How to Reach the Hard to Teach

Excellent Instruction for Those Who Need It Most

Jana Echevarría, Nancy Frey, Douglas Fisher

• Publisher: ASCD
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781416622413
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Teaching Methods

For every teacher it's different, but you know who they are for you—the students who are "hard to teach." Maybe they're reading far below grade level. Maybe they're English learners. Maybe they have diagnosed learning disabilities or behavioral issues. Maybe they're underachieving for reasons that are unknown. They have been overlooked or underserved or frustrated, and they're not learning as they should. Until now. Until you.

How to Reach the Hard to Teach presents a thoughtful and practical approach to achieving breakthrough success with linguistically and culturally diverse students who struggle in school. Combining elements of the SIOP® Model and the FIT Teaching® approach, authors Jana Echevarría, Nancy Frey, and Douglas Fisher take stock of what we know about excellent instruction and distill it into five guiding principles:

• Set high expectations.
• Provide access to the core curriculum.
• Use assessment to inform instruction.
• Attend to language development—both English and academic.
• Create a supportive classroom climate.

You'll learn specific practices associated with each principle and see how real-life teachers are employing these practices in their classrooms so that all students have the opportunity to learn and receive optimal support for that learning.

Every teacher has had the experience of seeing a "hard to teach" student in a new light and realizing all he or she might achieve. This book is about shining that light of possibility on the students who challenge us most, interrogating our beliefs, and taking action to ensure they receive the best instruction we have to offer.

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Chapter 1

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Every Child Achieves When There Is an Opportunity to Learn

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Rita Elwardi's high school English students participated in an interdisciplinary unit organized around an essential question: Why do people move? The unit's focus was migration and immigration. It featured several informational texts and a literary one (a novel) and incorporated content related to geography, economics, and climate studies.

On the first day of the unit, after introducing the essential question and the purpose for the day, Ms. Elwardi announced the opening activity—a quick-write that would tap into students' background knowledge and prior experiences. She asked her students to write for 10 minutes about a moment when they had to say good-bye.

Ms. Elwardi's students are a diverse group. Many of them speak a language other than English at home. A majority live in poverty and have a history of struggling in school. Although they attend school in a busy urban center a few miles from a prosperous downtown, in terms of their present lives, the region's economic possibilities might as well be thousands of miles away. Student mobility is high, the result of families moving frequently in search of better lives for their children. Almost every student enrolled in Ms. Elwardi's English language arts classes has attended many schools and lived in many different neighborhoods. Saying good-bye has become a routine part of their young lives.

While the class began the quick-write, Ms. Elwardi walked about the room and spoke privately with students not yet putting pencil to paper. With each, she followed a process designed to get them started, asking prompting questions (see Figure 1.1) and taking notes as they replied. "That's just what I'm looking for, Horacio," she assured one boy. "Write what you just told me, and continue writing down your thoughts, one after another, from that point on until the memory is complete."

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FIGURE 1.1 Guiding Questions That Elicit Details

• Where and when did this take place?
• Who was with you, and why?
• Why did you have to leave this place or say good-bye to this person?
• What did you say, and what did the others say to you?
• What were you thinking before, during, and after this moment?
• How do you feel now that you are looking back at the moment?

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Circling the room again, Ms. Elwardi scanned the responses of students who had stopped writing and asked them clarifying questions to prompt further exploration. Here is one student's response, with the irregularities in grammar and punctuation preserved:

On November 15, 1996, it was winter and too cold. At that time I was so sad because I was coming to America. I think I couldn't see anymore my country, my cousins and relatives, my country's church, also my mother. One word was hard to say for my mother. It was Good-bye. Because I never left my mother for a long time or even a few days before I came to United States. My feeling was bad like a sad for two weeks before I came to USA. I was counting each day and I thought how do I say good-bye for my mother, cousins, relatives and my country? I was looking all around and I was crying.

