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Jeffrey Lewis

September 2008

Recent efforts to close the gap in achievement between African American and White students have produced disappointing results.

But some classrooms are quite successful in helping young students succeed. How do they do it? That question has driven WCER researcher Jeffrey Lewis and colleagues to pinpoint the characteristics of interactions in these classrooms. Working with Eunhee Kim, Angel Gullón-Rivera, and Lauren Woods, Lewis analyzed two urban classrooms where teachers seemed particularly successful in working with African American children from low-income families.

“Solidarity in community” seems to be the key.

Lewis’s study was part of a larger project titled “Learning Through Teaching in an After-School Pedagogical Laboratory” (L-TAPL). His colleague Michele Foster developed L-TAPL as a teaching laboratory to link community-nominated master teachers in urban elementary schools with teachers who wanted to improve their effectiveness with urban children from low-income families.

L-TAPL documented and analyzed the processes by which children learned and by which inexperienced teachers learned to teach. The program met 3 days a week for 2 hours after school. The curriculum included language arts, math, and science. The teachers were permitted to develop their own curricula, with the condition that they include those basic skills. The program lasted 16–20 weeks.

“Children in a classroom form a unique community,” Lewis says. “Research has found a two-way relationship between community members’ sense of belonging and their morale.” Lewis says a sense of belonging is an important feature of productive classrooms, and especially for African American children.

When teachers offer nurturing care to early-grades students, they help to integrate students’ social, emotional, and intellectual development into their general school experiences. Lewis says five teacher practices appear to support positive development in children’s behavior:

• Cultivating a sense of “we-ness” and shared interests;
• Creating opportunities for all children to participate and develop skills;
• Nurturing positive classroom identities through teacher-student interactions;
• Integrating children’s ideas, interests, and experiences into the curriculum; and
• Helping children to maintain their integrity and feel comfortable in the classroom.

Solidarity in community develops as teachers encourage children to identify with and support one another in the classroom. In the successful classrooms Lewis and colleagues observed, teachers rarely isolated children or allowed children to isolate one another, either for praise or criticism. They treated all children as if they were able to learn. They encouraged them to learn from one another. Teachers’ interactions with children did not draw attention to differences in academic ability or behavior. Students felt connection and mutual support. Solidarity promoted the well-being of each class member.

Discipline with Compassion
Teachers in successful classrooms encouraged a sense of community through their speech, their instructional activities, and their disciplinary activities. They encouraged students to interact. Teachers made regular use of inclusive words like we, us, and our.

But kids are kids, and some did periodically present challenging behaviors. The instances Lewis observed were minimally disruptive, however, because teachers encouraged children to resolve conflict quickly and not to “pile on.”

For example, children laughed when a student noisily fell from his chair. But the teacher did not call attention to this potentially disruptive behavior. Instead, she focused on the children’s response to what happened and their failure to consider the welfare of the child who took the tumble. When one boy tried to participate in a way that could have been divisive or used to his advantage, she interrupted him and reasserted the core values of solidarity and care.

• Successful teachers set clear expectations for children and create an atmosphere of trust where students can practice the skills and dispositions expected of them. Successful teachers demonstrate flexibility, yes, but core values, behaviors, and practices are non-negotiable.

• Successful teachers cultivate a sense of connection through a shared positive identity, despite differences in students’ academic abilities. They do not allow children to create social and academic hierarchies.

Education is both science and art, Lewis says, and it’s misguided to reduce education to the “science of education.” Successful teachers attend to children as whole people, as members of complex social systems. They address children’s need for connection to each other, their families, and the places where they live.