Identity, Community and Achievement
Pre-Reading and Reference Resources
Linda Varley University of Manchester
Summer 2012
Copyright © 2012 by Linda Varley and Christiana Caswell at the University of Manchester
This publication, which includes resources adapted from Teach For America Diversity, Community &
Achievement, may not be reproduced or transmitted without prior written permission from Linda Varley and
Teach For America
Identity, Community & Achievement
Table of Contents
ICA Session 1
Appendix A: Santoro, N. (2009): Teaching in culturally diverse contexts: what knowledge about ‘self’ and ‘others’
do teachers need? Journal of Education for Teaching: International research and pedagogy, 35:1, (Extract) 3641
Appendix B: McIntosh, P. White privilege: Unpacking the invisible knapsack. Peace and Freedom [July/August
1989]: 10 -12
Appendix C: Multicultural Education
ICA Session 2
Appendix D: Thompson, P. (2002) Schooling the Rustbelt Kids Stoke-on-Trent: Trentham Books (Chapter on
Vicki and Thanh)
ICA Session 3
Appendix E: Notes on Identity Development in Adolescence
ICA Session 4
Appendix F: Disability Does Not Equal Handicap from Smith, D. (2004) Introduction to Special Education:
th
teaching in an age of opportunity 5 Edition Boston USA: Pearson
Appendix G: Swinson, J. (2008), RESEARCH SECTION: The self-esteem of pupils in schools for pupils with
social, emotional and behavioural difficulties: myth and reality. British Journal of Special Education, 35: 165–172.
ICA Session 5
Appendix H Fischman, Wendy , DiBara, Jennifer A. and Gardner, Howard(2006) 'Creating good education
against the odds', Cambridge Journal of Education, 36: 3, 383 — 398
Appendix I: Effecting Change with Professional Respect
Appendix A:
Santoro, N. (2009): Teaching in culturally diverse contexts: what knowledge about ‘self’ and
‘others’ do teachers need? Journal of Education for Teaching: International research and
pedagogy, 35:1, (Extract) 36-41
Knowing the ‘ethnic other’ and the ‘ethnic self’
Classroom practice marks the coming together of complex and interrelated sets of professional teacher
knowledges. Knowing what and how to teach culturally diverse students is dependant upon teachers
understanding their students’ learning needs and recognising how and when those needs are different from
and/or similar to the needs of students from the dominant cultural majority. Delpit (1995), speaking
about teaching in multicultural contexts, claims it is necessary ‘to really see, to really know the students we must
teach’ (183). Therefore, in order really to know students of ethnic difference, teachers need to understand the
nature of their students’ ‘ethnic identities’, that is, what their cultural practices, values and beliefs are and how
these shape them as learners and members of ethnic communities.
The findings of the study reported here suggest that the pre-service teachers had limited knowledge about their
students’ cultural values, practices and traditions. Kylie, who attributed her lack of knowledge about other
cultures to having grown up in an isolated rural and culturally homogenous community reflects upon how she
began to develop knowledge about her students during her teaching experience. She says:
I was very interested in learning about their different cultures so she [the supervising teacher] just talked and talked
and talked on through our lunch hour, and that made me feel a lot better because I walked into class feeling as if I
knew them a lot better. Like I didn’t know that the Vietnamese girls’ parents were so strict and there are arranged
marriages and all that… They’re not allowed to go out to parties, not allowed to go out with boys, they’re very much
set in their culture. That’s what the girls do, they stay at home and get married.
Here, Vietnamese culture, as understood by Kylie’s supervising teacher and now Kylie, is characterised by
practices that control, hinder and restrict girls. Such a construction is clearly problematic. It is at best, a
generalisation that attributes some aspects of Vietnamese culture to all Vietnamese–Australian girls. At worst, it
is a racist portrayal of Vietnamese culture as oppressive. Kylie has put her trust in her supervising teacher and
taken this advice on board as ‘the truth’. While this is not surprising, given that Kylie is a novice teacher, it is also
troubling that she does not begin to critique the advice but seems to take up readily such a deficit discourse. She
goes onto say:
It [this information] helped me to understand that’s why they’re so quiet, that’s why they don’t say anything, that kind
of thing, it helped me to understand that… Like, when I went up to the girls [to ask them questions], one of them
would say what I’d just basically said and then the rest would just agree and nothing else would be said.
Similarly, on the basis of advice given to her by other teachers at the school, Kylie attributes the rowdy and
disruptive behaviour of her male students to their being Muslim. She says:
…speaking to a couple of other teachers they did tell me that some of the Turkish boys see the females if they
haven’t got the head set over them as easy, that they’re sluts, that kind of thing. That’s just from the way they’ve
been brought up… If a new female teacher comes in, that teacher has really got to stand up for herself and tell them
that she’s in charge and that they are to respect her.
Kylie’s response to the boys, as the teacher suggested, was to assert her authority, remind them about the
school rules concerning behaviour and the need to respect teachers. In reference to how she dealt with the
behaviour of one particular student, she says:
I went into the class and I said, ‘Right you’ve got one chance’. I gave him one chance. ‘Right, move!’… He wasn’t
used to me doing that. He thought he could get away with it and then in the end I sent him out of the room and then
he knew I was for real.
These stereotypical constructions of Vietnamese girls as quiet and Muslim boys as disrespectful and disruptive
are troubling for a number of reasons. First, such constructions suggest that culture (and gender) is singular,
fixed, generalisable and shapes learners in predictable, consistent and often, negative ways. Students’
responses to schooling are regarded as predetermined; all students from a particular ethnic group will behave in
the same way and will conform to similar cultural expectations.
Second, it constructs the students, their cultures and ‘the way they’ve been brought up’ as the problem and
places the blame on the students and their families. There are however, a number of explanations for the
students’ disruptive behaviour or reticence to participate in class, including inappropriate or culturally irrelevant
curriculum, poor teacher–student relationships and so on. By constructing students as ‘the problem’, there is a
risk that teachers may not see the need to interrogate their own practices or the discourses of schooling that
work to marginalise some students. The solution lies with the students themselves, as the teachers simply need
to find ways to ‘manage’ them.
Third, Kylie’s naming of the students as ‘Vietnamese’ or ‘Turkish’ rather than ‘Vietnamese–Australian’ or
‘Turkish–Australian’, denies the complexities of hybrid and multifaceted identities. Individuals can identify with a
number of ethnic and cultural groups to inhabit an ‘in between space’ (Bhabha 1994, 38), or to develop what
Anthias (2001, 620) refers to as a ‘transnational positionality’. Positionality, that is, the intersection of one’s
social position and one’s social positioning, can be constituted across national boundaries and national
belongings. What emerges is a newly forged identity rather than an identity that
is an amalgam of the distinctive characteristics of a number of cultures. Furthermore, in naming the students as
‘Vietnamese’ or ‘Turkish’, even though they are Australian-born, Kylie sets up a binary between ‘real’
Australians, that is, those of Anglo-Celtic heritage and ‘the rest’. According to Nicolacopoulos and
Vassilacopoulos (2004, 32), ‘In Australia, whiteness is historically and socially
constructed through processes that position… designated migrant groups as what we might call ‘‘perpetual
foreigners within the Australian state’’, quite apart from their legal status or self-understandings’
.
In direct contrast to how some of the pre-service teachers explicitly and uncritically attribute their students’
behaviours to their ethnicity, others were reluctant to acknowledge that their students’ differences actually did
shape their responses to schooling and that these were factors to consider in classroom practice. When
reflecting on how her students’ ethnicities shaped them as learners, Hannah suggested:
Kids are kids… Everyone has problems and if you are going to start looking at some people, it’s really important that
everyone receives the same level of attention, I think… It’s very important to not make a big deal of cultural
difference.
Hannah’s response highlights a tension between acknowledging and explicitly naming difference and seeing
students as ‘the same’. Causey, Thomas and Armento (2000) refer to the tendency to see everyone as the same
as ‘naı¨ve egalitarianism’ (34). It does not acknowledge that students are different, that differences do matter
and some people are treated unequally and have unequal access to resources because they are different.
Students do not have the same problems: to give them ‘the same level of attention’ can ignore how schooling
practices often privilege those students of the dominant cultural group while marginalising others. Perhaps
Hannah took up this discourse of egalitarianism because she was concerned about the risk of stereotyping
students and being misunderstood as racist. Speaking about a North-American context, Pollock (2004) claims
that educators need to name ‘race’ and to ‘lead and participate in race conversations’ (121) ‘in order to
purposely challenge an existing simple race system, in which the distribution of social and tangible resources
remains perennially unequal’ (43). Practices that attempt to homogenise students, to blur the boundaries
between ethnic minority groups and the ‘mainstream’, can serve to silence debates about the inequalities that do
exist because of racial and ethnic difference. How does one talk about inequalities, and address them, without
naming the differences on which inequalities are based?
Not surprisingly, given their lack of knowledge about their students’ cultures and identities, the pre-service
teachers struggled to engage their students in learning. In particular, they found it difficult to design lessons that
were culturally relevant and accessible. When developing units of work they were unable to see beyond their
own localised and taken-for-granted understandings of the world to what was culturally
relevant for their students. For example, Susan was surprised to find that her 14-year-old Turkish–Australian
students were disruptive during a social education class about the Crusades and the lives of the crusaders. She
had spent long periods of time designing and sourcing material for a lesson about the crusaders’ shields that she
was certain would engage her students. However, she had naïvely assumed that the presentation of the
Crusades from a ‘western’ perspective was an appropriate lesson. When I talked to her about why this might be
the case, it became clear that she had little understanding of the socio-political and cultural discourses that may
have shaped the students’ understandings of, and engagement with this topic.
Similarly, Sally also chose to teach a topic to her 15-year-old students that required them to draw heavily on
cultural knowledge they did not have, while ignoring the cultural knowledge they may well have had. She used
an issue that had recently been in the Australian newspapers as the basis to teach argumentative writing skills to
an English class consisting primarily of second language learners from a range of backgrounds including
Vietnamese, Arabic, Serbian and Somali. The issue was that a former Anglican Archbishop and newly appointed
Governor General (the Queen’s representative in Australia), had been forced to resign because of the public
perception that he had, in his former position of Archbishop, mishandled claims against priests accused of child
abuse. Sally reported that this lesson did not go as well as she had hoped: the students struggled to understand
the newspaper text she had given them because they were not familiar with the religious or political terminology
integral to their successful reading of the article. She was surprised to learn that the students, most of whom
were not Protestant, ‘didn’t even know what an Anglican or an Archbishop was!’
In order to develop culturally relevant materials teachers must know what is culturally relevant to their students
and must recognise when existing curriculum fails to build on or acknowledge the cultural knowledge students
bring to their learning. This requires them to have knowledge of their students’ cultural traditions and practices
and understand how they are different from or similar to those of the
‘mainstream’. Teachers need to move beyond their own worldviews in order to develop and understand their
students’ perspectives.
The pre-service teachers’ lack of knowledge about the complexities of ethnicity as it relates to students is clearly
of concern. Similarly, some of the supervising teachers’ advice to the pre-service teachers was often based on
stereotypes. It is not always the case that practising teachers who are working with students of ethnic difference
on a daily basis have acquired, simply through experience, the knowledge needed for teaching in multicultural
contexts. According to McIntyre (1997), some teachers who are members of the dominant cultural and ethnic
mainstream can ‘perform the multicultural tricks while never having to critique [their] positionality…’ (13). It is the
critiquing of their positionality that might enable them to understand how their own ethnicity shapes their
relationships with students, their expectations of them and their classroom practices. Such critiques are essential
if teachers are to move beyond seeing teaching for diversity as something that focuses only on the ‘other’.
The pre-service students had little awareness of their own subject positionings in relation to ethnicity. They
understood ‘ethnic’ as a label for ‘others’ but not themselves. For example, Jody says in response to a question
about how she understands her ethnicity: ‘I’d always assumed that I had none – or one that wasn’t all that
interesting’. Why does Jody assume herself to be ‘ethnic-less’ or at best, with an ethnicity that is so
uninteresting, it barely counts? Her understanding of ‘ethnic’ is in keeping with the way it is popularly used in
Australia as a noun for people of non-British heritage or as an adjective for the cultural practices of the ‘ethnic
other’. The real ‘ethnics’ have ‘ethnic food’, ‘ethnic dress’ and ‘ethnic customs’ and so on, while the real
‘Australians’ in contrast, are without an ethnicity (Tsolidis 2001).
Sally also equates being Australian with being cultureless, or at best, not having a very interesting culture. She
says, recounting an interaction with a student who asked her about her ethnicity:
…when one of the kids asked me if I was Italian, I thought, oh I wish I could say ‘yes’. I just wish I could say ‘yes’…
my family has been here since the First Fleet [first British settlers to Australia in 1788] and it’s not quite as
interesting or, I don’t know… I talked to my family about it a lot, and Dad said to me, ‘But on the other hand, don’t
you think that we’re lucky that because we’re Australian, we can kind of take on parts of other cultures?’ We have
tomato day. We’re not Italian, but my Dad likes to think that he is… We have tomato day and the amount of food
and activities that we do at home are so multicultural… I think it is disappointing that in real life that you are just
Australian.
Sally’s statement about her family having been in Australia since the beginning of white settlement can be read
as an assertion of her status as a ‘real’ Australian. Claims of belonging embedded in time and history are
commonly made by Anglo-Celtic Australians to differentiate ‘real’ Australians from those with a more recent
immigration history. After establishing her belonging, Sally goes on to construct her Australian-ness as bland
and uninteresting in comparison to the cultures of the ‘exotic other’. However, it is because she is ‘just
Australian’ with the privileges that membership of the hegemonic ‘mainstream’ brings, that she and her family
can select what aspects of ‘ethnic’ culture they will allow to shape and enrich their lives. In his work on
multicultural Australia, Hage (1998) says:
In the context of Australian multiculturalism, the point being made is not simply that the discourse of enrichment
places the dominant culture in a more important position than other migrant cultures. More importantly this
discourse also assigns to migrant cultures a different mode of existence to Anglo-Celtic culture. While the dominant
white culture merely and unquestionably exists, migrant cultures exist for the latter. Their value, or the viability of
their preservation as far as White Australians are concerned, lies in their function as enriching cultures. (Hage 1998,
121)
The acceptance, and even ‘envy’, of particular cultures by those of the hegemonic ‘mainstream’ is popularly
believed to be evidence of a successful multicultural Australia where different cultures are valued. However,
while some aspects of some cultures are celebrated in some contexts in Australia, at the same time, the same
ethnic minorities can struggle to gain equal access to resources or to voice opinions contrary to those of the
hegemonic mainstream (Jakubowicz 2002). The acceptance of minority cultures under such circumstances is a
process characterised by a complex process of othering. In other words, they are accepted because they are
‘other’. However, when minority cultures do not enrich the lives of those in the dominant majority, or when their
members are reluctant to assimilate and take up the beliefs and values of the mainstream indiscriminately, they
are often constructed as ‘problems’ rather than as ‘interesting’.
References
Anthias, F. 2001. New hybridities, old concepts: The limits of ‘culture’. Ethnic and Racial Studies 24, no. 4: 619–
41.
Bhabha, H. 1994. The location of culture. London: Routledge.
Causey, V., C. Thomas, and B. Armento. 2000. Cultural diversity is basically a foreign term to me: The
challenges of diversity for pre-service teacher education. Teaching and Teacher Education 16, no. 1: 33–45.
Delpit, L. 1995. Other people’s children: Cultural conflict in the classroom. New York: New Press.
Hage, G. 1998. White nation: Fantasies of white supremacy in a multicultural society. Sydney, Australia: Pluto
Press.
Jakubowicz, A. 2002. White noise: Australia’s struggle with multiculturalism. In Working through whiteness:
International perspectives, ed. C. Levine-Rasky, 107–28. New York: SUNY
McIntyre, A. 1997. Making meaning of whiteness: Exploring racial identity with white teachers. Albany, NY: State
University.
Nicolacopoulos, T., and G. Vassilacopoulos. 2004. Racism, foreigner communities and ontopathology of white
Australian subjectivity. In Whitening race, ed. A. Moreton-Robinson, 32–47. Canberra, Australia: Aboriginal
Studies Press.
Pollock, M. 2004. Colormute. Race talk dilemmas in an American school. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press
Tsolidis, G. 2001. Schooling, diaspora and gender: Being feminist and being different. Buckingham, UK: Open
University Press.
Appendix B:
McIntosh, P. White privilege: Unpacking the invisible knapsack. Peace and Freedom
[July/August 1989]: 10 -12
The systematic advantages of being white in a multicultural society are often referred to as White privilege. The
phrase, ‘unpacking privilege’ has been popularised by Peggy McIntosh’s work (McIntosh, P. White privilege
:Unpacking the invisible knapsack. Peace and Freedom [July/August 1989]: 10 -12) which has become a model
for the kind of self-evaluation and awareness that is necessary for one to begin to recognise the many ways that
social dynamics of power influence our lives. She identified a long list of societal privileges that she received
simply because she was white; she did not ask for them and hadn’t always noticed that she was receiving them.
It is important to remember that her audit took place in the United States 20 years ago, but as you read the
following extract from her Journal it may be useful to consider if it rings true for you in the UK in 2010.
Through work to bring materials from women's studies into the rest of the curriculum, I have often noticed
men's unwillingness to grant that they are over privileged, even though they may grant that women are
disadvantaged. They may say they will work to improve women's status, in the society, the university, or
the curriculum, but they can't or won't support the idea of lessening men's. Denials that amount to taboos
surround the subject of advantages that men gain from women's disadvantages. These denials protect
male privilege from being fully acknowledged, lessened, or ended.
Thinking through unacknowledged male privilege as a phenomenon, I realized that, since hierarchies in
our society are interlocking, there is most likely a phenomenon of White privilege that was similarly
denied and protected. As a White person, I realized I had been taught about racism as something that
puts others at a disadvantage, but had been taught not to see one of its corollary aspects, White
privilege, which puts me at an advantage.
I think Whites are carefully taught not to recognize White privilege, as males are taught not to recognize
male privilege. So I have begun in an untutored way to ask what it is like to have White privilege. I have
come to see White privilege as an invisible package of unearned assets that I can count on cashing in
each day, but about which I was "meant" to remain oblivious. White privilege is like an invisible
weightless knapsack of special provisions, maps, passports, codebooks, visas, clothes, tools, and blank
cheques.
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.
14.
16.
17.
I can if I wish arrange to be in the company of people of my race most of the time.
If I should need to move, I can be pretty sure of renting or purchasing housing in an area which I can
afford and in which I would want to live.