At last the day, November 15, 1996, came. But at that time I was not sad and I was well. I thought, "Now I can to say good-bye for my mother," and I told to myself. Each minute and hour were decreasing. I was ready and I went to my mother and I hugged. I was looking at the ground and I couldn't say good-bye. Both of us were crying. I remember that time. I never forget I couldn't say good-bye.

With the quick-writes completed, the class went on to a collaborative oral language-building activity called the Three Step Interview (Kagan, 1994), which encourages active listening. Grouped into fours (Students A, B, C, D) and partnered within their group (A with B, C with D), the students read their quick-writes aloud, telling their own stories. Then they retold the stories their partners had shared. Afterward, the students revised their quick-writes to improve clarity, to make them more vivid, and to be sure the writing captured the memory's key information and feelings.

Next up was a writing activity called Found Poetry (Dunning & Stafford, 1992). Ms. Elwardi used her own quick-write as a model, posting it on a document camera. She explained the procedure to the class: "As I read my quick-write, I'll underline the important words and phrases that convey sensory details and express the tone of my writing. Then I'll take those words and phrases and restructure them into an open-verse poem."

As Ms. Elwardi walked through the classroom, giving individual assistance and encouragement, her students "found the poetry" in the quick-writes they'd written and then revised. Here is the found poem in the quick-write we shared earlier:

Winter
too cold, so sad,
coming to America.
one word was hard to say—
Good-bye.
How do I say it
to my mother,
cousins, relatives,
and my country?
I was counting,
the last day came.
I was counting
each hour, each minute
decreasing.
Looking at the ground,
crying,
I hugged my mother.
I remember that time,
I couldn't say
Good-bye.

There are several reasons we wanted to tell this story. The first is an obvious one: Rita Elwardi is an amazing teacher, one of the finest we have ever known. Her professional practice embodies every one of the principles we explore in this book. She sets high expectations of success, provides access to the core curriculum, monitors her students' progress and provides necessary supports, attends to language development, and creates a supportive classroom climate. In the slice of classroom life we showed, Ms. Elwardi used a series of writing exercises to introduce her students to a novel they were about to read. In the unit's culminating project, they went on to answer the unit's essential question—Why do people move?—in writing, using evidence from several texts, including the novel. Her objective was for students to respond in ways that honored their personal experiences but also looked beyond the personal to analyze the perspectives presented in the various texts. For Ms. Elwardi, inviting students to write about their experience was a means of providing them access to the core curriculum.

The second reason we told this story has to do with the student writer, whom we'll call Renata. She arrived in the United States at age 11, having been transported by human smugglers who had charged her mother an exorbitant amount of money to do so. Renata's mother was desperate to protect her youngest daughter from the crime that had spread through their rural village, a side effect of a thriving illegal drug trade. In the United States, Renata was cared for by an older sister; after a few months, the sister's new boyfriend insisted that Renata move out of the house and into a moving box in the backyard, and that is what she did.

When Renata joined Ms. Elwardi's class, she was a largely silent girl who often disappeared into the background. But Ms. Elwardi saw a quick mind. Over the course of the year, Ms. Elwardi focused on helping Renata learn about herself, the world, and its possibilities. Through the advocacy of her teacher and the help of many others, Renata moved to a safe home, transferred to honors courses, and graduated from high school. Because she had the good fortune to live in a state where undocumented people are able to attend the university, Renata graduated from college and went on to earn an advanced degree in social work. Working through the legal system, she was able to obtain U.S. citizenship. Today Renata works for a nonprofit that specializes in advocating for young Latinas.

Of course we would never say that Renata's success is due entirely to one lesson that one teacher taught. But Renata has told us that on that day, Ms. Elwardi sparked in her a level of self-awareness that she hadn't experienced before. In turn, after reading Renata's quick-write and the poetry it contained, Ms. Elwardi looked at Renata in a different way. All teachers have had this experience—that moment when we see children in a new light and realize all they might achieve. This book is about shining that light on those who are too often overlooked. It's about taking action to change the lives of the students typically considered the hardest to reach and, therefore, the hardest to teach.

