Identity Safe Classrooms, Grades K-5

Places to Belong and Learn

Dorothy M. Steele, Becki Cohn-Vargas

• Publisher: Corwin
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781483306599
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Multicultural Education

Every child valued and empowered to learn—this book shows you how! This book focuses on strategies that positively affect student learning and attachment to schooling, in spite of social inequalities. Research shows that students in identity safe classrooms learn better and like school more than peers in other classrooms. In identity safe classrooms, teachers strive to ensure that students:

• Feel their identity is an asset rather than a barrier to success
• Experience diversity as a resource for learning
• Form positive relationships with fellow students and their teacher
• Learn in an environment with a challenging curriculum and high expectations
• Develop a sense of belonging and empathy for others as they learn to use pro-social skills and practice cooperation

Part I

Getting Started

Welcome to Readers

1

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The purpose of this book is to engage teachers in thinking about how their everyday practice influences students from diverse backgrounds from a new perspective. Though teachers think about teaching and learning continually, their voices are rarely heard. Instead, the relentless debate in the news media about how to improve American schools and reduce the achievement gap focuses on a blame game that points to teachers or parents or students as the cause of what is too often described as the “failure” of American schools. Teachers are vilified as lazy, incompetent, and ruled by union decisions. Parents are blamed for raising unruly, disrespectful children. And students’ capabilities and motivations are questioned. Recommendations for improving schools include ridding districts of teachers unions, replacing regular public schools with charter schools, and using punitive discipline methods such as zero tolerance policies as punishment for unwanted student behavior. Much of the discourse is about student performance rather than student learning. As a nation, we have nearly lost the plot of the purpose of education. The idea that a good education could teach students to become productive contributors to our democratic society is rarely mentioned.

Few of the discussions about school improvement focus on what is going on in the classroom and how that affects the students’ daily experience. And, not many of the media reports and talk show discussions on “the gap” describe how students are treated or how to build their skills, challenge their curiosity, or help them learn to work together and independently on meaningful, useful learning activities. This is particularly true when the focus is on schools that students of color and poor students attend. For these students, the recommendations focus on strict discipline, remedial curriculum aimed at teaching basic skills, and almost military-like requirements for compliant behavior. These remedies are celebrated as successful models for other schools to follow. The media discourse is focused on solutions such as these for low-performing schools attended by other people’s children. Few promote the idea that we should treat all students as we would want our own children treated. And, it is rarely recommended that we treat teachers with the respect and authority needed for them to build intellectually and socially dynamic, caring classrooms focused on learning. Yet, mutual respect among all members of the classroom community provides the foundation for creating what we call an identity safe classroom.

Our premise is that efforts to create identity safe classrooms are essential to protect the lives of all students, especially those who suffer from two conditions: (1) a sense of alienation from school after repeated failure and (2) the epidemic of punitive punishments including suspensions and expulsions. These punitive discipline practices are not colorblind. A national study of nearly 7,000 districts in 2009–2010 found that 17.7% of African American students and 7.5% of Latino students were suspended from school during the school year. These high numbers are in contrast to those for Asian students (2.1%) and white students (5.6%). This disparity in suspension rates is called disproportionality and leads to the “school-to-prison pipeline” that describes the troubling trajectory of young students of color when their abilities at school are negatively stereotyped (Losen & Gillespie, 2012). It is important to make clear that the majority of these decisions to exclude students from school are based on discretionary disciplinary actions in response to behaviors such as acting disrespectful or defiant; they are not based on more serious offenses such as fighting or possessing drugs (Drakeford, 2006).

In response to the unintended consequences of these disciplinary practices, some schools have to begun to examine them and seek solutions other than exclusion from school, which has been found to have a negative affect on students instead of helping them improve their behavior. As teachers look at data on achievement and behavior, they see the links between academic failure, alienation from school, and disruptive behavior and can seek solutions that address all aspects of a child’s school experience. Our work on identity safety focuses on all aspects of life in the classroom and helps teachers examine their practice from the point of view of each of their students. This process helps them respond more successfully to the needs of each member of their class.