I can be pretty sure that my neighbours in such a location will be neutral or pleasant to me.
I can go shopping alone most of the time, pretty well assured that I will not be followed or harassed.
I can turn on the television or open to the front page of the paper and see people of my race widely
represented.
When I am told about our national heritage or about "civilization," I am shown that people of my colour
made it what it is.
I can be sure that my children will be given curricular materials that testify to the existence of their race.
If I want to, I can be pretty sure of finding a publisher for this piece on White privilege.
I can go into a music shop and count on finding the music of my race represented, into a supermarket
and find the staple foods which fit with my cultural traditions, into a hairdresser's shop and find someone
who can cut my hair.
Whether I use cheques, credit cards, or cash, I can count on my skin colour not to work against the
appearance of financial reliability.
I can arrange to protect my children most of the time from people who might not like them.
I can swear, or dress in second hand clothes, or not answer letters, without having people attribute these
choices to the bad morals, the poverty, or the illiteracy of my race.
I can speak in public to a powerful male group without putting my race on trial.
I can do well in a challenging situation without being called a credit to my race. 15. I am never asked to
speak for all the people of my racial group.
I can remain oblivious of the language and customs of persons of colour who constitute the world's
majority without feeling in my culture any penalty for such oblivion.
I can criticize our government and talk about how much I fear its policies and behaviour without being
seen as a cultural outsider.
18.
19.
20.
21.
22.
23.
24.
25.
26.
I can be pretty sure that if I ask to talk to "the person in charge," I will be facing a person of my race.
If a traffic cop pulls me over or if the IRS audits my tax return, I can be sure I haven't been singled out
because of my race.
I can easily buy posters, postcards, picture books, greeting cards, dolls, toys, and children's magazines
featuring people of my race.
I can go home from most meetings of organizations I belong to feeling somewhat tied in, rather than
isolated, out-of-place, out numbered, unheard, held at a distance, or feared.
I can take a job with an affirmative action employer without having co-workers on the job suspect that I
got it because of race.
I can choose public accommodation without fearing that people of my race cannot get in or will be
mistreated in the places I have chosen.
I can be sure that if I need legal or medical help, my race will not work against me.
If my day, week, or year is going badly, I need not ask of each negative episode or situation whether it
has racial overtones.
I can choose blemish cover or bandages in flesh colour and have them more or less match my skin.
I repeatedly forgot each of the realizations on this list until I wrote it down. For me White privilege has
turned out to be an elusive and fugitive subject. The pressure to avoid it is great, for in facing it I must
give up the myth of meritocracy. If these things are true, this is not such a free country; one's life is not
what one makes it; many doors open for certain people through no virtues of their own...
Thus, as McIntosh's essay makes clear, "unpacking privilege" refers to our attempts to pull back the veil of
complex dynamics of difference and sameness that impact our lives-especially those dynamics that make us
more appreciated, safe, influential, or comfortable in a given situation than we might be if we presented some
alternative identity. Several variations of McIntosh's original piece have been written to help people unpack their
privilege related to their gender, religion, socioeconomic status, etc.
The point of this process is not to make anyone feel guilty or ashamed – or reject it because it doesn’t relate to
them – but to identify power dynamics that shape our beliefs and perspectives so that we can be more aware of
them in the context of our classrooms.
You may wish to read "Unpacking The Invisible Knapsack II: Sexual Orientation " written by students at Earlham
College about heterosexual privilege in society:
http://www.cs.earlham.edu/~hyrax/personal/files/student_res/straightprivilege.htm
Appendix C
So What Does "Multicultural Education" Mean In Your Classroom?
Each of us could probably quickly brainstorm a list of ways to incorporate multicultural methods into our
classroom practices - we could collect and use articles from newspapers and magazines that deal with one or
more groups, make maps showing origins of various groups, maintain a multicultural calendar, learn songs in
different languages, and incorporate articles and texts from diverse authors. But how does a teacher
systemically create a classroom that values diversity and that benefits at all levels from the incorporation of
multicultural education?
The fact is that translating the various definitions and motivations for multicultural education into actual
practices and behaviours in your classroom takes planning and work. Each teacher must develop his
or her own approach to these issues based on the unique circumstances of his or her background,
classroom, school, and community. However, there are five general methods for implementing
multicultural education that teachers should consider:
(1) Recognise and appreciate the particular cultures and backgrounds represented in your
classroom through you and your students.
(2) Make recognition and appreciation of diverse background, cultures, and perspectives
(including those not represented by you or your students) a constant theme of your
classroom.
(3) Consider the potential insights of research on the "cultural learning style" of your students.
(4) Teach and model norms of positive, inclusive interactions among members of the class.
(5) Evaluate materials for their inclusiveness and cultural relevance.
METHOD No.1
Recognise and appreciate the particular cultures and backgrounds represented in your classroom by you and
your students. One of the demands on you as the leader of your classroom is to enter an ongoing process
of learning about the backgrounds and cultures of the students you are teaching. As you do, you will
inevitably encounter in your planning various means of highlighting or celebrating those backgrounds and
cultures represented in your classroom. These means might be as simple as building a classroom library that
includes books involving the cultures, backgrounds and identities represented by your students, or c onstantly
collecting and periodically sharing news articles about the impacts of medical and biological research on the
communities where your students live.
While a teacher should be careful to avoid a superficial "heroes and holidays" approach to multicu ltural
education, there is considerable benefit to a well-developed strategy for consistently highlighting the
contributions of individuals with whom students identify. Consider, for example, the following discussion
of the benefits and means of highlighting African-American contributors for African-American students
(presented for Teach for America Participants):
Chronicling the accomplishments of African-Americans in the classroom provides
encouragement and motivation for students (Diller 1999; Chandler 1995). Scientists such
as the laser physicists and astronaut Ronald McNair, the chemist Percy Lavon Julian, and
the physician and astronaut Mae Jemison demonstrate to students that Blacks can excel
in science, have done so in the past, and are doing so in t he present. There are
examples of Black doctors including Charles Drew, who discovered the importance of the
use of blood plasma in transfusions, Daniel Hale Williams, who performed the first
successful heart operation; and David Satcher, a genetics researcher who [served] as
the Surgeon General for the United States. The lives of these phenomenal African Americans can empower Black youth by demonstrating that they too have the option to
choose a career in medicine. Inventors such as Lewis Latimer, who desi gned the carbon
filament for light bulbs, and Jan Matzeliger, who designed a shoe-lacing machine, have
added to the quality of U.S. life, but few students know this. These role models are
important to all students, especially to those who live in economica lly-depressed
neighborhoods where academics compete with hopelessness, gang activity, and
overemphasis on athletic and entertainment careers.
There are a range of websites to support the equivalent accomplishments of Black British
heroes:
http://www.100greatblackbritons.com/bios/robert_wedderman.html
http://www.blackhistorywalks.co.uk/films-2008/september-08/44-400-years-of-black-british-heroes.html
Of course, any time consideration of adding materials and methods to the curriculum involves tension
of how to synthesise the traditional "canon" of materials (whatever that may include) and the more
diverse collection of materials, texts, and perspectives. At a fundamental level, a teacher must find a
balance between the urge to build on and validate the students' background and culture, and preparing
students to live in a world where their background and culture may not be the dominant one. As
multicultural education scholar Marilyn Cochran-Smith explains, "children need to know something
about the 'canon' of history and literature and how and when to utilise the conventions of standard
English, but they also need to see their own experiences reflected in novels and history books ... How
to do both is, I would venture, a life-long theme for many teachers and teacher educators."
METHOD No.2:
Recognize and appreciate diverse backgrounds, cultures, and perspectives (including those not represented by
the individuals in your classroom). The most effective classrooms not only highlight those backgrounds and
cultures that are represented in the classroom, but also (to some degree) recognise and appreciate other
backgrounds and cultures that may be new and unfamiliar to the students. Many cultures and backgrounds are
brought to students from outside the classroom through strategic choices of books, materials, and lessons. The
process of exploring and engaging different backgrounds and cultures is in and of itself a valued learning
experience that can offer many synergies to accelerate students' learning.
The best way to understand your students' backgrounds and cultures is to take as many opportunities as
possible to interact with the community, and to approach those opportunities with humility, respect, and an
eagerness to learn. Get to know the people in and around your school. caretakers, office staff, local librarians,
administrators, clerics, businesspeople. Form relationshlps. Ask questions about the neighbourhood, its history,
their experiences. Understanding the way your students understand their community will allow you to make more
effective connections between academic concepts and students’ lives outside school.
METHOD No.3:
Consider and benefit from the potential insights of research on the "cultural learning style" of your students
METHOD No.4:
Teach and model norms of positive, inclusive interactions among members of the class
Establishing a Respectful Tone
o
Model this behaviour by maintaining a tone of respect with your students, regardless of what you
might see them doing.
o
Speak in your own natural voice at all times - do not yell or use a condescending tone.
o
Err on the side of being "overly" sensitive to your students' feelings. Beware of using sarcasm,
even in a joking manner.
Establishing a Bond With and Among Your Students
o
Attend or lead student activities to demonstrate an interest in their lives while gai ning greater
knowledge of your students' strengths, personalities, and abilities.
o
Use a suggestion box or other way to collect student feedback in your classroom; this will
help make your students feel respected and valued.
o
Utilise "getting-to-know-you" and team-building activities to facilitate your students working
together and learning with and about each other.
o
Set aside time for daily or weekly meetings to create a safe, respectful place for
communication.
Creating a Community that Values All Students
o
Acknowledge and understand your personal biases
o
Ensure you are involving all students by looking for patterns of preference in your classroom
o
Capitalize on any opportunity to incorporate messages of tolerance into the curriculum.
o
Respond to insensitive comments - do not allow them to go unnoticed, and recognise the
"teachable" moments that they create.
Helping Students Resolve Conflict
o
Teach students how to use "I" statements to explain their actions and feelings to each
other. Possibly have them record their thoughts in writing before a discussion about a
conflict.
o
Teach and model "active listening" strategies for your students so that they all feel they
are being heard and understood.
METHOD No.5:
Evaluate materials for their inclusiveness and cultural relevance. The fifth method for infusing principles of
multicultural education into your classroom involves assessing all of the materials you use in your classroom to
ensure that they do not somehow undermine messages of inclusiveness. A number of multicultural scholars
have proposed lists for identifying forms of subtle and blatant bias that teachers should look for in textbooks and
other materials. Consider for example, the following guidelines for assessing the inclusiveness of education
materials, proposed by the Intercultural Development Research Association http://www.idra.org/:
o
Invisibility. Certain groups may be underrepresented in curricular materials. The
significant omission of women and minority groups has become so great as to imply that
these groups are of less value, importance and significance in our society.
o
Stereotyping. By assigning traditional and rigid roles or attributes to a group, instructional
materials may stereotype and limit the abilities and potential of that group. Children who
see themselves portrayed only in stereotypical ways may internalise those stereotypes
and fail to develop their own unique abilities, interests, and full potential.
o
Imbalance and Selectivity. Textbooks can perpetuate bias by presenting only one
interpretation of an issue, situation or group of people. This imbalanced account restricts
the knowledge of students regarding the varied perspectives that may apply to a
particular situation. Through selective presentation of materials, textbooks may distort
reality and ignore complex and differing viewpoints. As a result, students have been
given limited perspectives concerning the contributions, struggles and participation of
certain groups in society.
o
Unreality. Textbooks sometimes present an unrealistic portrayal of history and
contemporary life experience. Controversial topics may be glossed over, and discussions
of discrimination and prejudice may be avoided. This unrealistic coverage denies
children the information they need to recognise, understand and perhaps someday
conquer the problems of inequality in society.
o
Fragmentation and Isolation. By separating issues related to minorities and women from
the main body of the text, instructional materials imply that these issues are less
important than and not a part of the cultural mainstream.
o
Linguistic Bias. Curricular materials can sometimes reflect the discriminatory nature of
language. Imbalance of word order and lack of parallel terms that refer to women and men
are also forms of linguistic bias.
Appendix D
Thompson, P. (2002) Schooling the Rustbelt Kids Stoke-on-Trent: Trentham Books (Chapter on
Vicki and Thanh)
Vicki and Thanh
Statistically speaking, the best advice we can give to a poor child, keen to get ahead through education, is to
choose richer parents (Connell, 1995, p. 6).
Imagine two children about to start school. They are both five years old and are eagerly anticipating their first
day. Imagine that each brings with them to school a virtual schoolbag full of things they have already learned at
home, with their friends, and in and from the world in which they live.
The first child is a boy called Thanh. He lives in an extended family where he has been chatted and read to in
Vietnamese and Chinese since he was very small. He has watched Australian television, visited shopping
centres and worked with his family in its restaurant—doing small tasks like collecting dishes, giving out menus
and change, and washing vegetables. His parents spent much of their married adult lives in separate refugee
camps and were not reunited until they got to Australia. Thanh's father carried a nguyet (a guitar-like instrument)
with him on the long walk from the town where he was born to the camp in Thailand and kept it safe until he
reached his new home in Australia. When he is not too tired he plays it, and Thanh loves to listen to the
traditional songs handed down through the generations. He also loves to hear his older brother and sister talk
about school. His parents' formal education was disrupted by the civil war, but both of them are literate in two
languages and treasure books. They have worked long hours and several jobs to finally open, with the help of
the hui (the community financial system), the restaurant where they now work most days and nights. Thanh
comes to school with three spoken languages in his virtual schoolbag, a love of music, an understanding of the
restaurant trade, a capacity to get on with a wide range of people, knowledge about Vietnam, China, Thailand
and Australia and an understanding that school is important.
The second child is Vicki. Her parents are both university educated and Vicki's mother runs a small catering
business at home, supplying gourmet cakes to cafes. Her father is a teacher at the local high school and is
currently researching his Irish family heritage. She is the oldest child and has one younger brother. Vicki has
been to both childcare and preschool and has already begun to read, much to her parents' delight. Vicki loves to
help her mother and regularly plays on the family computer with the data base of recipes, customers and
accounts. Vicki also has a small dog and her current ambition is to be a vet. She watches a lot of television and
can sing along with all of the advertisements, much to her father's disquiet. She loves being read to at night and
knows that her parents expect her to join in and comment on the connections between the illustrations and the
story. She knows that when she is read to, she is expected to sit still and listen. Vicki's school-bag consists of
spoken and written English, well schooled reading behaviours, knowledge about the white colonial history of
Australia, and understandings about popular culture, animals, business and the computer. Both children's
schoolbags contain roughly equal but different knowledges, narratives and interests.
Thanh is going to a state primary school in a neighbourhood known to demographers as one of the poorest in
the country. Vicki is going to a state primary school in a leafy, green part of town. Vicki's parents think that they
will send her to a private girls' school before she starts high school. Thanh's parents hear lots of stories about
the local state high schools but think that Thanh will probably go to one not too far away where there is a uniform
and where some friends' children have already graduated to go on to university, a profession, a life of something
other than long days in the restaurant trade. They are determined that Thanh will do his homework and work
hard.
Vicki and Thanh have different life worlds yet their life trajectories are connected—and differentiated—through
the school system.
HOW SCHOOLS MAKE DIFFERENCE(S)
Educational statistics suggest that these two children will probably emerge from their schooling in very different
social places. Thanh and other children from localities classified as ‘low socioeconomic’ have much less chance
of completing their full twelve years of schooling and taking up further education, and much more likelihood of
being underemployed, than Vicki and her peers. Thanh, particularly if he works as hard as his parents want him
to, may be one of the children who goes against the trends, because after all such trends are probabilities, not
life sentences meted out to every individual. And Vicki could find herself living in a ‘low socioeconomic area’ one
day, a casualty of an unhappy marriage cast onto the welfare system. Their actual life trajectories are impossible
to predict. But Thanh is already more fortunate than many others in his neighbourhood, because even if he is not
as successful in schooling as his parents would like, there is a family business and a network of business
contacts who can potentially provide secure work for him.
There have been many explanations offered for the different social and educational outcomes between children
such as Thanh and Vicki— children whose families have modest incomes and live in low-income
neighbourhoods and those who are more comfortable and live in the wealthier parts of town. In the past, many
people believed that working-class children, and children from particular races and cultures, were just less
intelligent, and that somehow ‘smart brains' were distributed according to the thickness of parents’ wallets and
the colour of their skin. Others have argued that the culture of working-class homes and neighbourhoods is
hostile to school success and that working-class parents do not want to help their children do well. Research
shows this to be untrue: the vast majority of parents, regardless of their bank balance, think that school is very
important and try hard to help their children succeed (Connell et al., 1982).
This explanation of deficient homes and parents produced particular kinds of policy solutions. If the ‘problem’
emanated from homes, the policy ‘solution’ was to compensate for children's perceived shortages and
shortcomings. One ‘answer’ to inequity was to educate the parents, perhaps compel them to supervise their
children's homework (this is still a popular policy in the United Kingdom [Vincent, 2000]). If the ‘problem’ was not
caused by families, but by their lack of income, then the policy ‘solution’ was to provide some of the resources
that were not available to low-income families, such as books, visits to art galleries and museums; to provide
additional tuition for particular children, often in literacy; and to provide schools with additional funds to purchase
equipment and materials that were lacking in children's homes or in the neighbourhood.
A few have favoured explanations that highlight the processes of schooling (e. g. Bishop & Glynn, 1999;
Gillbourn & Youdell, 2000). This line of argument suggests that the ‘problem’ was that the different knowledges
and skills that working-class children bring with them to school are not those that are important for school
success. It is not the children who are disadvantaged but rather it is the school that does the disadvantaging.
The policy ‘solution’ arising from this analysis was to change the school. Advocates of this policy approach come
from both the right and the left side of politics. They believe that teachers and schools can be radically changed
to make ‘educational outcomes’ more evenly distributed, by concentrating on changing timetabling, student
groupings, teaching methods, curriculum content and school—parent relationships. Local practices and microinteractions in the classroom are the locus of intervention.
This seesawing between resources that compensate or school processes that must change has been a hallmark
of equity policymaking in many countries. But there are other ways to think about educational difference(s) and
differentiation.
THE MEDIATION OF PRIVILEGE(S)
1
Bourdieu suggests that the curriculum can be thought of as ‘cultural capital’—the knowledges that are valued.