Reaching the Hardest to Teach

The "hardest-to-teach" children who sit in our classrooms can make themselves known in obvious ways, chiefly by failing to make expected progress on academic measures. Some of these students have formal paperwork (e.g., an Individualized Education Program [IEP] or a 504 plan) that identifies their specialized learning needs and articulates a plan for them to gain access to the core curriculum; others do not. Some of these students are growing up in English-speaking households; many others are not.

This is where our look at the students who are traditionally thought of as the hardest to teach begins: with students who have disabilities and with students who are learning English. Until recent times, both were customarily served in separate classrooms or facilities, clustered with similarly labeled children. This approach was thought to be necessary in order to provide these students with access to the core curriculum, which is a foundational principle in public education. Because the needs of these students weren't widely understood, it was thought that only a relatively small portion of the teaching force, armed with specialized training, could teach them.

However, as society's perspectives have shifted, so have teacher education and placement practices. Both social justice issues and a growing body of evidence about best practices have converged. While there is still much to be improved, special education literature now emphasizes the general educator's content knowledge, collaboration skills, and provision of access to the core curriculum as vital factors for student success (Villa, Thousand, & Nevin, 2013). These perspectives run parallel to current best practices for helping English learners access the core curriculum. We are not saying that learning a new language is a disability; it's a gift. However, like students with identified disabilities, English learners need skilled teachers who know how to provide them access to the general curriculum.

Today, children identified as English learners are found in classrooms all over the United States, not just in regions historically associated with migration. Nancy, who has spent her teaching career in Florida and California (two places with significant English learner populations), once found herself eating lunch at a conference held in a small city of 40,000 less than one hour's drive from the Canadian border. She was joined by two local English as a second language (ESL) specialists who supported nearly 100 children at 4 area elementary schools. Collectively, these students spoke 38 different languages and had widely varied educational histories. Some were the children of university professors or oil and gas exploration executives, while others had interrupted schooling experiences because of war and violence in their countries of origin.

According to these ESL specialists, they operated in a system with outdated models of support for English learners that shortchanged children and marginalized teachers. As itinerant educators, they spent just a few hours a week with their students, mostly providing pullout supports such as phonics and vocabulary instruction, or in some cases, content teaching. It simply wasn't enough time. "I can't keep doing this," one said. "What I'm doing isn't working for my kids, their teachers, or me." When asked to elaborate, they cited having no time to work with classroom teachers on aligning instruction. "The [classroom] teachers would like to know how to support these kids better, but they say they don't have the training," said one. "Over time the English learners in their classes become ‘my kids' instead of theirs. They hoped that the ESL specialist could address all of the needs, but it really will take us all." As we discuss specifically in Chapter 5, all teachers must be language teachers, given that English learners are present in nearly every school in the United States and given the increased language demands that today's academic standards place on all students.

Who else falls into the "hardest-to-teach" population? We also include the students who fly under the radar, undetected until an astute teacher spots them. We are talking about students like Renata, whose genius has been muted by difficult circumstances in addition to a new language. We're talking about the boy who makes jokes all the time—not to "get attention" but to distract you from noticing he doesn't understand the task. The girl who shrinks in her seat when you glance her way, not out of shyness but because she is hoping you won't call on her for an answer she can't supply. The child who repeatedly brings you small gifts from home because her dad is hoping you'll regard his daughter kindly when she struggles to follow directions. The category includes all the students who do not have an identified disability and who are not learning English but, for a variety of reasons we may or may not grasp, underachieve. Perhaps they were slow to learn how to read. Perhaps chronic absenteeism in the primary grades, defined as 10 days or more in a school year, negatively affected their reading proficiency, grit, and perseverance (Ginsburg, Jordan, & Chang, 2014). Whatever the cause, these students have been unable to find themselves academically. Over time, they begin to engage in destructive self-talk that moves from "I don't get this" to "I'm stupid," and from "This is stupid" to "I don't care."