INTRODUCTION OF IDENTITY SAFE TEACHING PRACTICES

Our work is based on the premise that classrooms are socially dynamic places where, for each student, who you are and what matters to you is inextricably linked to your sense of belonging and ability to fully engage in learning and participating.

Our research identified an array of effective practices that are linked to improved student outcomes on standardized tests and on students’ attitudes about school, including their overall liking for school, educational aspirations, and sense of belonging in school.

In our yearlong research on 84 diverse elementary classrooms, we have documented ways that teachers can create inclusive, intellectually exciting, and socially supportive classrooms that promote learning and social development among all students. This research, funded by the Russell Sage Foundation and called the Stanford Integrated Schools Project (SISP), identified certain characteristics of the classroom that had a positive effect on student learning and attachment to schooling, in spite of real and powerful social inequalities in these schools. These identified classroom practices and relationships foster a sense of identity safety in students. Students have a sense of identity safety when they believe 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.

Identity safe practices provide a potential antidote to a sense of stereotype threat that has been shown to lower academic achievement. Stereotype threat theory suggests that people from groups whose abilities in school are negatively stereotyped may worry that they could “be judged or treated in terms of the stereotype or that [they] might do something that would inadvertently confirm it” (Steele, C. M., Spencer, & Aronson, 2002, p. 389). The research on stereotype threat and its link to depressed performance in important domains of human learning and performance provides the theoretical foundation of the present work on identity safety for students.

To answer our question, “What can teachers do in diverse classrooms to promote more successful learning and attachment to school,” SISP researchers observed 84 classrooms three times during this yearlong study to identify classroom practices that teachers can incorporate to promote learning among those students whose ability and behavior at school is commonly questioned. The researchers observed everything in the classrooms to see what teachers can do to create a classroom environment that serves as an antidote to the threat of being stereotyped as a poor student. As we will show, this antidote, identity safe teaching practices, benefits everyone in the classroom. All students make progress when teachers focus on positive classroom relationships, challenging learning opportunities, and cooperation instead of competition, to build on all students’ knowledge, curiosity, and energy.

Identity safe teaching is not colorblind. Instead, it uses student diversity as a resource for learning. Identity safe classrooms are free from the negative relationships, cues, and teaching practices (e.g., tracking, punitive discipline, remedial curriculum) that implicitly or explicitly link students’ identities (e.g., race, gender, class) to academic performance. Identity safe teaching practices begin with the consideration of how every aspect of classroom life is being experienced by each of the students in the class. We discovered that with careful attention to providing challenging instruction and by facilitating positive social dynamics in the classroom, students of all backgrounds come to feel accepted, included, and expected to be successful. They can begin to feel identity safe!

RESEARCH BASIS OF IDENTITY SAFETY

The goal of racially integrating schools, the aim of the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, was expected to fix the problem of unequal schooling for minority students. But now, as our schools become ever more segregated once again, we realize that access to equal schooling is just the start of the endeavor to provide America’s students of color with adequate schooling that promotes success in school and later adult life. Once students have access to the same classrooms, the complicated work begins—how to make classrooms a place of inclusion and high-level learning for all students.

As mentioned earlier, the work on identity safety emerged out of the research on stereotype threat. Our question was, if stereotype threat depresses performance, is there anything that teachers can do to create a less threatening environment to free students to learn? Based on earlier research and theorizing (Davies, Spencer, & Steele, C. M., 2005; Markus, Steele, C. M., & Steele, D. M., 2000; Steele, C. M., & Aronson, 1995; Steele, C. M., Spencer, & Aronson, 2002), we began with the assumption that particular practices (e.g., ability tracking, colorblind approaches to curriculum materials and tasks, rigid teaching strategies) in integrated classrooms may, inadvertently, reinforce widely held negative stereotypes linking ethnicity to academic achievement and leading to reduced achievement for students of color. Our SISP study was designed to test whether other practices (e.g., a focus on cooperative, helpful student relationships, expressed and scaffolded high expectations for all students, challenging curriculum) would cultivate a sense of identity safety in students (a sense of freedom from stereotypes linking social identity to academic performance) and would improve the academic achievement of many minority students.