Curriculum and assessment regimes are the means of creating a hierarchy of cultural capital, and cultural capital
acquired through formal processes of education and credentialling becomes ‘symbolic capital’. Possession of the
right symbolic capital can be ‘cashed in’ as a down-payment on further education and jobs. The school
knowledges that are at the top of the cultural capital league table are not only those required for university
entrance but are also the cultural knowledges of those who are socially, economically and politically privileged
and who determine what counts. In other words the rules of the schooling game are geared to perpetuate
particular kinds of knowledges, thus advantaging their holders. In Making the Difference (1982), Bob Connell
and his associates illustrate the congruence between the competitive academic curriculum and the work, life
interests and cultural and social capitals of parents who sent their children to high fee private schools. By
contrast, the different work, life interests and social and cultural capitals of working-class families were more
often at odds with the practices of schools. Rather than a question of deficiency, Connell and his colleagues
argued that educational disadvantage was about difference and power, and coined the term ‘organic
relationship’ to describe the homology between schooling and the already privileged.
Bourdieu sees the (partial) production of privilege and disadvantage through school education as a ‘practice’ or a
‘game’. The children who are most often successful are those who already possess, by virtue of who they are
and where they come from, some of the cultural capital that counts for school success. Through the game of
schooling, they acquire more. They are able to do this because they are ‘at home’ with both the ways in which
schools operate and with the kinds of knowledges, the cultural capital, involved. They are at ease in the place
called school—it is their place.
Because schooling success is both based and realised in material differences manifested as social, cultural and
economic possessions, status and political power, formal education produces a hierarchy of differences, or
‘distinction’ (Bourdieu, 1984). Bourdieu suggests that differences between children become educational
differentiation ‘in the relation between familial strategies and the specific logic of the school institution’ (Bourdieu,
1998, p. 19). He argues that this happens through the ‘practices’ of the schooling ‘game’, when the outcomes of
grouping, assessing, categorising, promoting and ranking favour particular kinds of players. In other words,
schooling is organised to make differences and differentiation. It is geared to produce particular and different
kinds of educated persons.
Bourdieu stresses that schooling is a social institution. The ways that people can behave in the institution of
schooling (Bourdieu would call this a ‘field’ of action) are regulated through a ‘logic of practice’, the sets of
explicit rules and taken-for-granted ways of doing things, procedures for the allocation and distribution of
material, symbolic and cultural resources, and the negotiation and balancing of the competing ‘interests’ of
everyone involved. It is important to note that in Bourdieu's explanations of differentiation, both the distribution of
material resources and the cultural and symbolic capitals produced through the logical practice of schooling are
important. This is an explanation that moves beyond a binary of resources or school change to say that both are
important.
Bourdieu's explanation also acknowledges that, because some players' interests are dominant, changing the
balance of power in the schooling game is not going to be a simple technical matter. Nor will change be
uncontested, since those who benefit from the game at present are positioned to work to maintain their positions
of privilege. Further, he argues that the game is not strictly predictable. Bourdieu does not suggest that there is a
simple reproduction of existing social relations of privilege by the school system, and that every child will come
out of schooling with the cultural and symbolic capitals that ensure they remain in the same social and economic
position as their childhood milieu. Indeed, Bourdieu stresses that schooling is not a determinist process. He
argues that people do have the capacity to act. He says that children, parents and teachers are not particles
subject to mechanical forces, and acting under the constraint of causes; nor are they conscious and knowing
subjects acting with full knowledge of the facts, as champions of rational action theory believe … [they are]
active and knowing agents endowed with a practical sense, that is an acquired system of preferences, of
principles of vision and … schemes of action (Bourdieu, 1998, p. 25).
Bourdieu's explanation emphasises that teachers, principals, system officials and policymakers do not
deliberately and wilfully act unjustly towards particular children. The schooling game positions everyone involved
in it to play in ways that differentiate between children and produce social difference. Adults in the school system
are engaged in what might be called processes of ‘mediation’ of privilege, of being positioned and positioning
students in the game. This positioning occurs through the actions each person takes to regulate the possession
and acquisition of symbolic and cultural capitals. Some children do move ‘upwards’, and some ‘down’ by virtue of
the mediation of cultural and symbolic capitals they acquire (or do not acquire) in school. It is because a large
number of people are involved in these mediating practices, each of whose actions contribute to the final results,
that none of them can be said to be individually responsible for the outcomes in a simple cause and effect
relationship (Bauman, 1993, pp. 124-25).
Bourdieu asserts that it is the combined and institutionally proscribed and discursively regulated actions of all
players that work (that is, use, construct, contest, alter and direct) to (re)produce socially and culturally
differentiated symbolic and cultural capitals. He calls this the ‘destiny effect’ (Bourdieu, 1999a, p. 63). It is
through the destiny effect that the social institution of schooling contributes to the production and reproduction of
the overall patterns of social, economic, political and cultural difference, differentiation and distinction.
Bourdieu also argues that this (re)production of difference is not only not determinist, it is also local, contextual
and historical. It changes over time. As Levinson and Holland (1996, p. 22) put it, ‘Schools provide each
generation with social and symbolic sites where new relations, new representations, and new knowledges can
be formed, sometimes against, sometimes tangential to, sometimes coincidental with, the interests of those
holding power’. Education is not just about the (re)production of the social order but also about its change.
DOING BETTER FOR VICKI AND THANH
Educational differences between Vicki and Thanh become apparent in their first year at school. Vicki is
advantaged in her classroom. She feels comfortable with its rules and modes of operation. She already knows
about book behaviours and is not shy about asking for help, whereas Thanh feels awkward and he is also
embarrassed about his occasionally clumsy English. What he knows about restaurants and music is not
necessary for success in his classroom. Even within the first few weeks Vicki starts to ‘outperform’ Thanh in
almost everything. Thanh has a knack with numbers, his teacher says, which is what she has been told by an
acquaintance in another school she can expect of ‘Asian’ students. There is nobody she can ask about this, and
because she is anxious to help Thanh feel successful rather than out of place, she allows him to spend more
time on numbers than on those classroom activities with which he is struggling.
Vicki's virtual schoolbag contains many things she is able to use in school everyday, whereas Thanh is only
required to open his virtual schoolbag for arithmetic. Thanh's teacher is not unaware of this, but cannot find the
time and space in her busy and crowded classroom to organise alternative learning activities for him—and all of
the other individual students with their particular schoolbags, their unique interests and knowledges. As the
principal brings yet another student to her door saying that her class is not yet ‘full’, she fears that the time she
has to think about what might work better for Thanh is running out.
The probability that Vicki will do well at school and go on to university like her mother and father and that Thanh
will end up in the family business are already being brought into reality through the mediating practices of
schooling. Changing these probabilities is fraught with difficulty. It is neither helpful nor just to think that Thanh's
educational success must come at the cost of Vicki's failure. It is neither helpful nor just to think that Vicki's
success must only be measured in terms of her school credentials, because they will not prepare her for a highly
gendered workforce and possible changes in family life.
Changing educational probabilities does mean that somehow, during their days and weeks at school, both Vicki
and Thanh must be able to use and build on their local ‘funds of knowledge’ (Moll, Tapia & Whitmore, 1993). In
order for this to happen, their teachers' working conditions must be such that they are able to find, use and value
each child's particular configurations of knowledges, narratives and interests. Their teachers must also have a
repertoire of pedagogical practices that will connect children to the knowledges that count through work with the
individual and collective resources that the children bring with them (Dyson, 1997). But even this still leaves Vicki
at an advantage because of the congruence between her schoolbag and the school curriculum, and her ease in
the school setting.
If Vicki is successful at school and goes on to university like both her parents, her social future will be much the
same as that of her parents, peers and others in her general milieu. If Thanh is to be successful, he must
become a person different from the rest of his family, peers and life world. A successful school student is one
who has acquired much of the dominant ‘habitus’, that is, ways of being in the world, as well as the cultural and
symbolic capital derived from their schooling. As Bourdieu (1999b, p. 128) says, ‘At the risk of feeling
themselves out of place, individuals who move into a new space must fulfil the conditions that the space tacitly
requires of its occupants.’
Social mobility means leaving ‘your place’ behind. Success for working-class children comes at a cost for the
individuals concerned and their families. Mark Peel succintly puts it this way:
In an isolated, factory based suburb, hoping your children ‘would be better than you’, or ‘wouldn't make
the same mistakes you did’ must often translate into raising them so they would want to leave. A fundamental part of the educational bargain for working class children, after all, is that they must change,
become something different and better. The overt and covert curricula of the primary and high schools,
even the day to day techniques of classroom teaching … urge working class children to become what
they are not and cannot be without inventing themselves as something very different (Peel, 1995a, p.
149)
So, even if Thanh's teachers are able to eliminate the ‘destiny effect’ at work, Thanh will have some choice(s)
and say in the matter. He may or may not choose the everyday costs associated with becoming different through
school success—being seen as the ‘nerd’, accused of thinking he is ‘too good’ for his friends, suspected of
regarding manual work as menial and beneath him, getting too ‘uppity’, getting ideas beyond his station. These
common phrases, used to describe the children who become socially mobile via schooling success, are telling.
The metaphor they create is of a social, intellectual ladder whose credentialing steps value school knowledges
over local, traditional and practical knowledges. Children’s place on the ladder becomes their ‘identity’,
particularly if they go further then their peers and family.
Somewhere here in the struggle for equity and justice in schooling there is the larger question of changing the
knowledge that counts, of changing the nature of the game, of officially bringing Thanh’s virtual schoolbag in
from the corridor into the main classroom. Without such educational transformation, the game remains the
same. As long as particular cultural capitals are valued in education, those that favour Vicki, then Thanh’s
teachers will have a bigger job to do, and working-class children like Thanh will have to make decisions about
who-and-where-they want to be.
The production and reproduction of educational advantage is complex. It is embedded in everyday microtransactions in the classroom and schoolyard where virtual schoolbags are variously opened, mediated and
ignored. In addition, the processes of differentiation between students are integral to school policies and
practices, and also to the larger system. These complex relationships and operations are not usefully thought of
as a series of interconnected levels of schooling, but as a shifting and changing educational ecosystem. Local
change both requires and generates action right throughout the whole organism/organisation. If policymakers
keep their eyes focussed on change, attempting to ‘steer at a distance’ the work of individual teachers and
schools, then they lose sight of what is happening to Vicki and Thanh each day and each week. They fail to
observe how their decisions contribute to the production of difference(s).
Recognising the difficulties in achieving more equitable changes can be depressing. When teachers have
‘realistic’ expectations of what they can achieve, it can sometimes mean lowered expectations, which translate
into low achievement for students. On the other hand, teachers’ utopian emancipatory ideals can become
heartbreaking self-realisations of futility, or alternative forms of domination and authoritarianism (see Ellsworth,
1989; Gore, 1992). The paradoxes and ambiguities around equity and justice in education are unpalatable to
policymakers, who more than ever want simple and technical ‘solutions’, rather than slow movement against a
murky tide and tugging backwash.
Thanh and Vicki’s schools and teachers cannot sit and wait for shifts in the value accorded to different cultural
capitals. They work in the here and now. But their capacity to effect even small changes is not the same. No
matter how willing the staff and parents, the differences between disadvantaged and privileged schools are
extensive. The educational mandates of sorting and selecting and producing good citizens, workers and parents
operate differently. The schools are differentiated by their localities, which are differently positioned socially,
spatially, economically and politically. Furthermore, they are positioned differentially by a complex educational
ecosystem of supports, allocations, rules and policy frameworks.
As a disadvantaged school, not only does Thanh’s school have a different and bigger job to do than Vicki’s
privileged school, but its capacity to make change is dependent on how well the wider institutional frameworks of
policy and infrastructure support it in this endeavour.
Appendix E
Summary
Archer, L. (2003) Race, Masculinity and Schooling. Maidenhead: OUP
Archer devotes Part II (of three parts) to Identities (‘Race’, religion and masculinity in school; Boys, girls and
gendered identities; Identities out of school: home, leisure and family). Within a UK context, Archer argues that
Muslim masculine identities can be read as organised around two central themes concerning brotherhood and
the authenticity of male voices. Most of the boys in the study claimed to be members of gangs (with the
boundary between friendship ‘group’ and ’gang’ often blurred) which were embodied through speech, clothing
and cultural styles. Among Muslim boys, ‘messing about’ was constructed as a typical feature of masculinity and
they included behaviours such as not paying attention and/or talking to friends; playing up and /or talking back to
teachers and a general culture of laddishness.
A paper presented by Archer and Yamashita in 2002, which explores identities of disenfranchised Year 11
students can be accessed at: http://www.leeds.ac.uk/educol/documents/00002317.htm
Summary
Daniel Tatum, B (1997) Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria? New York: Basic Books
In chapter 4 Daniel Tatum unpicks ‘Identity Development in Adolescence’ and contends that as children enter
adolescence, they begin to explore the question of identity in ways that they haven’t explored before. She
argues that for Black American youth ‘Who am I?’ includes thinking about ethnicity and/or racial origins. In order
to develop positive self-image they have to resist stereotyping, affirm other definitions of themselves in terms of
their identity and offer peer-support as a positive-coping strategy. It is this peer group (the kids in the cafeteria)
who are viewed as role models and support mechanisms. Consequently, certain styles of dress, speech and
music become highly valued & the peer group’s evaluation of what is identity can have an impact on adolescent
behaviour and there is distain for those who do not conform. There is a corollary: sharing identity may be
influenced by other factors such as gender, social class and geographic location.
Extract
Kokkinos, C.M., Panayiotou, G. & Davazoglou, A.M. (2004): Perceived seriousness of pupils' undesirable
behaviours: the student teachers' perspective, Educational Psychology: An International Journal of Experimental
Educational Psychology, 24:1,109-111
The effective management of pupils’ undesirable behaviours in the classroom represents a major challenge for teachers. In
order to better comprehend the difficulties facing them it is important to examine how they perceive pupil behaviours at
different stages of their professional development. The present study examined the effects of teaching experience and pupil
and teacher gender on student teachers’ perceptions of the seriousness of various forms of undesirable behaviours. A
structured questionnaire was completed by 243 student teachers, regarding the perceived seriousness of 25 behaviours in
boys and girls. Results indicated that both teaching experience and pupil gender were important moderators of their
perceptions. For instance, novice student teachers rated overtly antisocial behaviours as serious, whereas their experienced
counterparts gave higher ratings of seriousness to internalising forms of behaviour. A degree of gender stereotyping was also
apparent in the perceptions of mainly novice teachers. The accumulation of teaching experience may help direct teacher
attention to more subtle aspects of pupil behaviour difficulties and may reduce gender stereotyping.
Managing pupil misbehaviour in the classroom represents a challenge for most teachers and can become a
major source of stress at every school level (Travers & Cooper, 1996). Preservice teachers, in particular, may
feel anxious about their ability to manage pupil behaviour (Latz, 1992). In fact, the experience of preservice
teachers as they attempt to cope with the classroom environment has been described as a “reality shock”
(Veenman, 1984). There is evidence, though, that training experiences involving demonstrations of effective
management procedures can help them feel more efficacious (Hagen, Gutkin, Wilson, & Oats, 1998), indicating
perhaps that the anxiety they suffer is more a result of how they perceive and interpret pupil behaviour rather
than an accurate representation of its severity and unmanageability.
Resent research on teacher training has begun to focus on teacher cognitions about students’ discipline
problems, as they are believed to affect decision making in classroom behaviour management (Prawat, 1992;
Westerman, 1991). Among both expert and novice teachers, cognitions are assumed to drive behaviour, which
is also affected by prior knowledge and skills (Berliner, 1987; Clark & Peterson, 1986). In constructivism, both
student and teacher are viewed as interacting organisms that bring into the context of the classroom prior
experiences and knowledge that play a critical role during the instructional process. Hence, understanding
preservice teachers’ constructs of pupil problem behaviours is essential in order to assist them to develop
pedagogical competence in class management. Kagan (1992) has demonstrated that teachers’ cognitions affect
not only their own behaviour, but also their pupils’ actions and academic performance. In turn, undesirable
pupil behaviours are more likely to evoke unfavourable impressions of the pupil, and yield negative attitudes on
the teacher’s part.
Although teacher perceptions of pupils’ undesirable behaviours may be affected by pupil characteristics such as
gender, race, age and economic background (Dulin, 2001; Hindmand, 1999; Neese, 1998), the effect of
accumulated exposure to such behaviours should not be underestimated. It is reasonable to predict, for
instance, that inexperienced teachers may feel more helpless or anxious about managing aggressive or
disruptive classroom behaviour, compared to experienced teachers who might see such behaviours as falling
within the normal limits. Research by Borg (1989, 1998) with Maltese primary and secondary school teachers
found significant effects of teaching experience on secondary school teachers’ perceptions. Experienced
teachers were found to be more tolerant of student undesirable behaviours, a finding that Borg (1998) suggests
may be attributed to the fact that after the difficult initial years, teachers come to realise the relatively mild nature
of problem classroom behaviours and form their attitudes accordingly.
Given the paramount significance of cognitions in guiding teacher behaviour, the degree to which teacher
attitudes reflect common stereotypes, such as gender roles, has been examined. Borg (1998) and Borg and
Falzon (1993) found that gender stereotypes were evident in teacher appraisals of disruptive and withdrawn
behaviour patterns, even though Langfeldt (1992) contested that such stereotypes are in operation only when
teachers are considering single behaviours. Cline and Ertubey (1997) failed to find gender stereotype effects on
teachers’ evaluations of pupils’ school difficulties using contextualised vignettes, but it must be noted that this
finding only pertains to three types of problem behaviours (specific learning disability in literacy, selective mutism
and hearing impairment). The way stereotypes are affected by teaching experience has not been adequately
examined, particularly among preservice teachers. If it is found that inexperienced teachers rely heavily on
stereotypes when judging pupils, training programmes may need to include greater exposure of student teachers
to problem behaviours in order to dissipate stereotype effects on teachers’ classroom behaviour.
In addition to pupil demographic characteristics and gender stereotypes, teacher perceptions of pupils’
undesirable behaviour are affected by biases regarding the behaviours themselves. Teachers tend to notice the
presence of blatantly antisocial, aggressive and overtly challenging behaviours, probably because such
behaviours are salient, annoying and difficult to manage. On the other hand, they pay less attention to symptoms
of internalising problems such as depression, anxiety or social inhibition, probably due to the subtle nature of
such signs and the fact that they do not call for urgent management. Molins (1999) found that teachers are
primarily concerned by the behaviour o children who demonstrate externalising difficulties, particularly boys, and
have to be sensitised with information before they notice internalising behaviours as significant. In the UK, the
Elton Report (DES and Welsh Office, 1989) suggested that teachers generally identify misbehaviour in terms of
outward active manifestations such as verbal interruption, distracting other pupils, inappropriate moving about,
and physical aggression. Passive misbehaviour, such as inattention and daydreaming, is less likely to be noticed
because it is less disruptive.