What all children who underperform need, whether they have formal paperwork or not, is a clear path forward—an on-ramp to the learning highway. Constructing that ramp requires intentionality. In other words, our struggling students cannot be overlooked, and they cannot be an afterthought. It is not sufficient to design instruction for most, and then retrofit it for the few who are on the learning fringes. Nor is it enough to hope that geography and good luck bring the students who most need help into the classrooms of teachers who are equipped to help them. All of us need to be those teachers, and that requires us to take explicit action.

The Way Forward: The Five Essential Practices of Excellent Instruction

There is ample evidence that specific practices improve the outcomes for students who do not have a history of academic success. The simple fact that students who fail in one school will achieve in another provides additional reason to hope that a different approach can be the difference (e.g., Ross, McDonald, Alberg, & McSparrin-Gallagher, 2007).

Our collective research, professional experiences in effective schools, and own teaching careers suggest that increasing the likelihood of every student's success is a matter of adhering to five principles of excellent instruction. Doing so is absolutely essential if we hope to bring out the hidden genius in our underachieving students.

1. Provide access to the core curriculum. Students who are learning English, struggling, or otherwise falling short of their potential don't need watered-down, "dumbed-down," curriculum. They don't need isolated skills practice. A 6th grader who is taught 3rd grade standards will likely be performing as a strong 4th grader in 7th grade. What these students need are teachers who know how to remove or otherwise circumvent barriers to the core curriculum, and know how to support students' development and accelerate their growth. This requires differentiated instruction and scaffolded learning. Without access to quality curriculum, students will stagnate, falling further and further behind; with access, they have the chance to explore complex ideas, think critically, and apply their learning creatively. Access is foundational, but access alone isn't enough.
2. Establish a climate that supports students as individuals and learners. Every student enters the classroom with his or her background knowledge, lived experiences, values, beliefs, traditions, and ideas. These understandings factor into the learning experience, and they must be honored as scaffolds that will support new knowledge and understanding. A classroom learning environment that feels safe enough to encourage risk taking is especially critical for students with a history of academic struggle. For them, trying might very well mean failing (at first), and they must believe that their efforts won't be mocked or belittled, and that if they keep trying (and accept feedback), they will eventually succeed. It's the experience of learning that builds students' identity as learners. Students who find school difficult must have teachers who are both culturally sensitive and culturally proficient—willing to look beyond themselves and their own experiences to create a learning community that honors individuals and celebrates differences.
3. Set high expectations for success. Study after study has demonstrated that teacher belief in students' capacity to achieve has a significant impact on actual student achievement. Students rise to the expectations their teachers set. All students must understand what they are expected to learn and why they should learn it. They need high expectations for academic language, critical thinking, and engagement. It's essential that struggling students have teachers who acknowledge and support the aspirations they have for themselves. They need learning experiences that open their eyes to the vast array of possibilities that lie before them and present pathways to achieve short- and long-term goals. And, critically, there must be responsive systems in place that teachers can readily activate when students fall short of high expectations.
4. Provide language instruction. Humans learn through language. When we interact with others, through speaking, listening, reading, writing, and viewing, we acquire new insights, skills, and experiences. Language should permeate the classroom, and students who struggle in school should receive explicit instruction in language. Some need specific, dedicated time for English language instruction, and all need access to the academic language that will open the doors to classroom learning and facilitate their membership in the...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Table of Contents
• Chapter 1. Every Child Achieves When There Is an Opportunity to Learn
• Chapter 2. The Expectation of Success
• Chapter 3. Access to the Core Curriculum
• Chapter 4. Assessment to Inform Instruction
• Chapter 5. Language Instruction
• Chapter 6. A Supportive Climate and Culture
• Conclusion
• References
• Study Guide
• About The Authors
• Related ASCD Resources
• Copyright