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Jones, S. P., & Sheffield, E. C. (2018). What kid’s love (and hate) about school: Reflections on difference. Gorham, ME: Myers Education Press.

For a couple of reasons, this book has been on my mind of late. Firstly, many kids are not in school, at least not in body, and I know that many of them are missing the things they love about school. I also know some kids who are not minding that they’re learning from home as it has let them avoid some of the things they hate. Secondly, as I’ve watched the news over the past year, I’ve wondered so many times about the ways in which the education system in this country is complicit in what I would call a gross lack of critical thinking. (Just two of many pieces of evidence…people who were and are influenced by lies ­­­­­­promulgated on social media to the extent of law-breaking and people who claimed to be surprised by violence in a country that is built on the foundations of the violence of slavery and the near obliteration of indigenous people – “This isn’t America!”)

And even though this book is about “kids,” the principles shared in its pages are for “students.” In my experience, the same kinds of things that make school work (or not) for students in preK-12 schools are pretty much the same things that make it possible for college students to learn and thrive.

Jones and Sheffield have pulled together the wisdom of so many important voices in this conversation. I want to make just a few summary points about what kids love and hate about school and encourage you to read the entire book to get the details and practical guidance that is so generously offered.

Learning environments in which students can learn and thrive…

·      Make sure that everyone belongs (safe and valued in all their identities) through affirming relationships among teachers, classmates, school leaders and staff at every level

·      Include regular “check-ins” to assess students’ bandwidth, especially during the pandemic, and let students have a moment to reflect on their learning

·      Are culturally responsive, recognizing that culture affects how students relate to the material and what makes them comfortable enough to have lots of available bandwidth for learning it

·      Recognize students “funds of knowledge;” start with their assets

·      Make assessment part of everyday so we’re not trying to teach students what they already know

·      Give students just enough help and just when they need it (Vygotsky’s “zone of proximal development”)

·      Feel like “makerspaces” where students and teachers create and learn together

·      Have faith in their students – “all children…start school with a desire to learn” (Rueda, p. 77)

·      Use universal design to create classrooms for everyone – no one is forgotten or excluded

·      See mistakes as golden opportunities to grow our brains – potential is precious

·      Have curriculum in which all students can see themselves

·      Use restorative practices in place of an emphasis on punishment and humiliation

What do students hate? What impedes learning for so many students?

·      The opposite of all the points above

·      Fear – people can’t learn when they’re afraid (not much at all happens in the panic zone)

·      Forced conformity – when the students who are rewarded and valued are those who just do their homework, come to class on time, and pay attention (be quiet?)

·      Bluntly, “…culturally inept curriculum and authoritative, bullying teachers” (Harvell, p. 29)

·      School that works for some… “Most adults and even many people still in school today experienced their education with the same number of options in every class: one.” (Schulze, p. 118)

·      Instead of love and support, lots of blaming and shaming (of students and families)

·      Teachers who are stressed out and tapped out, wanting to do right by students but not having the bandwidth themselves to do the next good thing

This list could go on and on. Fortunately, this wonderful book has a strengths perspective; while clearly articulating what is seriously wrong, it gives us hope by sharing many ideas about how we can do things right for kids and teachers and families and communities.

Especially in the current climate in this country, this statement about the purpose of schools feels vitally relevant in this moment: “…the production of an educated citizenry, which, in actuality, has been a deeply entrenched and often unexamined view toward producing and reproducing citizens that follow traditional lines of White and heteronormative power and privilege” (Carter, Sugimoto, Stoehr, & Carter, p. 104). Have we accomplished this too well? Watching the social unrest, the political violence, and the gross inequalities brought to light by the pandemic, I suggest that a close examination of our entire educational system is in order. This book offers many beginnings to long-overdue conversations.

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Jack, A. A. (2019). The privileged poor: How elite colleges are failing disadvantaged students. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

 A couple of years ago, I gave a couple of talks at Harvard University, first at Gutman Library at the Graduate School of Education, from which I had earned my doctorate back in the day. The second talk was to heads of houses. Having not been an undergrad at Harvard, I was not familiar with that scene; I suspected that bandwidth issues would not be relevant to students at a school where financial need was not supposed to be keep anyone from attending. Wrong. These student life professionals were very interested in the concepts around the depletion of cognitive capacity due to poverty, racism, classism, homophobia, etc. Just recently, I read Anthony Jack’s The Privileged Poor and now I have a better understanding of what those heads of houses were saying.