The present study examines the perceptions of preservice teachers regarding the seriousness of pupils’
undesirable behaviours, and considers the effects of teaching experience and pupil and teacher gender on these
perceptions. It was anticipated that inexperienced student teachers, to a greater extent than their experienced
counterparts, would be guided in their perceptions by gender stereotypes and biases with regard to the
disruptive nature of certain behaviours. It was also predicted that, overall, antisocial and aggressive acts
would be rated as more serious than internalising behaviours. In order to bring to the surface the existence of
stereotypes, the present study analyses the data both at the level of single behaviours and at the level of
behaviour patterns emerging from factor analysis.
To access the whole article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0144341032000146458
Appendix F:
Disability Does Not Equal Handicap from Smith, D. (2004) Introduction to Special Education:
teaching in an age of opportunity 5th Edition Boston USA: Pearson
Appendix G
Swinson, J. (2008), RESEARCH SECTION: The self-esteem of pupils in schools for pupils with
social, emotional and behavioural difficulties: myth and reality. British Journal of Special
Education, 35: 165–172.
The concept of self-esteem has become one of the most frequently written about topics in psychology. Rodewalt
and Tragakis (2003) cite over 25,000 articles, chapters and books referring to the subject. In the field of
education, the building up of pupils’ self-esteem has become one of the important features of the Government’s
SEAL (Social and Emotional Aspects of Learning) initiative (DfES, 2005). The inclusion of self-esteem in the
programme seems to indicate two assumptions: firstly, that children will benefit from having enhanced selfesteem; and secondly that enhanced self-esteem will benefit their learning in school. These assumptions have
been questioned from two perspectives.
From a philosophical perspective, Smith (2002) points out that the enhancement of self-esteem in itself is not a
chief aim of education, nor is the provision of therapeutic approaches. Self-esteem, he argues, is just one of
many outcomes of good school experiences, not an end in itself. Carr (2000) also questions the value of an
over-emphasis in educational policy of concepts such as emotional intelligence and the promotion of qualities
such as confidence and self-esteem. He suggests that prescriptions for promoting emotional intelligence may be
problematic, and not as valuable as they first appear.
Two recent reviews have questioned the evidence of a link between self-esteem, educational achievement and
behaviour. In the UK, Emler’s (2003) major review of the area points out that within education the assumption
that there is a direct link between pupils’ measured self-esteem and their educational performance and
behaviour is not always supported by the evidence. Hence he suggests that to attempt to improve educational
outcomes for children by enhancing self-esteem may not always be a productive strategy. In the USA,
Baumeister, Campbell, Krueger and Vohs (2005) have also questioned the assumed link between self-esteem
and many aspects of social behaviour, including educational performance and behaviour in school.
What is self-esteem?
Self-esteem as a concept first appeared in Principles of Psychology by William James (1890). He defined selfesteem as success divided by pretensions. This basic concept of self-esteem as a comparison between ideal
self and actual self has persisted in most subsequent definitions. Rosenberg (1965) pointed out that there were
problems with this approach, as it would appear that self-esteem was contingent upon success and was
therefore inherently unstable. He defined self-esteem in terms of a stable sense of personal worth or worthiness.
Lawrence (1973), whose work has concentrated on studies of children, suggests that self-esteem is a result of a
series of value judgements made by children as they grow up, in which they attempt to sort out ideas that they
develop about their abilities, attributes and appearance. These they acquire by their perceptions of how they
areaccepted and valued by adults. As a result of interactions with significant adults and peers, children form
impressions of the abilities and personal qualities that are admired and valued. Self-esteem, Lawrence suggests,
is the total evaluation children make of themselves and the degree of respect in which they regard themselves.
Self-esteem is thus conceptualised as global feelings and attitudes that children and adults have about
themselves. This is in contrast to the idea of self-concept (Marsh, 2005), which is essentially multi-dimensional,
and which involves children and adults developing positive and negative concepts about themselves centring on
a number of different dimensions. A person may therefore have a very positive self-concept about themselves as
a sports-person or a language student, but a very negative one about themselves as a mathematician.
Measuring self-esteem
Self-esteem, at least for the purposes of empirical research, has been measured by self-report questionnaires
that yield a quantitative result. These scales are standardised and therefore purport to be able to differentiate
between individuals with high, average or low self-esteem compared with the rest of the population. Rosenberg
(1965) developed a simple ten-question scale. Coopersmith (1967) designed a 50-item inventory for use with
adolescents. Piers (1969) also devised the Piers-Harris scale for use with a similar age group. All of these three
scales or inventories were standardised in the USA and have been widely used in research. Other scales
have been developed with UK populations. Two widely used scales are those of Lawrence (1981) and Maines
and Robinson (1988). While all these scales vary in terms of range and scope, they all have been standardised
and therefore can demonstrate their test–retest reliability.
The question of the validity of using this type of self-report questionnaire in assessing self-esteem is an issue.
The validity of any measure can be ascertained by looking at three types of evidence: the extent to which
different methods of assessing a phenomenon produce similar results; the extent to which results differentiate
between individuals; and whether the results of any procedure are consistent with what is already known about
the phenomenon. Demo (1985) assessed the self-esteem of a group of adolescents using two different scales
(the Rosenberg (1965) and the Coopersmith (1967) scales); the ratings of both their peers and student
observers; and a simple self-report. He found a high level of agreement between the two scales and the two sets
of observations by the peers and the student observers; however, this was not the case between those
measures and the pupils’ own self-reports. There would therefore appear to be agreement between how the
scales assess self-esteem and others’ perceptions of an individual, but not between those measures and an
individual’s self-assessment. This is ironic, as both of the questionnaires used by Demo (1985) use the subject’s
self-report, but there is an essential difference between asking an individual directly about their self-esteem and
inferring it from a number of carefully selected questions contained within a standardised scale. The last criterion
used to assess the validity of any self-esteem measure – that is, whether it is consistent with other findings – is
an important one. As Judge (2001) argues, there has been a consistent correlation between measured low selfesteem and self-efficiency, locus of control and aspects of depression that he suggests are part of the same
underlying quality of poor self-evaluation.
The use of self-report questionnaires, despite their limitations, can demonstrate a reasonable degree of validity
and reliability, and have been able to demonstrate a capacity to differentiate between individuals. They have
been widely used in a variety of settings and have often been able to demonstrate that self-esteem is an
important variable that may influence a number of aspects of human behaviour.
Self-esteem and educational achievement
The relationship between measured self-esteem and educational achievement has been the subject of
considerable research. In an early review, West, Fish and Stevens (1980) cite over 300 studies on the
relationship. More recently, Emler (2003) comments that: ‘No single aspect of self-esteem has attracted quite so
much attention as its relation to education’. Self-esteem is assumed to be an important variable affecting a
pupil’s progress. However, as Branden (1994) points out, much of the relevant research consists of
correlational studies. Therefore it is difficult to know whether it is the case that educational failure is detrimental
to a young person’s self-esteem or whether it is that pupils with poor self-esteem fail to learn, in part because
their self-esteem is already low. A number of studies have attempted to resolve this issue by demonstrating that
by enhancing pupils’ self-esteem pupil attainments have improved. Lawrence (1973) found that by counselling
primary pupils (aged seven to 11 years) he helped to improve their reading skills.A similar approach was recently
adopted by Galbraith and Alexander (2005). Burton (2004) also reported on group sessions in a secondary
school to help improve the reading and spelling of dyslexic students by first building up their self-esteem.
Research over many years, using a variety of scales and measures of self-esteem, has shown a very consistent
pattern: self-esteem and educational attainment are related, but the links are not strong. Lawrence (1981) found
a ‘small but significant’ correlation of 0.325. While in individual studies the correlations can be as high as 0.5
(West et al., 1980), on average the correlations are much lower. A review by Hansford and Hattie (1982) found
average correlations of 0.16 and West et al. (1980), in a review of 300 studies, put the estimate at 0.18.
Longitudinal studies allow the opportunity to examine the influence that low self-esteem may have on
educational outcome. Feinstein (2000) analysed data from the 1970 British Cohort study (BCS70), which
followed the development of a group of over 8,500 subjects born between 5 and 11 April 1970. Measured selfesteem at the age of ten was found only to be ‘trivially’ related to later educational attainments. Recently, Flouri
(2006) was able to conclude that ‘empirical support for a causal relationship between self-esteem and school
achievement is often weak and confounded’.
Self-esteem and behaviour
The relationship between self-esteem and pupils’ behaviour in school is far from simple to determine. Essentially
three different hypotheses have been put forward:
1. Low self-esteem is related to antisocial behaviour; Fergusson and Harwood (2002) suggest that low selfesteem is related to potential offending behaviour, and Donellan, Trezesniewski, Robins, Moffit and
Caspi (2005) found a relationship between low self-esteem and self-reported delinquent behaviour in
teenagers.
2. Self-esteem is not related to behaviour. This hypothesis was put forward some time ago by McCarthy
and Hoge (1984) in a study of over 2,000 adolescents, and more recently by Jang and Thornberry
(1998).
3. High self-esteem is related to antisocial behaviour. Kernis, Grannemann and Barclay (1989) found that
adults with high but unstable self-esteem were more likely to display angry and hostile behaviour than
others. This view is also supported by the work of Baumeister, Smart and Boden (1996) and Baumeister
Campbell, Krueger and Vohs (2003), who found that high self-esteem in adolescents was related to
antisocial behaviour.
The variation in these research findings may be due to a number of factors. Firstly, it is rare for two different
authors to use the same device for measuring self-esteem, and certainly there is wide variation in the methods
used to measure behaviour. Donellan et al. (2005) used a self-report for measuring delinquent behaviour, while
others, for example Jang and Thornberry (1998), used teacher reports. The accuracy of these devices (that is,
the extent to which these reports of behaviour compare with actual behaviour) is rarely examined.
In a major review of self-esteem studies, Emler (2003) formed the view that the design of most published
research meant that it was unable to show whether self-esteem had a causal influence on behaviour patterns.
He pointed out that this could only be shown using longitudinal studies that followed individuals over a period of
time, such as the Feinstein (2000) study or that of McCarthy and Hoge (1984).
However, he was able to conclude that:
1. relatively low self-esteem appeared not to be a risk factor for delinquency, violence towards others
(including child and partner abuse), drug use, alcohol abuse, educational underachievement or racism;
2. relatively low self-esteem did appear to be a risk factor for suicide, suicide attempts, depression,
victimisation by others and teenage pregnancy.
Emler’s work seems to question the assumption that an individual’s low self-esteem is related to many of the
types of behaviour (for example, delinquency, violence towards others and educational underachievement) that
are often referred to in the Statements of pupils who are described as displaying social, emotional and
behavioural difficulties (SEBD). Therefore, it is useful to ascertain the extent to which low self-esteem is
regarded by education authorities as an issue for those pupils whom it recommends should attend specialist
schools for pupils assessed as having such difficulties. It also seems valuable to assess the self-esteem of
pupils attending specialist schools for children and young people deemed to have SEBD to see how their
measured self-esteem compares with that of mainstream pupils of a similar age from other studies.
In order to examine these two issues, two studies were carried out. The first study examined the extent to which
self-esteem was seen by education authorities as an important part of the special needs of pupils to whom they
have given a Statement on grounds of their behaviour. This was done by carrying out a survey of Statements of
pupils attending two independent special schools. In the second study, the self-esteem of 60 pupils attending
two schools for children with SEBD was assessed in order to establish the degree to which measured selfesteem was a significant characteristic of the pupils themselves.
Study 1. A study of the contents of the Statements of Special Educational Needs of pupils at two special
schools for pupils with SEBD
Method
An examination was made of the Statements of Special Educational Needs of all pupils (35) who were on the roll
of two independent special schools for pupils with SEBD. Permission to examine the Statements was given by
the headteacher of both schools and the respective local authority. Each pupil was only identified by roll number.
Each Statement was read in detail. Special attention was paid to section 2 of the document, which includes a
description of the child’s needs, and section 3, which outlines the type of specialist educational resources that
the child would expect to receive. A note was made if in either section any mention was made of self- esteem.
Careful attention was paid to the advices or formal reports that were submitted to the education authorities by
educational psychologists, psychiatrists, clinical psychologists and any other agency, to see if at any time a
standardised assessment procedure had been used by any of these professionals to measure the pupils’ selfesteem, or if any of them had mentioned self-esteem as an issue in any part of their assessment report.
The Statements of 35 students attending two independent special schools were examined in this way. The
Statements came from seven different local authorities in the north-west of England.
Results
The main results are presented in Table 1.
Table 1: The number of Statements that included self-esteem as part of a pupil’s special educational
need and the number of pupils whose self-esteem had been assessed during formal assessment (n = 35)
Number of Statements
Examined
Number of Statements
that included selfesteem
as part of a pupil’s
needs
Number of Statements
that did not include
self-esteem
as part of a pupil’s
needs
Number of Statements
that included an
appendix with an
assessment of the
pupil’s self-esteem
35
34
1
1
The fact that self-esteem is specifically mentioned in Statements would appear to suggest that self-esteem is
seen as an important element of the special needs of pupils assessed as having SEBD by the education
authorities who write the Statements. However, their written statements do not appear to be based on the
assessments carried out on their behalf by educational psychologists and others, at least as far as self-esteem is
concerned. In only one case was evidence found in any of the written advice or other reports indicating either
that any assessment of self-esteem had been carried out or that, in the view of the professional, self-esteem was
an important issue in the young person’s development.
Study 2. An examination of the measured self-esteem of pupils attending special schools for pupils with
SEBD
Introduction
In the first study, it was found that self-esteem appears to be considered an important factor in children’s
functioning and development by those who write the Statements, but in practice self-esteem is rarely assessed
by psychologists and others as part of their report on the child.
In order to ascertain the extent to which self-esteem was an important characteristic of pupils described as
having SEBD, a survey was conducted among pupils in four specialist schools for pupils with SEBD.
Method
The self-esteem of 60 pupils in four different schools for pupils with SEBD was assessed using the B/G Steem
self-esteem scale (Maines & Robinson, 1988). Three of the schools (one residential and two day-schools) were
run by a local authority, and the fourth was a day special school run by an independent company. (This last
school was also included in the survey in Study 1.) The B/G Steem scale was used, as it is relatively easy to
administer and has been standardised on a British school population and trialled in British special schools. The
scale is short, with only 27 questions on the junior/primary version and 35 on the senior/secondary version. The
type of questions asked in the scale are: ‘Are you as clever as other children?’; ‘Do you worry a lot?’; or ‘Do
children choose you to play with them?’The pupil is expected to tick either ‘yes’ or ‘no’. The test–retest
correlations are at a reasonable level: 0.73 for the junior/primary sample (aged seven to 11 years) and 0.84 for
the secondary sample (aged 11 to 16 years). The small number of questions in the scale means that it is quick to
complete, which is a definite advantage since a number of pupils in this survey had attentional problems.
However, it has a disadvantage in that the small number of questions means that it may be limited in terms of its
ability to differentiate between pupils. For instance, a difference of only four points differentiates the categories of
low and high self-esteem for junior/primary boys (aged seven to 11 years) (Maines & Robinson, 1988). However,
the scale has one major advantage over its rivals in that it includes a measure of locus of control. This concept
was developed by Rotter (1954). The concept of locus of control suggests that pupils differ in the extent to which
they believe their own behaviour leads to the outcomes they subsequently experience. Those described as
‘internals’ perceive strong causal relationships. An ‘external’, on the other hand, perceives a weak causal
relationship and therefore regards any outcome of their behaviour to be more influenced by chance or factors
outside their control. Research by Gilmore (1978) and Connelly (1980) suggests that children they class as ‘maladaptive, unmotivated and unco-operative’ are more likely to be ‘externals’. In schools with pupils described as
having SEBD, it might therefore be expected that a higher proportion of ‘externals’ would be found.
The assessment of each student’s self-esteem was made during an individual interview, and was carried out by
either an assistant educational psychologist or an educational psychologist. Permission to interview the pupils
was gained from all the parents of the pupils. The nature and purpose of the survey, and the voluntary nature of
participation in the research, were also explained to each pupil.
The pupils were in either Key Stage 2 (primary, aged seven to 11 years) or Key Stage 3 (secondary, aged 11 to
14 years). Thirty pupils were at Key Stage 2 and 30 were at Key Stage 3. All of the pupils in the appropriate age
group of each school agreed to participate. Although all four of the schools which took part in the survey catered
for boys and girls, very few girls were actually attending any of the schools. The assessments reported in this
survey were only carried out with boys.
Results
The results of the assessments are presented in Table 2.
Table 2: The measured self-esteem of primary and secondary pupils in schools for pupils with SEBD, in
comparison with the Maines and Robinson (1988) sample
Pupils
Mean
Key Stage 2 (primary) 16.13
Key Stage 3 (secondary) 20.00
SD
2.73
4.37
Maines & Robinson (1988) mean
15.79
20.74
The average scores obtained from the sample of pupils in the specialist schools for pupils with SEBD were very
similar indeed to those scores found by Maines and Robinson (1988) in their original standardisation sample
taken from mainstream schools. Thus the results demonstrate that, in terms of average scores, the measured
self-esteem of the pupils in the four schools for pupils with SEBD was similar to the measured self-esteem of
pupils in Maines and Robinson’s ainstream school sample.
The B/G Steem scale also provides a table that allows the scores of self-esteem to be categorised as being very
low, low, normal, high and very high. The scores of the pupils in the sample were therefore examined to see their
distribution. This would therefore demonstrate the extent to which pupils with especially high or low self-esteem
were a feature of this special school sample. These results are presented in Table 3.
Table 3: The number and percentage of pupils categorised as having very low, low, normal, high or very
high self-esteem (n = 60)
Self-esteem
Sample
Very low
10(16%)
Low
8(13%)
Average
23(38%)
High
7(12%)
Very high
12(20%)
The distribution of these scores shows that the self-esteem of the majority of pupils in the sample, 63%, was
within two standard deviations of the mean (low, average or high categories). In terms of normal distribution,
there appeared to be a larger than expected number of pupils, 36%, whose scores fell in the extremes of the
scale; that is, having either very low or very high self-esteem.
In the case of those pupils with markedly low scores, 16%, it was noted that half of the pupils who fell into this
category came from the residential school. Of equal note was the fact that a larger than expected number of
pupils, 20%, scored in the extremely high range on the scale. Those who scored in this range came from all
schools in the sample; five were primary school pupils and seven came from the secondary schools.
The scores of each of the pupils in terms of their measured locus of control were collated. The results are
presented in Table 4.
