. To achieve our espoused goal of educating all children to a high level, we need to become culturally proficient and anti-racist.
Due to the importance of this belief in The Skillful Teacher Framework, we ex- plore it in a separate chapter, Chapter 4, “Cultural Proficiency and Anti-Racism.”
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