We know from the experimental work on stereotype threat among college students that performance can be improved by explicitly removing stereotype threat from the situation (Cohen, Steele, C. M., & Ross, 1999; Davies, Spencer, & Steele, C. M., 2005; Steele, C. M., & Aronson, 1995). This work shows that there are various ways of reducing these forms of identity threat: promoting cross-group friendships, fostering high expectations for success, providing success-affirming role models, eliciting and valuing diverse perspectives and ideas, and providing an array of diverse representations linking people from diverse groups with valued classroom membership and academic achievement. While some teachers are using several of these practices, we recognized that sustaining them in the classroom day in and day out over the school year would be crucial to diminish the effects of stereotype threat. We hypothesized that when some constellation of these practices is intentionally incorporated in a classroom setting, all students, and particularly students of color, will be more successful than they would be in less identity safe classrooms.

Our work on identity safe teaching practices was an effort to translate the findings of the research on college students into elementary classrooms. There is ethnographic data indicating that young students are aware when some students but not others are disproportionately being sent to the principal’s office, when some students but not others are in the high reading group, when some parents but not others are invited to help with a field trip, and so forth (Ambady, Shih, Kim, & Pitinsky, 2001; Lewis, 2004). We believe that it is practices such as these that contribute to students’ learning about negative stereotypes.

By contrast, we found in our SISP research that a set of factors, taken together, can mitigate the identity threat that prevails in many integrated classrooms. These practices we call identity safe teaching practices can create a social and intellectual environment of inclusion and validation that can be experienced even by young children.

These four domains that constitute identity safe teaching practices are the following:

1. Child-Centered Teaching characterized by Classroom Autonomy, Listening for Students’ Voices, Teaching for Understanding, and a Focus on Cooperation
2. Cultivating Diversity as a Resource, characterized by Diversity as a Resource for Teaching, Challenging Curriculum, and High Expectations and Academic Rigor
3. Classroom Relationships characterized by Teacher Warmth, Teacher Availability to Support Learning, and Positive Student Relationships
4. Caring Environments characterized by Emotional and Physical Comfort, which is promoted by Teacher Skill and Attention to Prosocial Development

These four domains reflect the foundational assumption of identity safety that learning is a social process. Learning occurs in every social, intellectual, and procedural transaction between the teacher and students and among the students. Therefore, it is important to foster positive, caring relationships with the other students and the teacher in the classroom. Because relationships matter, who you are and what you know and can do matters. While a teacher may have the idea that being colorblind and ignoring differences shows equal acceptance of all, even young students are very aware of their differences. Instead, in identity safe environments, student differences are recognized and validated. Consideration is given to every aspect of the classroom, to all the subtle and overt messages that recognize that diverse ideas, perspectives, and materials can actually enhance learning.

WHAT’S WRONG WITH BEING COLORBLIND?

Part of what makes it difficult for teachers to fully appreciate group differences in lived experience and their role in academic achievement is the well-intended cultural injunction not to see group differences. Since the civil rights era, the social norm has been to remedy the negative effects of historic group prejudice by not seeing group differences. The goal, then, has been to be colorblind. It is linked to our idea of fairness and the strongly held belief that, in America, if you work hard you can achieve anything. This belief is based on the notion that people are equal, so that race and ethnicity should not affect opportunities in life such as education, housing, and employment. Yet, in reality, people are not colorblind and, from a young age, children in this country are exposed to the powerful influence of race. And such efforts not to see differences can often magnify the impact of differences (Markus, Steele, C. M., & Steele, D. M., 2000).

It is important to note here that the theory of stereotype threat is not based on the assumption that teachers are personally or explicitly prejudiced. Quite the contrary, we believe that the goal of most teachers is to be fair by being colorblind. However, this well-meaning goal to ignore differences inadvertently creates an environment that can lead to stereotype threat among students. By not paying particular attention to who each student is and by failing to address each student’s particular experiences and interests, teachers unintentionally convey that what these students know and can do, and how they feel, does not matter. Without cues in the environment that reflect the liv...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• About the Authors
• Part I. Getting Started
• Part II. Child-Centered Teaching
• Part III. Cultivating Diversity as a Resource
• Part IV. Classroom Relationships
• Epilogue
• Index