Table 4: The mean score, standard deviation and scores of pupils on the Locus of Control scale
Pupils
Normal
Mean score, Maines &
Mean score
SD
Internal
External
Primary (N = 30)
Robinson (1988)
4.74
4.49
0.973
8
21
1
Secondary (N = 30)
13
10
5.67
5.67
1.304
7
These results show that, as far as the average score is concerned, the pupils in our sample scored in a very
similar fashion to those in Maines and Robinson’s (1988) mainstream sample: primary mean score = 4.74, and
secondary mean score = 5.67. However, there appears to be a marked difference in the pattern of the scores. In
our primary sample, only one pupil scored in the ‘external’ range of scores, whereas ten pupils in the secondary
sample were found to be in that range. According to the hypothesis put forward by Hartley (1986), one would
expect a disproportionate representation of pupils designated as having SEBD and attending appropriate
specialist schools to be found in the ‘external’ category. While this would appear to be the case for the
secondary school pupils in this study, it was not the case for the primary school pupils.
Discussion
A number of issues are raised by the results of these two studies. The first concerns the role of local authorities
in the writing of formal Statements of special educational need. The Statements reviewed in this study, with only
one exception, included as one of the pupil’s needs the need to enhance the pupil’s self-esteem. This stated
pupil need, with one exception, did not appear to be based on any assessment of the young person’s measured
self-esteem, which would normally be contained in one of the advices from which that Statement had been
generated. The fact that any reference to self-esteem appears in the formal Statement at all would therefore
appear to be based on the writers’ assumptions, rather than evidence submitted by professionals. The fact that,
with one exception, educational psychologists, psychiatrists and others did not attempt to carry out any formal
assessment of self-esteem may indicate that they do not feel such assessment procedures are either useful or
reliable. Alternatively, they may feel that self-esteem is not an important element of the special needs of the
pupils whom they assessed. Certainly, on the evidence of the reports read in this study, self-esteem did not
feature in any other work that they may have carried out with the pupil.
In almost all of the Statements reviewed in the survey in Study 1, as far as the pupil’s self-esteem is concerned,
the final Statement did not appear to be based on a careful reading of the professional advices submitted to
them by specialists, including educational psychologists, psychiatrists and behavioural support workers. Many
Statements appeared to be remarkably similar; identical sentences and paragraphs were common, thereby
creating the impression that they had been constructed from a list of convenient paragraphs from the memory
bank of a word processor rather than a detailed examination of the evidence provided by specialist
professionals. It would appear that the writers of Statements have made the false assumption that all pupils
destined for a school for pupils with SEBD have low self-esteem.
The second series of issues raised by this study concern the self-esteem of the pupils in these schools. Two
findings seemed to emerge. Firstly, in terms of the mean value of measured self-esteem (see Table 2), there
would appear to be little difference between the average measure of self-esteem in the special school sample
and that from the mainstream school sample used by Maines and Robinson (1988) in their original
standardisation of the scale. In respect of their overall self-esteem, therefore, pupils placed in schools for pupils
with SEBD are very similar to their counterparts in mainstream schools.
The second finding of the survey that requires further comment is the proportion of pupils with very low or very
high self-esteem (see Table 3). There was a proportion of pupils, 16% of the sample, with particularly low selfesteem. This is more than would have been predicted in terms of normal distribution, but this larger than
expected number may be explained by our inclusion of pupils from a residential school. A detailed examination
of the pupils’ scores in this group showed that of the ten pupils in that group, five came from the residential
school. Placement in a residential school is rare and often only takes place as a consequence of family
breakdown or where parents find it difficult to provide supportive care. Emler (2003) notes that especially difficult
family relationships and adverse life experiences could result in low self-esteem. This therefore may explain the
presence of a higher than expected number of pupils in this group.
There was a larger than expected number of pupils with especially high self-esteem, 20% of the sample. This
has been noted before among young people with difficult or challenging behaviour (Baumeister et al., 1996,
2003). Baumeister and colleagues seem to suggest that the high self-esteem measure of such pupils was
‘unstable’. It is beyond the scope of this study to ascertain the stability of our measures; nevertheless, for 20% of
the sample to score in this way was much higher than would have been predicted in terms of the normal
distribution of scores.
Overall, the results of this survey seem to suggest that the measured self-esteem of those pupils who present
challenging behaviour in school and have been placed in specialist schools because of their behaviour shows
very little difference from the measured self-esteem of the majority of pupils in mainstream schools. This
conclusion would appear to be similar to that made by Emler (2003), who suggested in his review that low selfesteem did not seem to be associated with the behaviour of children and adolescents. There appears to be a
group of pupils in specialist schools for pupils with SEBD with extremely low or high measured self-esteem. It is
beyond the scope of this study to examine whether these unusual scores might impact on the behaviour of the
pupils concerned.
In terms of the pupils’ locus of control, there seems to be a marked difference between the scores in the primary
and secondary sample. As predicted, the secondary school pupils in our sample included a large number of
pupils whose locus of control appears in the ‘external’ category. Typically, these pupils appeared not always to
acknowledge the consequences of their behaviour, and hence may be reluctant to take responsibility for their
actions. In contrast, of the primary school pupils in the sample, only one appeared in the ‘external’ category,
while the majority appeared to be in the ‘normal’ range. On face value, therefore, locus of control does not
appear to be a factor for the primary school pupils, but may be an important issue for a large proportion of the
older pupils and one that their schools may wish to address.
Implications
The implications of this study are threefold. Firstly, it is clear that many Statements of special educational need
presently being produced by educational authorities, at least as far as self-esteem is concerned, do not
necessarily reflect the needs of the child as described by those who have been asked to provide evidence to the
authority. The writers of Statements seem to assume, in the case of pupils who are destined for placement at
special schools designed to meet the needs of pupils described as having SEBD, that they have special needs
that include a need to enhance self-esteem.
Statements are very important documents in the lives of pupils. They should be based on sound assessment
and should clearly reflect the needs of the pupil. The results of Study 1 in this article suggest that in some
respects, namely, assessment of pupils’ self-esteem, many Statements do not fully reflect the needs of the
pupils. Therefore there is a need for all writers of Statements to revise some aspects of their work so that the
needs of pupils are fully reflected in their final Statement.
Secondly, those whose responsibility it is to provide evidence to education authorities on pupils who present with
challenging behaviour, or emotional or social need, have a responsibility to carry out a comprehensive
assessment of all pupils. If they feel that a pupil’s self-esteem is an important feature of that child, or an
important contributory factor affecting the pupil’s behaviour, then they should fully assess that self-esteem using
either a standardised assessment measure or other procedure. The evidence of this survey of the self-esteem of
pupils in this sector of specialist education showed that over a third (36%) have unusually high or low selfesteem. It is important that these pupils are identified and that evidence is provided to both local authorities and
the schools they eventually attend so that decisions can be made on how best to address this aspect of their
needs.
The last issue affects those who teach in specialist schools. Teachers in specialist schools would be wise to treat
written Statements with caution, at least as far as any advice about building up self-esteem is concerned. Most
specialist schools have a ‘social, emotional and behavioural curriculum’. These are not dissimilar from the SEAL
programme (DfES, 2003), in which a programme of work is provided to help pupils build up social skills, social
awareness and confidence. Such a curriculum usually has a section on building self-esteem. It would be good
practice before embarking on that section of the curriculum to have a base-line measure of each pupil’s
measured self-esteem. The evidence of this study suggests that low self-esteem may be a significant problem
for a proportion of pupils (16%), but equally, especially high and perhaps unrealistic self-esteem may also be an
important contributory factor in the behaviour of another sizeable proportion (20%) of pupils, especially those of
secondary school age.
Once the self-esteem of each pupil has been assessed, either by formal testing or by other means, such as
therapeutic interview, the issue facing the specialist school is to plan a programme to meet the pupil’s needs.
The evidence of the effectiveness of intervention programmes is generally positive, but not universal. Haney and
Durlak (1998) point out, in an analysis of over 116 studies, that 60% of programmes reported positive changes in
measured self-esteem, although worryingly 12.5% actually produced negative changes. In his review, Emler
(2003) suggests that those programmes that use a broad cognitive behavioural approach seem to be particularly
successful. He draws attention to one cognitive behavioural therapy approach (Pope, McHale & Craighead,
1988) which helped young people to address both their aspirations and achievements and make a more
balanced self-appraisal. This programme therefore appeared to be suitable for those individuals who were
described by Kernis et al. (1989) as having high but unstable self-esteem. Teachers also need to be aware that,
as Flouri (2006) points out, self-esteem may not be the only factor affecting young people’s
behaviour. They suggest that it is self-esteem compounded with locus of control that appears to be important. As
this study has shown, the locus of control of some of the older SEBD population shows an over-representation of
young people who scored in the ‘external’ range. This would suggest that teachers would be wise to address
both of these issues with their pupils if they wish to see changes in both attitude and behaviour.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Alice Tilley, educational psychologist for Liverpool City Council, for her help in the pupil
assessment and data analysis, and the headteachers, teachers, pupils and parents in the schools for their help,
advice and co-operation.
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Address for correspondence:
Dr Jeremy Swinson
Witherslack Group
c/o Pontville School
Black Moss Lane
Ormskirk
Lancs L39 4T
Email: [email protected]
Article submitted: November 2006
Accepted for publication: March 2008
Appendix H:
Fischman, Wendy , DiBara, Jennifer A. and Gardner, Howard (2006) 'Creating good education
against the odds', Cambridge Journal of Education, 36: 3, 383 — 398
What is the responsibility of an educator—where does it begin and end? We report on a study of teachers at four
admired public high schools in urban areas in the US. The teachers describe their deep commitment to meeting
students’ academic needs, as well as their developmental, social and emotional needs. The ways these
teachers construe responsibility requires them to be creative, innovative and flexible inside and outside of the
classroom. However, this broad conceptualization puts them at odds with current signals from the larger society,
which define their responsibilities narrowly, calling for a focus primarily on the academic needs of students.
Despite this tension, many urban teachers work tirelessly to connect with students personally to find new ways to
satisfy students’ needs—indeed this is how the teachers ultimately derive meaning from their work. With minimal
guidance about how to carry out what they see as ‘good work’, teachers set their own goals and expectations,
while also aiming to meet the school, state, and national standards. Teachers worry that at some point in the
future, without support from the field, they will not be able to sustain their energy and passion for this challenging
work. We focus on how these urban teachers describe and define responsibility in their work, the relationship
between responsibility and creativity, challenges teachers face to sustain this work, and how these factors
impact teaching as a formal profession.
Introduction
According to recent studies, only 71% of American high school students graduate; less than a quarter of Black
and Hispanic graduates are adequately prepared for college (Greene & Winters, 2005). Much attention and
money has been directed toward the urban high schools that contribute to these low statistics. Similarly, in the
UK, ‘the more socially disadvantaged the community, the very much more likely it is that the LEA [Local
Educational Authority] will underachieve’ (Demie et al., 2002, p. 105). Individuals who teach in urban settings
confront difficult conditions: students lacking in grade-appropriate skills, insufficient finances, rigid state
mandates, and lack of parental support and involvement. Their plight raises nagging questions: Are schools too
big? Are the requirements for graduation too low? How do good teachers cope with school buildings that are old,
unsafe, and lack adequate resources? Are teachers trained properly?
How to measure a ‘good’ teacher who can navigate these challenges is also a difficult question. In literature
about effective teaching, it is hard to ignore the abundance of information on ‘standards’—a term often used to
describe what a teacher should do in his job. The National Board for Professional Teaching Standards (2002),
for example, published ‘five core propositions’ for teachers— responsibilities that teachers must regard and act
upon in order to ‘effectively enhance student learning’. Specifically, these principles include:
1. Teachers are committed to students and their learning.
2. Teachers know the subjects they teach and how to teach those subjects to students.
3. Teachers are responsible for managing and monitoring student learning.
4. Teachers think systematically about their practice and learn from experience.
5. Teachers are members of learning communities.
The National Commission on Teaching and America’s Future (1996) put forth similar standards for beginning
teachers, labelling these standards as ‘criteria’ and ‘benchmarks’. There are also standards for students, which
schools, districts, individual states and the US as a whole, use to assess both the student and the teacher.
Controversial policies, such as the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, draw on these standards in formulating the
principles by which superintendents, principals, and teachers should structure their work in schools.
Holding teachers responsible or ‘accountable’ for meeting these standards is a vexing matter. Though politicians
and legislators often look toward standardized test scores, student retention rates, and graduation statistics,
teachers wonder whether such quantitative indices adequately capture their most crucial skills and abilities.
Clearly, the responsibility and professional status of a teacher is unresolved.
To determine professional status of a particular area of work, Shulman (1998) suggests that professions share
six important features, namely that they:
1. Serve society.
2. Have a body of scholarly knowledge.
3. Engage in practical action.
4. Need to develop judgements in applying knowledge as a result of uncertainty.
5. Build on experiences in practice.
6. Have a professional community that develops standards and sanctions.
While teaching exhibits many of the elements of a traditional profession, current K- 12 teaching lacks others.
Most importantly, teachers do not have the power to regulate and enforce their own standards and
responsibilities (Darling-Hammond, 1987; Goodlad, 1990; Levine, 1998). While state medical boards are
governed by practicing physicians, and state bars are staffed with practicing lawyers, state departments of
education are generally comprised of bureaucrats and political legislators who make the decisions about statelevel qualifications for a teaching license or certificate.
In addition, some critics believe that teaching lacks a specialized knowledge base essential to professional work
(Goodlad, 1990). Fast-track certification problems, which are increasingly prevalent, seem to reinforce this
view.(1) At the same time, in recent years, several efforts have been initiated to define and distill teacher
knowledge. In the US, the National Board of Professional Teaching Standards, the National Commission on
Teaching and America’s Future, and the National Academy of Education have each attempted to codify a body
of ‘professional’ knowledge for teachers (cf. General Teacher Council for England, 2002).
For more than 10 years, the GoodWork Project (2) has investigated a variety of professions and professionals to
understand how individual workers carry out ‘good work’—work that is high quality, socially responsible, and
personally meaningful. Through in-depth interviews with more than 1200 individuals in journalism, genetics,
philanthropy, business, law, medicine, theater, and education, we probe how professionals describe the beliefs
and values, goals, and perspectives that guide them in their work, as well as the ethical dilemmas they face and
the strategies they employ to navigate these challenges. The study aims to uncover how personal traits and
institutional conditions support or stifle an individual’s ability to carry out work that is excellent, ethical, and
engaging during a time of fast-paced technological innovation and powerful market forces.
As part of our study of precollegiate education (3) 40 teachers from four different high schools in economically
disadvantaged communities in the US were selected as participants in the research (4). The goal was to
understand how teachers carry out exemplary work when external conditions are notably challenging. At the
time of the study, all of the high schools were undergoing some kind of reform, either at a district, state, or
national level.(5) Interestingly, however, rather than hearing about challenges associated with difficult physical
conditions, such as overcrowded classrooms, limited resources, and unkempt buildings, teachers report more
frustration with the lack of agreement about their work and professional responsibilities. Simply stated, teachers
seem to struggle most with how to navigate their own understanding of what it takes to be a ‘good’ teacher with
expectations from the larger field. The following article discusses how urban teachers who participated in the
GoodWork study view their professional responsibilities, how creativity plays a crucial role in being able to fulfill
these responsibilities, the challenges they experience to sustain this kind of work, and the factors that impact
the consideration of teaching as a formal profession.
Responsibility of a teacher
One of the core questions of the GoodWork Project concerns responsibility—to whom or to what are individuals
most responsible? Responses from professionals at different stages in their careers and in various lines of work
can be organized into five major categories (Gardner et al., 2001):
1. Responsibility to self (e.g., financial stability, sustaining passion for work, staying committed to individual
beliefs).
2. Responsibility to other (e.g., family members, neighbors, colleagues at work).
3. Responsibility to workplace/school.
4. Responsibility to domain of education (e.g., students, the calling of the profession, mission of work).
5. Responsibility to society.(6)
Not surprisingly, almost all of the teacher participants identify ‘students’ as their primary responsibility in work.
Some teachers also mention a responsibility to students’ parents, school administrators and colleagues, the
larger community (town or city of the school), and to their own family and individual interests. Students, however,
almost always take precedence in their teachers’ minds. Notably, in some professions, individuals tend to impute
responsibility to others. In genetics, for example, many scientists claim that the determination of how their
research is implemented is important, but something for which only politicians and citizens should be most
concerned (Gardner et al., 2001). Conversely, teacher participants, rarely impute responsibility to anyone else.
Teachers believe that with the deterioration of family, emphasis on material objects, and the increasing pace of
society, they feel more responsibility for students’ lives than teachers may have felt in the past. In the words of
one teacher, ‘the biggest issue we have in school today is what’s going on outside of school’.
Teachers respond to the perceived increase of student problems by broadening their responsibilities to meet the
academic, social, developmental, and emotional needs of their students. Rather than interpreting these
extended needs as an extra burden, teachers understand that addressing all of them is an integral part of their
professional responsibility. Many teacher participants—both novices and veterans— believe that they may be a
‘student’s only salvation’.
A young English teacher, for example, states that the personal relationships he develops with students are
essential to reaching students, ‘Nobody knows the kids like me … If we save a kid, it’s not through the effort of
the school, but a one-on-one connection’. A veteran teacher at the same school also talks at length about the
necessary relationships she has developed with students—relationships forged not only through teaching
content, but also through attending school theater productions, chaperoning school programs with her husband,
and spending time with students in the hallway after the closing bell. She refers to students as ‘her kids’ and
considers them to be part of her larger family. She remarks:
Certainly I feel the responsibility to the kids … They deserve all the help they can have, especially … in today’s
world … I say to teachers who are new at the business … ‘Johnny, needs to be able to look at you and to know that
it’s going to be all right’ … I feel very responsible about that, much more so now, in 2005, than I did in 1980. … I’m
afraid that there are parents [now] who’ve abdicated the kind of responsibility that we all felt as parents a number of
years ago…I’m probably like a grandmother to a lot of kids, and I know that’s true…But some of them don’t have
that…and they need that…
Though these charismatic teachers are sometimes recognized in the media, descriptions of these types of
relationships are absent from most of the highly publicized measures of effective work.