This book is about the struggles of students who come from low-income or poor families when they attend elite universities. A small proportion of students (about 15%) from the bottom half of the income distribution in the US go to one of these nearly 200 elite schools, so their minority status alone sets them up for some challenges. Through a series of interviews with students at one of these institutions – he uses the pseudonym of Renowned University – Jack describes in moving and authentic narrative the experiences of these students as they attempt to survive and thrive in this rarefied environment.

Jack makes a distinction between the Privileged Poor (PP) and the Doubly Disadvantaged (DD). The PP are students who grew up in poverty but had gone to college-prep/elite high schools with mostly white and wealthy classmates, where the emphasis was on close relationships with teachers and the kind of independent learning that is expected in college. The DD students grew up in poor families as well but they went to public high schools with equally poor and often majority non-white classmates where they excelled but where the educational expectations were very different than those in college. One of Jack’s major points is that we often consider students coming from poor families (who are often black or brown) to be a monolithic group, and he asserts that ignoring the fact that they come from very different experiences, “…limits our understanding of the ways in which poverty and inequality shape the lives of today’s undergraduates” (p. 21).

Whereas lack of ready money formed significant barriers for most of these students, the DD’s also suffered from lack of social and cultural capital; they didn’t know the rules and didn’t know to ask about them. One student described an environment that was toxic. He quoted a DD classmate who had had to take some time off school because, “I couldn’t breathe here. This place totally destroyed me!” He said, “You feel like you don’t fit in. You feel like you’re alone, like there’s no one that can relate.” The sense of not being able to breathe is, of course, very disturbing in light of the social protest in response to state violence against black people, emphasizing to me how institutions of higher education mostly reflect the society at large.

 In addition to the rich analysis of the contrasts in experience between the PP and DD students, Jack relates, through the students, powerful examples of the ways in which money is a critical factor in being a student and that the lack of it can be debilitating and humiliating. He examines how programs that are designed to offer opportunities to earn money come at a severe price, like some students cleaning the bathrooms of other students. A program that provided free tickets to musical and cultural events for poor students included policies and procedures that grossly and publicly outed those students as poor, serious eroding the benefit. The practice of closing all the dining halls during Spring Break and other campus holidays left poor students without food, causing them to go without food or get by on a diet of low-cost, low-quality fare. These are just examples of the ways that both the PP and DD students realized that money was a requirement for full citizenship at the university.

We know the bandwidth costs of not feeling a sense of belonging, and added to that is the cost of poverty, exacerbated by both university programs, policies, and practices that assume a level of wealth that singles out those who don’t have it. One of the most powerful messages I took from Jack’s research is that we need to not lump all students together because they fit our preconceived notions of students based on one aspect of their identities or backgrounds. We need to talk with and listen deeply to students and respond to what they say they need, not to a formula we have devised based on our assumptions. Even those of us who don’t work at elite institutions (most of us!) can use the valuable wisdom that Jack has presented in The Privileged Poor.

Teaching and learning with free students.

On the Wednesday morning of Thanksgiving week, I spoke with a group of students in a Global Class hosted by Durham College in Ontario. There were about 40 people signed onto the call from several countries including Canada, China, Russia, Indonesia, Malaysia, and India. We talked about the ways in which bandwidth was depleted by the social/economic “differentisms” in their countries. These bandwidth-stealing phenomena differed in the particulars but were all based on exclusion, hostility, and messages of “you don’t belong here” and “you’re not good enough.”

I talked about how understanding the idea of bandwidth – how it is depleted by social realities beyond the control of students – helped take the blame and the shame away and could help students recover. Just as we were winding up the conversation, Inga Koryagina, a professor of marketing at Plekhanov Russian University of Economics, joining the class from Moscow, made the comment, “Blame and shame are great management tools. It's hard to manage free people." Her comment stayed with me all day.

“It’s hard to manage free people.” What a powerful statement. It would be easy to think, “Well, of course, that’s Russia, where people aren’t free like they are in the US.” My mind immediately went to students, and I thought of the wisdom of the phrase, “It’s hard to teach free students.” It's much more troublesome to teach and learn with free students as compared to those who have been and are being subdued by blame and shame. And as long as we attribute the persistent failure of certain groups of students to individual deficits, we can choose not to look at societal and school factors that continue to zap their bandwidth.