In fact, when asked about ethical dilemmas for work, teachers most often mention the predicament of how to
meet all of students’ diverse needs and at the same time, satisfy the more rigid school, state, and national
requirements. A Spanish teacher, for example, claims that one of the biggest challenges in work is juggling
students’ needs: ‘we are expected to be parent, psychologist, and then teacher, and that’s very difficult …’. Like
other professionals, educators must respect and respond to a variety of stakeholders at different levels,
beginning at their own school and expanding out to the national level. Government officials, administrators,
unions, business and industry, believe that they have a stake in the kind of work teachers carry out and the
results of this work. Not surprisingly, these interest groups have different expectations for teachers’ work and
dissenting opinions about how to determine success. A state politician may be most interested in results of
student test scores; a district administrator may be most focused on student attendance and retention; a union
representative may be only interested in the consistency of hours worked by teachers. Though these diverse
stakeholders differ in their perspectives, most emphasise standardisation and fail to recognize what teachers see
as their primary responsibility: development of both the academic and personal skills students need to succeed
in school and in the future. Teachers recognize that in practice, work on academic skills cannot always be easily
separated from work on students’ social and personal skills.
From many perspectives, education is not a well-aligned profession (Gardner et al., 2001). All too often the
various interest parties are at cross-purposes and fail to call for the same kind of work performances. Though
most individuals find it difficult to carry out ‘good work’ in a misaligned profession, the teachers we studied
persevere through this difficulty because of their deep responsibility to students and hope that they will have a
positive impact on the students’ lives. For the most part, teachers are most concerned about the impact they
have on students and they worry about those students they fail to reach. One teacher remarks:
The difference is that … if you’re working in the grocery store or you’re working in construction, if you make a
mistake, you’ve ruined a piece of wood or you ruined a case of groceries … In this job, when you do a bad job,
you’re messing with the kid’s life or his future, and that’s the … great responsibility you have to these kids …
In fact, in the absence of clear guidelines, this ‘misalignment’ may serve teachers’ broad goals, because in many
ways, they are left to develop their own ‘rule book’, for how to define their work and how to measure its impact.
In other words, whereas some teachers mainly focus on instruction, others concentrate on finding ways to
engage students more deeply through personal relationships and real-world connections. Rather than embrace
a one-way notion of professional excellence, teachers know they have been successful when students ‘give
back’, in improved behaviors, attitudes and accomplishments. Though teachers acknowledge the extra time it
takes to connect with students, teachers stay motivated and inspired when their students reciprocate
responsibility. This reciprocity occurs, for example, when students present material covered in class in a school
exhibition, say ‘thank you’ at the end of the year, pass a state mandated test, or return after graduation to
reconnect. Teachers also look to the students’ accomplishments and affirmations as a way to prepare them for
the next day’s work or the next year. A young world language teacher explains:
Success is when my students are proud of their knowledge and their learning and are inquisitive and are eager to
learn more. And it’s a miracle when it happens. We have an exhibition that was a pain … to organize last year, and I
was very ‘Eh’, about it … But that night when I saw the kids that would fight me tooth and nail everyday in class, and
someone would come up to them and they would say, ‘Oh, yes, this is where I learned to conjugate verbs, and this
is the difference between an irregular and a regular verb, and I created this diagram for you’. And the pride that they
had, and the confidence that they exhibited, and the accuracy, with which they conveyed the information, I was
about to cry. I was so proud of them. I was like, ‘Oh, my God, you actually learned something, and you’re proud of
it!’
These kinds of disagreements about what it means to be a ‘good’ teacher, seem to provide at least some
teachers with the flexibility and freedom to redefine their own positions in schools. In order to fulfill the deep and
varied responsibilities teachers feel for students, they find creative ways (many of which are overlooked in
current professional standards) to engage students and circumvent challenges associated with traditional urban
settings, including mandated teaching strategies connected with many reform initiatives. Regardless of how
others inside and outside of school perceive teachers’ work and how the school as a bureaucratic organization
structures teaching and learning, the teachers’ commitment to meet students’ needs—at all levels—turns out to
be the driving force behind their practice, decisions, and focus in the classroom. Teachers view creativity as
essential to engaging students in rigorous academic content and, ultimately, to carrying out ‘good work’ in their
classrooms.
Creativity of a teacher
As recent compilations of teaching standards suggest, there may be a clear and well-defined pedagogy of
effective teaching (National Commission on Teaching and America’s Future, 1996; National Board for
Professional Teaching Standards, 2002; General Teacher Council for England, 2002). Yet the teachers whom
we interviewed claim to carry out this pedagogy in their own way, guided as much as possible by their own and
their students’ curiosities, interests and needs. As the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards
(2002, p. 2) concedes, ‘This enumeration suggests the broad base for expertise in teaching, but conceals the
complexities, uncertainties and dilemmas of the work’. While teaching has aspects of a ‘science’, it is also an
‘art’. Building deep connections and relationships with students is a key ingredient in engaging them in the
learning process and, more specifically, confers deeper meaning on the content.
Teachers identify their own creative practices for engaging students in learning as necessary to meeting their
responsibilities to students. In fact, their most creative work may inhere in the ways that they redefine their roles
and responsibilities in response to their students’ changing and broadening needs. The rewards and results
of this creativity are often a key reason for staying committed to a difficult and challenging area of work.
According to teacher participants, engaging students requires them to be creative and flexible, specifically in
terms of how they (1) set the tone and deliver content material in the classroom; (2) relate teaching and learning
to the larger world; and (3) nurture creativity within their students. Teachers also hope that, through their own
creativity in these diverse respects, they will serve as a model for students in terms of how one can approach
difficult personal and professional problems in the future.
Delivery of content material
In order to engage students in learning specific content knowledge, teachers first talk about the importance of
setting a tone in the classroom that allows both teachers and students flexibility, independence, and freedom.
Many teachers view their classrooms as their own laboratories. They experiment with different techniques and
approaches to garner students’ interest and curiosity in the material at-hand. An English teacher speaks of his
classroom space as a precious commodity:
When I go into my classroom … that’s my planet … I’m not doing it because that’s the way I was taught…I’m doing
what teachers are supposed to be doing. And if somebody comes along and says, ‘You can’t do it that way’, I’m not
going to compromise on that… I am not going to compromise anything that affects my freedom to teach the way I
believe and know works best in my classroom. I will not compromise.
To make the most of the limited time teachers have with their students, teachers frequently talk of their work as
performance and describe their classroom as the stage. A veteran teacher explains:
Whether I’m having a good day or bad day in front of those kids, it’s going to be a good day. If I’m feeling lousy and
if I’m negative and something’s happening in my life, I’m not going to let that crawl into my classroom. When I step
on stage, I’m going to be the most positive, best teacher they can get for 90 minutes. And then after that’s over, I
can go back and cry in my soup.
Furthermore, several teachers seek to create an environment in which students are not afraid to ask questions.
One teacher, for example, declares, ‘In the classroom …[what is] really important to me is the ability to ask
questions without penalty. I’m talking about ‘‘Why is the sky blue?’’ or ‘‘How did you get this answer?’’’ He
wonders:
Why is it that eight-, seven-, nine-year-olds ask great questions and love listening to the answers, even if you can’t
really explain them the way you should? By the time they reach me, so much of that creativity has been snuffed out
or it’s a dying ember. That shouldn’t happen, but it does.
Teacher participants mention particular personal qualities, such as a sense of humor, wild imagination,
entertaining persona, and ability to think quickly, that have helped them to create this kind of inquisitive and
open environment. An English teacher states ‘While teaching isn’t necessarily an act or performance, it can’t be
routine and you have to be strange …’. In other words, teachers creatively find ways to make the content
resonate with students’ own lives. For example, a young math teacher developed a short song—a ‘rap’—to help
her students remember how to solve equations. She repeats:
When you have a math equation;
adding or subtracting type of situation;
add the opposite to each side;
then the letters have nothing to hide.
Letters on one side;
numbers on the other.
A-R-T;
go home and tell your mother.
This teacher explains that:
Even though I may look like a fool up there doing it, after the fifth, sixth, seventh hundredth time I’ve done it, they
really know what it is. The kids still, that I had three or four years ago, still say it to themselves, still know how to do
it.
For this teacher, merging the popular rap form with standard math content was just one creative approach she
uses to make learning more ‘fun’ and enticing for students. In her mind, her method is successful because year
after year, students actually remember the mathematical formula she aims to convey.
Relationship to the wider world
Some teachers speak about how they creatively use the specific content of their class to facilitate a broader
understanding of the world. With these goals, a math teacher explains how through teaching broad mathematical
concepts, she hopes to encourage students to think abstractly about their lives:
I guess the most important belief is that [the] kids I’m teaching need to achieve a certain amount of abstract thought
in math in order to be abstract thinkers and problem solvers in general. A lot of the disasters that the kids report to
me in their personal lives have to do with really bad decision making. And I think a lot of that just comes from not
being fully developed intellectually and managing their lives accordingly. The better you understand your world and
the more effectively you can juggle options, the better able you are to negotiate [your] way through life.
Teachers also mention the importance of taking field trips in order to open students’ minds, develop curiosity,
and facilitate awareness of a wider world. An arthistory teacher, for example, mentions the necessity of having
students experience learning outside of the classroom, regardless of the work it requires for him:
I love art history, I think it’s an incredible thing, and I’m very passionate about it. And I think when you’re
passionate, kids pick up on it. If you’re just delivering the stuff, if you’re just dumping information, they
can pick up on that too, and they don’t get excited about it…to prove that to them, I organize trips every
other summer to Europe; this summer, I’m taking 38 kids to five countries, all the places that we studied
in class, and that’s just to backup, to show them that I believe in what I teach, and I think it’s important
and now you can go and have a real world experience and see it all. And I do that. I don’t get any money
to do that. I get the trip paid for, and I’ve been to Europe six times; I don’t need to go again, and I’m
going to the same places that I’ve been for the last six years. I’m doing it for them so they can see it
through their eyes for the first time.
Some teachers use other creative strategies to connect with students outside the classroom and expose them to
larger issues in society. A social studies teacher, for example, started a community service club at her school in
order to inspire passion and a sense of purpose for her students. Specifically, she explains that when students
engage in community service, they ‘stop thinking about [their] own problems, and [they] start thinking about the
problems of someone else, and [their problems] somehow magically just seem to dissipate’. She organizes one
service project per month, which comes to nearly 1000 hours of community service per year.
Creativity in students
Teacher participants speak directly about not just creating awareness about the wider world, but also trying to
nurture a sense of creativity in their students. Such a sense should aid them subsequently in handling
challenges in their own personal and professional lives. A Spanish teacher comments that her mission is to
structure the teaching and learning in her class so that she gets kids to step ‘outside the box’. She
aims to have students apply learned content material to new situations. She argues that students need
opportunities to be creative:
[Students] don’t take the freedom to think. They don’t take the opportunity to … think freely [and] be just be a little
creative … they stay in the narrow confines of what they think is expected of them instead of stepping out … you’ve
got to model that for them all the time and I’m continually aware of that …
Similarly, an art teacher sees the structure of his class as a way for students to experience using creativity in
their own lives:
Whether they want to be a professional artist or not…the processes and techniques you go through to create art are
the very things that you would go through to be good at any job no matter what it is. If you’re going to be a gasoline
attendant or a brain surgeon, the creative process of learning small steps of success, going through that little
microcosm of design, failing, succeeding, is just like life…when I prepare students in my classroom and take them
through that art process, I’m taking them through a process that’s going to be valuable to them for the rest of their
lives … I want them to … experience the creative process because they can be creative in whatever they do.
Many teachers believe that modelling alternative approaches for dealing with problems is an important lesson for
students. An English teacher, for example, explains that making ‘home visits’ for students who are not doing well
in class is a useful way to show students and their families that she cares about the student and seeks strategies
to help them learn. An immigrant herself, she says that visiting these families at their home is essential in order
to understand their cultural background. Because some of this teacher’s students are new to the US and have
problems adapting to American culture, often leading to disciplinary problems in the classroom, these visits give
her the chance to work out plans to improve their chance of passing the course and shows the families that she
is open to dealing with issues in different ways. She claims that her home visits work:
I have never met an indifferent parent; I’ve been very fortunate in that. All the parents I work with have been
extremely concerned, and respond to concern for those average students who are dropping out, doing drugs, going
off and having affairs instead of coming to school
In short, creativity is an essential element in teachers’ responsibilities to meet students’ needs. Teachers
accomplish this most effectively by forming deep connections and meaningful relationships with students inside
and outside of the classroom in order to intrigue them in the learning process. A veteran English teacher who
works with students who struggle academically says, ‘I do want them to learn the material, but I think there has
to be a relationship for them to really connect, and then we go into the English and into the learning, and the
writing, and the reading’. Teachers also use creative approaches to model creativity as a useful
strategy to respond to issues in the larger world. An art history teacher summarizes the relationship of
responsibility and creativity when he states:
All [kids] come to us the way they come to us, they all come with whatever level of education they have. They’re all
steel, and we have to make a car out of them. And I’m not going to claim that it’s bad steel. I’ve got to find a way to
reach that kid … I take a lot of responsibility in that … There’s a lot we can do about it. And it’s a partnership
between students, parents … [and] the community.
The challenges
Forming deep relationships with students does not come without its challenges. As teachers become connected
with students on multiple levels—intellectually, socially, emotionally—they also encounter difficulty maintaining
personal and professional boundaries. While they value their personal connections with students, teachers risk
becoming overwhelmed by them. Specifically, teachers are concerned with two issues: (1) how to help students
with their personal needs while staying true to their own values; and (2) how to maintain themselves and their
relationships with family and friends, outside of teaching. Teachers identify both of these issues as the most
concerning aspects for their work. Though there are several obstacles to their work that teachers describe, such
as the difficult external conditions and minimal parent support, teachers often overcome these ‘smaller’
challenges because they do not directly influence the ways in which they can relate to students or impede their
personal relationships.
Staying true to your own values
Many teachers discuss the challenge of meeting students’ needs without compromising their own personal and
professional values. For some teacher participants, focusing too much attention on students’ personal problems
encroaches on their professional values about their role as teacher. Though many teachers believe that
developing personal relationships with students is the most effective way to engage students in learning, others
worry that not enough energy and time is spent on academics. One teacher and school administrator expresses
her concern:
It is a dilemma because—especially here—[the focus is] more personal. They run it more like a social agency, and
you don’t get to where you need to be academically…It’s very hard. I think that I am more guilty of making it more
personal than it should be, but my goal would be to make it more academic…I try to be really conscious of the fact
hat I still want to challenge these kids academically, but sometimes it gets overwhelmed by the personal support
that they need.
This teacher also feels that the school gives too much support to students in their academic work, which may
cause students to lack confidence in how to carry out independent work in the future: ‘Some of them [the
students] are not going to be able to make it [in the future] because [of] the support system that they’ve come to
rely on so much’.
Furthermore, as much as teachers talk about flexibility and creativity as an essential aspect of their work, they
also remain firmly committed to their own rules, philosophies, and regulations in the classroom. A young teacher
worries that colleagues spend too much time ‘entertaining’ their students. She asserts: ‘I tell [my students]
continually that their future bosses aren’t going to stay up late at night thinking about ways to entertain them, so
there’s got to be balance, and they’ve got to learn a lot of things’. Similar to this teacher, other teachers mention
that though they can change plans quickly or use alternative approaches to reach students, they are not willing
to compromise standards they have set for students in their own classroom, including mutual respect, reliable
attendance, active participation, and completing assignments and projects on-time. Several teachers specifically
mention the unwillingness to change grades, even with pressure from parents and administrators.
Indeed, teachers raise grading as a real and pressing ethical dilemma they face in their work. More often than
not, teachers describe negotiating the situation so that they are not compromising their own principles. The
bottom line for teachers is not their professional standing or their reputation in the school, but rather the impact
of their decision on the student and whether it would jeopardize the responsibility for learning they have worked
so hard to instill.
Teachers also describe the difficulty of maintaining their own personal values at work. A math teacher, for
example has a hard time working with parents who, she feels, are poor role models. This teacher believes that
their inconsistency, particularly in terms of the promises and sanctions that are not kept, does not convey to
students how to carry out responsibility. She explains that it is nearly impossible to talk with parents who come to
her for advice because she cannot tell them what she really believes:
I talk to a lot of parents that cry to me and say, ‘I don’t know what to do with my kid’, and this, that, and the other.
And I know parenting is hard. I have no doubt about that. I do a lot of it here, even though they’re not my kids …
Those same [parenting] skills come into play with my role … I do take the hard route and I do go the extra mile; if I
say I’m going to call them, I do, or if I say I’m going to refer you to somebody, I do.
Notably, for the majority of teachers, religion constitutes an important factor in their lives. Though all of these
teachers assert that religion does not influence the ways in which they convey content material in the classroom,
for some teachers, religious beliefs pose questions about how to advise students who come to them with
personal issues. A veteran math teacher explains that certain topics, such as abortion, are off-limits because
school is not ‘the time or place’. However, these personal limitations can also cause regret when she feels that
she was not helpful to a student in trouble. She explains a particular situation in the past:
I become kind of a friend with a lot of the students and they trust me, and they talk with me before school, after
school … But I had this one girl come after school one day, it was towards the end of the school year…And she had
been taking a lot of LSD, a lot of cocaine, she had been drinking, a lot of partying, lots of boys, lots of sex, and she
thought she was pregnant, and she came crying for help. And as a teacher at that particular point, I was not really
secure in letting myself as a person speak to her too much … I guided her to different places to go speak, where I
would rather have spoken to her from my heart … and just cuddled her in my arms and given her some of what I
believed and what I thought. Where at that point, I just kind of sent her, gave her a lot of choices to explore, and
people to maybe go contact … that bothered me for years … And I made up my mind after that, I would never do
that again, I would give of myself even if it meant giving up my job. And I may get myself in trouble someday, but I
care about those individuals enough now so I don’t care, I’ll give up that job … I won’t do it again.
Preserving one’s own time and relationships
Many teachers also recognize the risk of over-empathizing with students and taking on students’ personal
problems as their own. Specifically, teacher participants talk about the dilemma of being asked to be students’
confidantes. However, most teachers are especially concerned with how they will preserve their own time, for
familial responsibilities and hobbies, and how they will maintain a fresh perspective for the next day’s work.
As much as teachers want to develop relationships with students, they also worry about the price this closeness
exacts on their own emotional well-being. This kind of openness has consequences. Teacher participants often
report that students’ problems cause them to become upset and distraught. Teachers describe specific
strategies to deal with their sadness: making plans with friends, gardening, exercising, or stopping at the
Hallmark store before going home. Sometimes, making professional adjustments, such as changing grade
levels, switching school settings, and collaborating with other teachers, also helps teachers to maintain a sense
of self.
However, employing these personal strategies may not be enough for teachers. The majority of teacher
participants anticipate that once they are no longer able to sustain the energy the work requires, they will leave
the profession. The National Commission on America’s Future (1996) identifies this problem as ‘the teacher
retention crisis’ and characterizes teaching as ‘the revolving door profession’. For instance, in the 1999–2000
school year, one third of the teaching force was in transition. Furthermore, teacher turnover is higher in
economically disadvantaged communities (Darling-Hammond, 2003). Caring deeply for students and wanting to
help takes a heavy toll on these teachers. Many teacher participants share their concern for how they can
maintain passion with the depth and breadth of students’ needs. They fear that over time, they will not be able to
find enough ways to meet the needs of students and maintain enjoyment in their work.
Many teachers assert that once they fail to meet students’ needs, they will have to give up teaching. In these
cases, teachers yearn for help—suggestions about strategies they could try to keep them fresh and models of
others who have triumphed despite these problems. However, because the field does not often recognize
teachers’ broadened sense of responsibility, professional development opportunities seldom address these
kinds of teacher needs. Though little publicized, the issues of how to relate personally to students, how to stay
true to your own principles, and at the same time, not become too entrenched with students’ problems,
constitute the most overwhelming aspects of teachers’ work. In terms of the GoodWork Project, a loss of
teachers’ engagement in their work may signal the end of ‘good work,’ or even of a career in teaching altogether.
Conclusion
While the teaching profession has its struggles and challenges, urban teaching in the US is in deep crisis and
urban schools and its teachers have been under scrutiny.(7) Research in the UK has repeatedly found that
poorer communities tend to have lower achievement rates (Demie et al., 2002). The British Government
responded in 1999 with its ‘Excellence in Cities’ program, and, in 2001, the US responded with No Child Left
Behind, which was passed in the hope of narrowing this achievement gap. However, the increased
standardization required in classrooms and tougher criteria for graduation, still leave teachers to negotiate their
understanding of how to serve students’ needs with what the local and national Governments perceive as
solutions to the student achievement problems.
Because of these complexities around professional responsibility in education, urban teachers struggle with how
to determine whether they have carried out ‘good work’. The aspects they find most important in their work—
forming deep connections with students in order to engage them in learning—are virtually absent from core
professional standards touted as vital to success as a teacher. Furthermore, teachers tend to use evidence of
student engagement as benchmarks for successful work—e.g., if a student shows appreciation for the class,
honors their personal relationship, demonstrates an understanding of content material, or simply comes
consistently to class.
To put it succinctly, teachers find flow (Csikszentmihalyi, 1990) in the actual work process. Rather than through
any external measures, such as test scores or own status and financial reward, teachers are driven by the
challenge of devising creative means that meet students’ needs. Work becomes meaningful when they witness
success in this endeavor. In this way, these urban teachers are similar to some of the other ‘creative leaders’
studied by The GoodWork Project. These highly creative professionals are generally motivated by intrinsic rather
than extrinsic rewards (Gardner et al., 2001).
Paradoxically, the close relationship of responsibility and creativity in teachers’ work may be one of the major
factors that prevent teaching from being considered a profession. In established professions, good work is done
by following tradition rather than resorting repeatedly to creative departures from established practices. When
creativity is always at a premium, then the consolidation of practices and values intrinsic to a profession may
prove elusive. Pursuing ‘individual creativity’ in the ‘performance and delivery of expert services’ is a real
challenge. Sullivan asks, ‘How, that is, can the practitioners’ sense of personal agency be enhanced while also
encouraging strong allegiance to the ideals of competent performance that lie at the core of every professional
domain?’ (Sullivan, 2005, p. 23).
The dedication and responsibility that teachers create for themselves in response to these gaps in the
educational system, can sometimes leave teachers at risk for frustration and burnout. On the one hand, they find
the personal relationships with students to be the most rewarding and sustaining part of their work. Yet they also
recognize their own limitations, particularly in terms of an unwillingness to compromise their own personal and
professional values and their inability to address adequately students’ diverse problems and needs. Teacher
participants dread the time when they can no longer happily shoulder the deep responsibility they feel for their
students and when they can no longer sacrifice so much of their own time and energy. Though all teacher
participants believe that teaching is a ‘profession’ because of the training and expertise involved, they also
speak of other areas of work to which teaching is most similar, including an air traffic controller, a parent, and a
medical practitioner.
Like these other areas of work, teachers are sustained by the enjoyment they receive by meeting the needs of
their students. Through the close relationships they develop with students, they often measure their own work by
what the students give them back. Teachers continually find news ways to engage their students—either through
trying new classroom strategies, making content relevant to students’ lives, or utilizing outside resources—even
as the constraints tend to increase in schools. Though the challenges—limited resources, deterioration of school
buildings, and increasing curriculum demands due to standardized testing—are hard to ignore, teachers do not
let these obstacles impede their work. Rather, these difficulties motivate teachers to think about the ‘big picture’
of students’ lives. In these terms, a teacher participant reflects that his work is most similar to that of a mountain
climber:
Sometimes the day is long and a lot of sweat is involved and there is not much fun going on, but these days are
necessary to shape one’s ability to have the exhilarating times when so much knowledge seems to connect and
crystallize before you…the joy is in the journey and not the destination.
Notes
1. By 2005, 47 states had authorized fast-track certification programs that required less (sometimes substantially
less) preparation for a teacher license. See Johnson, S. M., Birkeland, S. E. & Peske, H. (September 2005) A
difficult balance: incentives and quality control in alternative certification programs (Harvard Graduate School of
Education: Project on the next generation of teachers).
2. For more information, see The GoodWorkH Project web site, www.goodworkproject.org.
3. We were able to carry out this study with generous support from the Ford Foundation and Christian A.
Johnson Endeavor Foundation.
4. To identify exemplary schools in pre-collegiate education, we first spoke with a group of experts in the field of
education, who had expertise in a variety of areas, including school reform, educator training, urban education,
and school governance. These informants include leading reformers, leading figures in non-profit and for-profit
educational institutions, as well as professors of higher education who were formerly teachers and
superintendents.
5. Reform trends include the Coalition of Essential Schools, a small ‘start-up’ school, small schools conversion,
district reform, and a ‘magnet’ school.
6. Some individuals also feel a responsibility to a divine power.
7. The publication of Death at an early age (1967) by Jonathan Kozol in the US and 15,000 hours (1979) by
Michael Rutter et al. in the UK, are early books which explicitly discuss this persistent crisis.
Notes on contributors
Wendy Fischman has worked at Project Zero at the Harvard Graduate School of Education for the last 10
years. As a manager of the GoodWorkH Project, she has written about education and human development in
several scholarly and popular articles addressing topics such as life long commitment to service work,
inspirational mentoring, and teaching in precollegiate education. She is lead author of Making good: how young
people cope with moral dilemmas at work. Most recently, Wendy has co-developed a curriculum for students and
teachers to introduce the concept of ‘good work’ in classrooms and schools.
Jennifer DiBara has worked on the GoodWork Project for over three years. She is currently a doctoral
candidate in learning and teaching at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. She has an M.Ed. in
elementary education from Boston College and an M.A. in American history from the University of California at
Berkeley. She has been a public school teacher in Massachusetts.
Howard Gardner is the Hobbs Professor of Cognition and Education at the Harvard Graduate School of
Education. He is a leading thinker about education and human development; he has studied and written
extensively about intelligence, creativity, and leadership. Gardner’s most recent books include Good work: when
excellence and ethics meet, Changing minds: the art and science of changing our own and other people’s
minds, and most recently, The development and education of the mind, a collection of his writings in education.
References
Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1990) Flow: the psychology of optimal experience (New York, HarperCollins).
Darling-Hammond, L. (2003) Keeping good teachers, Educational Leadership, 60(8), 6–14.
Darling-Hammond, L. (1987) Schools for tomorrow’s teachers, Teachers College Record, 88, 356–358.
Demie, F., Butler, R. & Taplin, A. (2002) Educational achievement and the disadvantage factor: empirical
evidence, Educational Studies, 28(2), 101–110.
Gardner, H., Csikszentmihalyi, M. & Damon, W. (2001) Good work: when excellence and ethics meet (New
York, Basic Books).
Goodlad, J. I. (1990) The occupation of teaching in schools, in: J. I. Goodlad, R. Soder & K. A. Sirotnik (Eds) The
moral dimensions of teaching (San Francisco, Jossey-Bass), 3–34.
Greene, J. P. & Winters, M. A. (2005, February) Public high school graduation rates: 1991–2002 Education
Working Paper No. 8, Manhattan Institute.
Kozol, J. Death at an early age (Boston, Houghton Mifflin).
Levine, M. (1998) Introduction, in: M. Levine (Ed.) Professional practice schools: building a model (Washington,
DC, American Federation of Teachers), 1–25.
National Board for Professional Teaching Standards (2002) What teachers should know and be able to do
(Arlington, VA, National Board for Professional Teaching Standards).
National Commission on Teaching and America’s Future (1996) What matters most: teaching for America’s
future (Washington, DC, National Commission on Teaching and America’s Future).
Rutter, M., Maughan, B., Mortimore, P. & Ouston, J. (1979) Fifteen thousand hours: secondary schools and their
effects on children (Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press).
Shulman, L. (1998) Theory, practice, and the education of professionals, The Elementary School Journal, 98(5),
511–526.
Sullivan, W. M. (2005) The civic promise of professional education, Daedalus, 134(3), 19–26.
This article was downloaded on: 1 April 2012: URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03057640600866007
Appendix I
Effecting Change with Professional Respect
The Identity, Community & Achievement resources are built on the idea that valuing identity and diversity in your
classroom can and should be a means of increasing learning and growth for your students.
Three key principles provide guidance in your quest to harness the positive power of diversity matters in your
classroom. First, set and maintain high expectations, despite all the forces that may be working against them.
Second, build a strong diversity-related knowledge base that includes not only information about racial identity
development, cultural learning styles, and multicultural education methods, but also includes knowledge about
yourself. This text describes best practices for successfully achieving change as a new member of your
community.
Effecting Change With Professional Respect: Starts With Success In Your Classroom
A.
B.
C.
Effecting Change As A New Member Of A Community
Getting Started: A Review Of Tangible Steps Towards Effecting Positive Change
Conclusion: Choose Your Battles Wisely
Your commitment on the Teach First programme is to propel your students to achieve ambitious academic goals
in an effort to make change. As new members of your school and community, you must approach any attempts
to make change with respect and humility.
This is even more critical if you seek to change policies or practices at your school that you believe to be
inhibiting your students' academic achievement. Your quest to close the achievement gap for your students in
your classroom may lead you to encounter other, related problems that you are eager to take on and overcome.
Perhaps there are special education placement policies that you believe could be adjusted to better serve the
needs of your students. Perhaps a mandatory dress-code check is leading to excessive tardiness to the start of
Period 1. Perhaps you have opinions about how money should be spent. As a member of your school
community, you may be able to influence some of those policies and decisions. If and when such issues truly
hinder your students' learning, you may feel the need to engage in those issues to maximise the likelihood that
your students can meet their academic goals. Of course, how you choose to approach the issues can be just as
important as which issues you choose to address.
Your greatest influence will come if you approach both your efforts to achieve significant gains with your
students and your efforts to change policy or practice with sensitivity to the dynamics of diversity.
A.
Effecting Change as a New Member of a Community
Among the dynamics of difference that virtually every Teach First participant encounters during his or her initial
two-year commitment to the classroom are the challenges inherent in being "new" to a community, or faculty, or
classroom. No matter what your race, ethnicity, religion, culture, background, sexual orientation, or gender may
be, as new cohort members you are entering a role with which you are unfamiliar, and in which most of those
around are unfamiliar with you. (This transition process has been identified by cultural anthropologists as a ‘rite
of passage’. See: Rites of Passage in Initial Teacher Training: Ritual, Performance, Ordeal and Numeracy Skills
Test Olwen McNamara, Lorna Roberts, Tehmina N. Basit and Tony Brown British Educational Research
Journal, Vol. 28, No. 6 (Dec., 2002), pp. 863-878)
When considering the additional layers of dynamics of difference and sameness that come from new
colleagues' and students' wide range of identities, you will be faced with a complex tapestry of expectations,
assumptions, and relationships that must be acknowledged and navigated in order for you to become a
successful agent of change.
These dynamics pose an interesting challenge for you as a new teacher. On one hand, you have been recruited,
selected, and trained because of your potential to effect significant gains and your demonstrated leadership
ability, which from Day One is focused on leadership in the classroom. Teach First’s collective mission as an
organisation, in fact, calls on participants and ambassadors to bring their leadership skills to bear on difficult
problems and to change an inequitable system. On the other hand, you are new to your classroom, school, and
community, and you may have little or no education experience. You have not yet proved yourself in this context
and may be lacking credibility as a leader in the classroom when you begin. Who are you to enter this unfamiliar
system with the intention of changing it?
This tension - between your great potential to effect change and your status as a newcomer with little initial
influence in your community - has a profound impact on many participants' experiences. Everyone, as new
teachers, struggle with gaining the necessary influence to be in a position to effect change and with choosing
which challenges to take on and which ones to let pass.
On occasion, some participants have failed to make those choices wisely. They have instead charged into their
new arenas with well-intended, but overly aggressive plans to change long-standing policies or practices. They
have attempted to solve a problem or make a change without the necessary sensitivity to the dynamics of
diversity that are at play in a particular context, and have therefore failed. Imagine a participant who, in his or her
first week, marches into the head teacher's office and demands that the policy barring field trips be changed. Or
imagine a new teacher who promptly tells his departmental leader how to restructure the literacy programme. Or
imagine a participant writing a letter to the editor of the newspaper to report on what she sees as
misappropriation of funds in the school Local Authority. Whether or not those participants are right on the merits
of their concerns, they probably doomed their cause with their somewhat arrogant assumption that they, as
newly arrived members of the school community, could immediately effect policy changes in their schools.
I knew early on that the only way to be "heard" at my school was to gain respect as an educator. In my first year. I worked
extremely hard to get my children to improve their standards and to do well in GCSE and APP standardised tests. During
nd
rd
my 2 and 3 year, my hard work paid off as my colleagues and senior managers listened and treated me as an equal
contributor to help solve the pressing issues occurring at our school.
Of course, many more participants have been successful agents of positive change in their schools - effecting
significant gains among their students and on a whole range school policies and practices. These positive
changes are a fundamental part of your teaching experience. In seeking to effect change, however, heed the
lessons learned by those who have done so before you.
The sum of our "lessons learned" about successfully making changes and solving problems as a new member
to your community can be boiled down to two critically important principles. First, the path to meaningful
leadership in your school and your community can only begin with success in your classroom. Second, you must
work toward your primary goal of success in your classroom and any derivative goals that impact school policy
or practice with respect and humility for those around you and the task before you.
Rule for Change No.1: It Starts With Success in Your Classroom
As we have talked to hundreds of participants who have in one way or another had a positive impact on their
schools and communities, we have seen an unfaltering pattern. In virtually every case, the teacher who is
successful in making changes outside of his or her classroom first built credibility through success inside his or
her classroom. Until you have your own successful programme in place in your classroom, your suggestions for
how to fix other systems have little credibility and therefore are unlikely to lead to any change in policies or
practices that you believe hinder your efforts to achieve those gains.
Rule for Change No.2: Respect and Humility Moves Mountains
A proven record of achievement is a necessary prerequisite to having ability to lead people to make positive
changes for the sake of your students. At the same time, as a new member of your community, you are
undeniably ignorant of much of what is going on and has gone on around you. Somewhat paradoxically, we
have found that a key to successfully effecting change in a new community is focusing on what you do not know
rather than on your proven record of leadership. You best way of succeeding in making meaningful change is to
approach each issue with a continued sense of respect and humility.
I approached every interaction with the notion that I was an outsider in my new school community, and I needed
to rely on the expertise of parents, fellow teachers, and other community members. I made sure than was
respectful in every interaction in which I engaged. They were the experts about the community, the school, their
children, and I wanted to work as a partner with them to make sure their students achieved. I believe that,
because of the way that I presented myself, I was well-received in my community as someone who had come
from the outside but was interested in achieving the same ultimate goal as my students' families, other teachers,
and community members – student achievement.
(The Education and Inspections Act 2006 introduced a duty on all maintained schools in England to promote
community cohesion and this came into effect on 1 September 2007.)
The fact is that no matter what your background and experience, you have much to learn about how things work
in your new community. Where you may simply see a problem that needs to be solved, others around you may
see a whole history and context that you do not. Where you may see an opportunity to change some policy or
practice for the benefit of students' learning, others around you may see a web of political dynamics that can
only be navigated in a particular way. And, where you may see what you believe to be an obvious solution,
others around you may, with the benefit of their experience, know that solution to be fatally flawed.
Thus, to be most effective as a leader for change-no matter how big or small the issue may be, you must
approach the project with profound respect for the perspectives and opinions of those around you and with the
humility to recognize how little you may know about the context of the problem. This approach will lead you to
ask the right questions of the right people, and to gain the support of those around you so that the change will
be lasting.
Clearly, one of the messages of this chapter is to check any inclination you may have to burst on the scene in
your community with plans to "change the world." Such an approach and attitude is disrespectful of the norms
and culture of your new community. It is also usually ultimately ineffective because you have not yet built the
credibility you need to have an influential voice on key issues.
We want to make clear, however, that this chapter is not a call for passivity; rather, the point is that to be
effective in your leadership for change you must 1.) build your credibility with success in the classroom and 2)
approach every interaction with the respect and humility appropriate for a newcomer.
B.
Getting Started: Tangible Steps Towards Effecting Positive Change
Here, we describe a number of concrete ways to establish yourself in your community as a leader, and discuss
methods that are particularly pertinent to proceeding effectively in your efforts to excel as a teacher and, where
important, bring about policy change:
Learn From Those around You. Successful teachers have found that they are most effective when they
remain open to learning (and are in fact on a constant mission to learn) from the community of teachers,
administrators, students, and students' families with whom they work. Most participants from previous cohorts
can share inspiring stories of the guidance and support they received from their experienced colleagues. Do not
wait to take advantage of opportunities to learn from colleagues who have considerably more experience than
you working in your community. A wonderful way to "break the ice" with your co-workers is to ask them for
advice and suggestions for your teaching.
If you have grand ideas to engage, motivate, and create with your students and community, first and foremost acquire the
capital that is necessary to get these BIG projects done. Humbly asking: What can I help other people accomplish? will
provide you the relationships and experience necessary to carry out your vision. By volunteering to help fellow staff
members at school events and leading an activity that no other teacher wanted, my students were the beneficiaries
because we were able to get a grant for reading incentives and prizes.