My kids – now all grown-ups – went to a wonderful neighborhood elementary school where there was lots of diversity among the students and fantastic teachers dedicated to student learning. My oldest daughter had a first-grade teacher who ran an open classroom in which students moved around freely based on their activities and learning needs. She loved that class; she thrived with that kind of freedom. A memorable moment was when she came home after school on the first day of second grade, where the teacher ran a much more standard sit-at-your-desk-all-day classroom. My daughter was appalled. “She expects us to sit at our desks all day and be quiet!” This teacher was excellent, as it turned out, just with a different style.

As I reflect on my own children’s journeys through elementary school (and later through middle and high school and then through university), what mattered was not freedom of movement or “strict” vs. lenient, it was the way each teacher nurtured the freedom of their minds. It was about how the teachers loved each of their students and strove to bring out the best in them and how they expected the best from each of them. There was a teacher at the elementary school who, with his fifth-grade class every year, wrote and produced an opera – script, score, sets, costumes, and all. Amazing! That was freedom. And it was tons of work for the teacher; way more than if he had kept the kids at their desks with pencils and books.

Yes, it is harder to teach truly free students. We have to give up a bit of control. We need to be willing to see that different students need different kinds of instruction, support, encouragement, involvement. I suspect, though, that any teacher would tell you that it’s so worth it to teach and learn with students who are using their whole minds and hearts and whose curiosity drives them to push on the boundaries of their own potential.  Students need access to all their bandwidth to make this happen. As Bell says, “Wonder…is an experience that happens to an available mind” (2017, p. 18).

In order for all students to thrive in school, at all levels, we need to place the blame and shame for failure where it belongs, on societal realities, like poverty, racism, classism, violence, etc. We need to create learning environments in which all students are free – and have the available cognitive capacity – to learn and thrive. This can happen within any classroom organizational scheme and is dependent on things like the recognition of students “funds of knowledge” (Moll, Amanti, Neff, & Gonzalez, 1992), designing “identity-safe” spaces (Steele, 2010), and making sure students basic needs are met. Free students demand lots from us but give back way more in the end.

Bell, R. (2017, September/October). How poverty kills wonder and what we can do about it. The Humanist, 16-19.

Moll, L. C., Amanti, C., Neff, D., & Gonzalez, N. (1992, Spring). Funds of knowledge for teaching: Using a qualitative approach to connect homes and classrooms. Theory Into Practice, XXXI (2).

Steele, C. M. (2010). Whistling Vivaldi: How stereotypes affect us and what we can do. New York, NY: W. W. Norton.

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Hammond, Z. (2015). Culturally responsive teaching & the brain: Promoting authentic engagement and rigor among culturally and linguistically diverse students. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin.

One of my mantras around helping students learn is “connecting the known to the unknown.” In this book, Zaretta Hammond provides a handbook full of practical ways to do that, focused on the reality that, “Culture, it turns out, is the way that every brain makes sense of the world.” (p. 22) The point of the book: if we don’t teach in ways that connect with students’ cultures and ways of knowing, we will never light up their brains and help them transition from dependent-learners to independent learners.

There are so many words of wisdom and concrete ideas in this book about making real this idea of culturally responsive teaching. Hammond guides teachers through four phases of development: awareness, learning partnerships, information processing, and community building. We need to first be aware of our own culture and position in society, develop a “cultural lens,” and learn to manage our own social-emotional response to students. Authentic relationships with students are key; without trust and a sense of belonging, students’ brains can get stuck in the primitive protection mode and no significant learning can occur. Different cultures have a variety of ways to process information; in many, it’s oral transmission through story-telling, music, movement, and rhythm. Teachers need to leverage those methods to engage students’ brains in learning. Community in the classroom means that children are in a “socially and intellectually safe space.” Only then can the automatic-shutdown parts of the brain quiet enough to let the analytical parts of the brain light up for deep learning.

Hammond provides a step-by-step guide to the “inside work” that each teacher has to do to become a culturally responsive teacher, first by getting clear about the layers of our own cultural upbringing. She helps us think about how to form learning partnerships with students, how to examine and rid ourselves of deficit thinking to see students as equal partners in key alliances focused on learning – theirs and ours. In trusting alliances, students are willing to take the necessary risks that are a central part of learning new information and ways of knowing and thinking. She shows us how to assess and evaluate student learning, giving feedback in ways that students will see as valid, a necessary condition for them to use it for improvement.

We know that uncertainty is a huge bandwidth stealer for students. Hammond’s prescriptions for classrooms that are safe for risk-taking and relationship-building help us envision learning environments where all students can recover enough bandwidth to thrive as independent learners.