At times, participants may encounter situations where they feel that their "values" differ from those of the
communities in which they're placed. When you encounter a situation where community practices or norms
seem to conflict with your own values, talk with community members to understand the roots of the practice or
norms so as to be able to view the issue through another lens. You may discover that it is possible to accept
different practices or norms even if you don't agree with them. Even teachers whose methods you may be
determined not to adopt can often teach you an enormous amount about how to be effective in the classroom.
Develop Positive Relationships With Colleagues and Community Members. Not only can other teachers,
administrators, and other adults help make you a better teacher, but they can prove to be invaluable allies in
helping you access the resources you need or helping you work around obstacles, whether small or large.
Conversely, if your colleagues do not support your efforts, they can make it more difficult for you to accomplish
your goals for students.
Professionalism for a new teacher in a new community is listening without judgment, keeping opinions to yourself for a
while, making an effort to understand others' perspectives, learning as much as you can about the community, your
students, and their families, and engaging in school community events on the school’s terms {not your own)
To develop positive relationships, it will be important to understand how you are perceived by others, as this
self-awareness can help you determine how best to form positive relationships with colleagues and other adults.
The fact that you will be newcomers to this role in your schools and communities can in and of itself be a reason
for scepticism [however, new energy and enthusiasm can also be warmly welcomed as an asset to the school);
you may be entering a system where new teacher retention rates are very low, so whether you plan to teach for
two years or more, your colleagues may believe that they will be around long after you leave. If your race,
ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation, educational background, economic background, or any other aspect of
your identity is different from that of most of your colleagues, it may take time for some teachers to warm to you.
If the different characteristic or characteristics make you part of a more privileged group, some colleagues may
express scepticism toward your presence, particularly if you somehow convey that you "know it all" and are out
to "save" the school.
Finally, your participation in the Teach First programme may work either for or against you as you work to
develop these relationships. Teach First is controversial in some parts of the teacher education community given
its abbreviated Summer Institute training programme and two-year commitment that some perceive as shortterm, and various individuals may have either misconceptions or philosophical disagreements with our
programme. While many head teachers and teachers of the schools in which you will teach are committed to
Teach First, in some rare cases, your colleagues will have had negative experiences, either working with a
participant or merely from having read the website.
Very often, however, persistent efforts to get to know others and to ask them for help and guidance pay off as
others sense your commitment to their students and discover commonalities on which to base their trust and
respect. Invest some time and energy "networking" with other teachers and adults. Sit with experienced teachers
at faculty meetings, attend local events, and work to meet and get to know your administrators. Consider Laura's
account of her relationship with an experienced teacher at her school:
"Well, it looks like we'll be teaching together this year," Mrs. Nero said as she walked into my
classroom. It was our September Inset day before the autumn term and I was feeling very
nervous after my first glimpse of my school, my colleagues, and my classroom. I had also just
found out that I would not be team-teaching with another Teach First participant, as we had
previously thought. Instead, I was paired with Mrs. Nero, whose reputation as a larger-than-life
teacher was legendary. Misbehaving children were apparently threatened with Mrs. Nero's
discipline in Year 7! To add to this, within that first day, I found out (from another teacher) that
Mrs. Nero is often assigned her share of the "difficult" PGCE students and that she most likely
was not going to be ecstatic about being teamed with a young TF teacher for the school year.
Needless to say, I was daunted by the task that lay before me.
Fast forward eight months and I have reflected on the evolution of my relationship with Mrs.
Nero, a teacher who once looked at me with doubtful eyes. How did the expression in her eyes
begin to change? When exactly was I welcomed?
Looking back on these eight months, I now realize that there was no huge event that
changed my status at the school or with Mrs. Nero. Nothing spectacular happened to integrate
me into the staffroom. There are simply a series of things that inevitably happen if you approach a
new environment with respect and professionalism. These things that happen are small building
blocks that chip away at old prejudices and deep doubts; and since all eyes are on us TF
participants during our first few months, all actions and words are noticed and remembered!
Thus, the cheerful hallway conversations, the staying behind after school to prepare for the
next day, the dedication shown to students, the willingness to help out, and the hard work is
noticed. No one will give you a medal for all of these things, but believe me, they will notice
and they will be appreciative. And so, Mrs, Nero's eyes, the eyes that were watching me the
closest, took in all of these things and she slowly began to accept me. She would bring me
supplies for my classroom, back me with certain difficult parents, and most importantly, she
supported me in front of the students. There has never been a time when she questioned my
methods in front of others and I am very sure that this isn't a result of her not questioning my
methods! Instead, she chose to see the successes rather than the failures of my first year.
Despite our disagreements over discipline (I know she thinks I’m too soft with the students)
and over the workload (mindmapping isn't considered real work) we have managed to forge
a strong relationship, one that benefits both of us.
From my part, the relationship was necessary; I needed to work with Mrs. Nero in order
to be successful at the school. However, I realise that she did not face that similar need, She
could have ignored me or put up with me for the duration of my stay. Instead, she welcomed
me as a friend and colleague even though she wasn't aware that she wanted to! Her
experience and her strengths have made my experience a far more valuable one, I know
that next year will be even better, in part, because I will again be teaching with my friend,
Mrs. Nero.
The point of this reflection is that we all encounter colleagues who aren't too sure of us.
That is an obstacle that either has faced us all or will face us at some point in the future.
However, there is always a way around the obstacle, but only if you choose to overcome it. I
made that choice on the very first day and for that, I will be eternally thankful. I can honestly
say that all of the unease was worth it - I know that I have been changed and I think that if
you asked Mrs. Nero, she would probably admit that I have affected her in the same way!
However, be sure to catch her on a good day!
Work with Students' Families. In particular, invest time and energy building relationships with students'
families, whilst also maintaining professional standards. This promotes community cohesion; they can be
your greatest ally in leading your students to academic gains, and their support when you are trying to
effect broader changes is crucial.
Maintain the Highest Level of Professionalism Professional conduct is one of the keys to building positive
relationships with colleagues, supervisors, students and community members, Following the conventions of
your school - although some of them may at first seem restrictive or odd to you - is the most effective way
to become a trusted member of the school. As a newcomer to your school community, your behaviour will
likely be under the scrutiny of those who wonder who you are and what you're about. Behavio urs that may
at first seem peripheral to your core objectives - like dressing appropriately, submitting accurate attendance
records, lesson plans and grades on a timely basis, and arriving punctually - send strong messages to all
those who are observing your behaviour. These habits demonstrate that you are dependable, and that you
respect your job and the people with whom you're working. They also help you build social capital to obtain the
resources and make the changes you need to serve your students best. Here are some concrete tips to help you
do so:
Professionalism means saying “Good Morning” and “Good Evening" to everyone in the school: the secretaries,
care-takers. cleaners, canteen workers, fellow teachers. It means handing in your lessons on time each week
and being early to staff meetings, even if it 's just to chat with your colleagues. It means wearing clothing that
doesn't show a tattoo, your belly, your exotic piercings, or your undergarments. It means smiling, listening, and
talking to your corridor neighbours, and it means asking for help from those who have been there longer than
you.

Dress appropriately. For a new teacher in a new community, appearance counts. Your colleagues and
your students will draw conclusions about you based on how you dress. They will respond to you in
particular ways based on those conclusions. In order to avoid conclusions that will make it more difficult for
you to be effective, you need to think critically about the messages your appearance sends. Do you come
across as casual? Disrespectful? Disorganised? Rebellious? Young? Not serious? If so, how might these
impressions sabotage your efforts to assert your authority, to build relationships with older (potentially more
conservative) colleagues, to win the confidence of families and to communicate to your students the value
and seriousness of education?

Attend school every day and be punctual (i.e. slightly early) to school meetings. While there may be
an exceptional reason why it is necessary to miss a day of school (or a meeting) participants aiming to
reach high levels with their students are in school (or attending meetings) consistently. If you need to stay
home because of a serious illness, call the appropriate school official as soon as possible. Develop a
substitute teacher's folder in case of emergency. You should also "sign out" in the main office if you need to
leave school during the day for any reason. Present your apologies before missing a meeting and arrange
for someone to take notes or brief you afterwards. Doing all these things communicates that you take your
teaching responsibilities seriously and that you want to ensure that every moment of school time - even
those when you are absent - is used as well as possible.

Cultivate a relationship with your head of department (HoD) and professional/ subject mentors. Your
head of department is your line manager and a school leader, and it is your job to defer to his or her
instructions. In addition to realising that your HoD has much more experience than you and often faces
difficult judgment calls with many variables at play, you can take proactive steps to build a strong
relationship. You might update your HoD on what is going on in your classroom, invite him or her to a
special class presentation, or slip a copy of your class newsletter in his or her mailbox. You should also
consult with your HoD and PM/SM before planning any type of school trip, or watching a movie in your
classroom that could possibly be considered frivolous or objectionable. Not only can your HoD be a
valuable advisor to you, but he or she is also ultimately responsible for everything that happens in your
subject department and may want to be kept aware of any plans that could be considered out of the
ordinary.

Comply with all school regulations. Different schools have different expectations for their teachers, and
you may not immediately understand the importance and rationale behind all of the regulations at your
school. You may need to reserve audiovisual equipment a week in advance. Doing so may seem an
unnecessary hassle when you come up with a great idea the night before a lesson and need a TV/VCR/ CD
to make it a reality. You could be required to provide students with a pass before sending them to the nurse
or to the toilet. You may feel that it is more important to focus on teaching your class than it is to interrupt
your class to fill out a pass. There may be a special procedure for covering textbooks; for notifying the office
if someone is planning to observe you teach; or sending your attendance register within the first five
minutes of the lesson. Some of these regulations may seem unnecessary or even burdensome. It is
important that in this area, as in others, you seek to understand the point of view of those who have put the
regulations in place; that you trust that they have done so with good intentions, and that you comply with
these regulations. If you get the reputation of someone who is insubordinate or who won't follow simple
rules, it will be much harder to gain the support of your line managers when you need it in order to best
serve your students. The office secretary or an experienced teacher in your department can help you get up
to speed on these regulations. They can also be very helpful in providing you with background information
that will help you to understand the rationale for these regulations - and may be able to help you find a way
to get the TV/VCR/CD after all.

Be careful with records and documents. Teachers are expected to juggle a lot of paperwork and
documentation: attendance, grades, assignments to grade, schedules, notes home, permission slips,
special education documents, and discipline referrals - for starters. In most cases, this documentation is
required of your school by the Local Authority. If you do not complete them, your school may suffer
penalties or be exposed to potential lawsuits. If you need to write a discipline referral, maintaining accurate
records allows you to be taken seriously by administrators. It is far less effective to say "Paul's always late
to class" than it is to report that "Paul was late five times in the past two weeks - 12/12, 13/12, 15/12, 19/12
and 02/12." In addition, be sure to remain official, factual and dispassionate in your communications,
particularly if you are responding to a family's complaint or an administrator's request. Consider having your
SM proof-read such letters. Written documents have a way of coming back to haunt their well-intentioned
authors, so you will want to be sure you can stand by every word that you've chosen.

Uphold school rules. If you are not much older than your students, students may pressure you to bend
rules and be "the cool teacher." But by doing so, you would be undermining the authority of your colleagues
who stand firm to uphold school policy. Learn the rationale for school rules, such as no chewing gum or
shirts tucked in, and communicate this honestly with your students. If your school has a dress code, you will
need to enforce it. Some schools expect all students to be silent during the morning announcements, If
there are students who have not submitted their Internet permission slips, it will be up to you to plan an
alternative activity for these children while the rest of the class is doing research on the Web. You are also
responsible for monitoring the halls and supervising students on the school grounds, and you may be
expected to oversee student arrival, lunch, break or dismissal.


Maintain your boundaries. You will want to avoid any suggestion of an inappropriate relationship with a
student. By touching students, driving students in your car without parent or guardian consent, or
scheduling one-on-one tutorials without anyone else's knowledge, you are opening yourself up to potential
allegations of misconduct. If you need to detain a student after class, alert another teacher before doing so
and be sure to keep the door open. Also, you should stop students from flattering you about the way you
look, or talking about your romantic life. If you are unsure whether your comments or actions are
inappropriate or not, err on the side of caution.
Professionalism extends outside of school. (Reference: 2009 GTC Code of Conduct) When you're
acting out of "teaching mode" (for instance, at a bar or a dance club), avoid venues where you're likely to
bump into students or their families. This does not mean abandoning your social life during your entire
teaching career, but it does mean being aware how you may be viewed in your community and paying
attention to where you let your hair down. (For current media debates on this issue view:
http://www.thisisstaffordshire.co.uk/news/Teacher-s-month-ban-complaints/article-1742789-detail/article.html
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1210974/Teachers-moan-new-code-conduct-stop-getting-drunkweekends.html)

Be discreet. Like a doctor or lawyer, you will learn specific and personal details about your students and
their families. Keep sensitive information to yourself and avoid gossip. (There may be times where you
learn information - for instance, about physical or sexual abuse - that you are required by law to report.)
You should also never make comments about other teachers in front of your students or colleagues.

Express your gratitude. The librarians, secretaries, caretakers, bus drivers, canteen workers, security
guards and other school personnel work extremely hard so that your school runs smoothly every day. Be
friendly, and be sure to acknowledge their contribution to your work.

Remain flexible and stay positive. The copy machine may break. Supplies may run out. Faculty meetings
may be scheduled the same afternoon you need to grade assignments, and it would be rude to do
paperwork while your principal is addressing the school. A fire drill may interrupt your most important
lesson. You will need to muster your patience and ingenuity to rise above these inconveniences; dwelling
on circumstances outside your control is mental energy you'll want to save for helping your students. You
also need to call upon your generosity of spirit to remind yourself that your colleagues are most likely not
intentionally creating obstacles to make your job more difficult. Rather, they too are doing the best they can
to work with a system that can be challenging, disorganised and unpredictable. As a member of your
community, your energy and emotions affect the tenor of the environment. You play a role in creating
positive or negative vibes at your school.
Learn About the History and Culture of Your Region. When you arrive in your region, you will be afforded
opportunities to learn about the region, its history, and its culture. Take full advantage of those opportunities,
even if you are already familiar with the community you will be working in. While no workshop or tour can give
you a full picture of a new community, beginning to explore your region provides foundation on which to build
your knowledge of your community throughout the year. Moreover, your interest in learning about your region
will be another sign of your professionalism. This is an on-going process... you should sustain all of the above
throughout your teaching career.
C.
Conclusion: Choose your Battles Wisely
You have joined Teach First because you want to change things. As mentioned above, we do not want to
suppress that interest and energy because such an attitude is exactly what it is going to take - in both the short
and long term - to close the achievement gap for students from low-income communities. We do, however, want
to encourage you to choose your causes carefully, strategically, and purposefully. Generally, when you decide
to take on existing practices, it is wise to recruit allies within your school who can help you determine how best
to approach your goal and perhaps even help you in the pursuit of that goal.
Making wise choices about what issues to tackle means choosing just those causes that align with your core
mission; as a teacher of students who are on the losing end of the achievement gap. Your litmus test for
investing energy in any particular quest for change should be whether or not the change will positively affect
students' academic development and if you're in a good position to bring about that change.
You may find yourself pulled in many directions by many motivations as opportunities arise for leadership in and
around your school. Many of those motivations may be absolutely valid and worthy, but they may not actually be
for the benefit of students' academic growth. You might, for example, see the need for a recycling programme in
your school. Or, you might disagree with the application of a certain item in the dress code. Or you might
disagree with your HoD's insistence that you remove a particular poster from your classroom wall. You must ask
yourself: Is this worth the energy it would take to see this issue through? Will my work on this issue actually
advance my students' learning? Given the precious value of your time and energy, we believe that you should
focus your leadership energies on those "battles" that will truly help to close the achievement gap for your
students.
In deciding whether to pursue an agenda that requires change outside of classroom, newcomers to
communities must evaluate the implications, challenges, and potential consequences of questioning family,
community, school, and regional norms. Herb Kohl, a well-known education reformer and advocate for
social change, reflects in his book, Creative Maladjustment and the Struggle for Public Education, on his
mistakes in questioning the system when he was too early in his career. He writes:
When it is impossible to remain in harmony with one's environment without giving up
deeply held moral values, creative maladjustment becomes a sane alternative to giving up
altogether. Creative maladjustment consists of breaking social patterns that are morally
reprehensible, taking conscious control of one's place in the environment, and readjusting the
world one lives in based on personal integrity and honesty - that is, it consists of learning to
survive with minimal moral and personal compromise in a thoroughly compromised world and
of not being afraid of planned and willed conflict, if necessary.
Sometimes decisions to maladjust are made without thought and can lead to trouble.
Such trouble befell me twice at the beginning of my teaching career. During my six weeks of
student teaching I got into trouble for trying things that clashed with the style and practice of
my supervising teacher. I was accused of getting too close to the students, of being too
informal, and of replacing structured learning activities with open-ended, cross-disciplinary
projects. When I was asked to do things that in my judgment were detrimental to student
learning and self-respect, I changed them without asking permission. This maladjustment
made sense in terms of maintaining my integrity and helping my students, but it was suicide
for a student teacher who didn't have his or her own classroom and who had no status within
the school. Two weeks before the end of my student-teaching assignment, I was
unceremoniously terminated by the supervising teacher and ordered out of the school by the
principal.
The same thing happened during my first teaching assignment.... At that time, my
maladjustment was neither creative nor effective, and I continue to wonder how much more
useful I might have been to the school and the community had my responses been more
tempered and my maladjustment better thought-out.
However, as a beginning teacher I found myself with too much to learn, too little
support, and an inflated sense of how much reform I could accomplish by myself without
'¹
having experience or friends or allies within the community or the school district.
As Kohl implies, it is important for you to ask yourself whether pursuing a change will compromise your
ability to succeed in your core mission. For example, if it will cost you your job, by definition the change
prevents you from expanding the opportunities available to your students. If your actions make your HoD or
head teacher resistant to your efforts, they may compromise your ability to pursue other initiatives that are
equally or more important. While it is admirable to act according to your convictions, you must do so
strategically and think about whether the end results of your efforts will truly be in the best interests of your
students.
I learned early on in my teaching career that creating change in my school was a delicate procedure. You have
to choose your battles - follow the lead and advice of experienced teachers in your school. While you might
initially be frustrated with some of the administrative goals in your school, as time passes you will find that you
have a greater ability to make things happen. But, in the words of Confucius, the journey of a thousand miles
begins with a single step. The first steps will be moderate and cautious, but as the year passes you will be
amazed how far you’ve progressed.
¹Kohl, H. (1994) “I Won’t Learn From You” And Other Thoughts on Creative Maladjustment. New York: The New York Press