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Milner, H. R. (2015). Rac(e)ing to class: Confronting poverty and race in schools and classrooms. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Education Press.

Published in 2015, Milner’s book is amazingly prescient in its emphasis on students who are school-dependent. The harsh reality, brought to the forefront by the challenges of remote schooling, is that some children depend on public schools much more than do others, and are, therefore, much more seriously disadvantaged by the educational fallout of the pandemic.

Milner emphasizes early in the book that although race is a social construct, developed by human beings so that one group might benefit at the expense of others, the consequence – racism – is very real and affects the lives of students everyday. He advocates for radical school reform so that we can realize “…an educational system where every child has an equal opportunity to succeed because it is not only his or her constitutional right, but also our nation’s moral responsibility and imperative (p. 26).

School-dependent children count on school for more than just an education. For many students, school provides breakfast, lunch, and healthy snacks, academic and social supports, and exposure to enriching experiences like museums, libraries, and cultural events. For school- dependent children and youth, a teacher can be one of the critical people in their life who notices them and their needs and who makes a significant difference to their learning and well-being.

Milner applies an equity lens to his work with school-dependent students. Equity does not mean the same for everyone; students living in poverty, for instance, may need more from school than do other students. Equity isn’t equality, but it’s “…being responsive to the particulars of the circumstances” (p. 34).

Even school-dependent students and their families have assets, what Moll and his colleagues (1992) call “funds of knowledge.” Students have learned many things from life experience, their culture, their families, their neighborhoods and communities.. Milner expresses this strengths perspective when he asserts that, “It is important that conversations about meeting the needs of school-dependent students (1) acknowledge the fact that some students’ needs are being met at home while others may not be and (2) take place within a space of possibility, optimism, and hope” (p. 50). Effective teachers and school staff “…practice at the intersection of students’ home and school lives” (p. 68).

To find out about students’ funds of knowledge, upon which teachers can build learning and development, Milner says we need to listen to their voices. He has talked with hundreds of students over many years, asking them about what they think teachers can do to meet their needs. These four themes have emerged:

·      Teachers need to be patient with students and motivate them to learn, as learning is a developmental process.

·      Teachers need to increase the rigor of their classes and their expectations of students.

·      Teachers need to dedicate themselves to their work, to plan and put forth effort, and to find joy in what they do.

·      Teachers need to communicate more often, more openly, and more directly with their students.

Most of Milner’s book is a series of practical ideas for helping school-dependent students learn, from reading, writing, and vocabulary to social skills, collaboration, and conflict resolution to relationship-building and culturally-responsive practice with students and their parents. He shares a series of case studies to illustrate the application of the ideas and approaches.

 This book was compelling to me when I read it a year ago and now, when teachers and school staff are struggling with how to maintain education quality in mostly remote classrooms, Milner’s wisdom is even more important in this moment. The appreciation of the fact that some students are more school-dependent than others will help us remember that those students need even more from their schools now and we can apply some of Milner’s ideas to our work today to help all students thrive even in these trying times.

Moll, L. C., Amanti, C., Neff, D., & Gonzalez, N. (1992, Spring). Funds of knowledge for teaching: Using a qualitative approach to connect homes and classrooms. Theory Into Practice, XXXI (2).

Let's remember...

As I (finally) publish this website after over two years of development, the timing seems perfect. If there is a time when we can all understand, at least a bit, about what it’s like to try to learn and function with depleted bandwidth, that time is now. I suspect there are very few people in the US (and globally, actually), who have been unaffected in some way by the pandemic - illness and death in our families, loss of employment, pressures of balancing home/family and work-from-home, work-away stress for essential workers in sometimes high-risk environments, long separations from family and friends, loneliness, depression, anxiety, uncertainty. All these are major bandwidth stealers.

As an economically-secure straight, white woman, the stress of the pandemic and related pressures have left me with seriously depleted bandwidth, even on my best days. Now, think of people - adults and children - who are persistently financially strapped, are black, brown, or indigenous, differently-abled, immigrant, identify as LGBTQ+, who are members of a religious minority, who live in an unsafe home or neighborhood, who have a chronic mental or physical illness, etc. The uncertainty from the pandemic is piled onto the realities of their everyday lives that already diminish their bandwidth.

When this pandemic is over and we’re back to being in our offices and kids are back in school and we all want to forget about all the stress and loss, let’s remember this: The loss of cognitive capacity that we all have experienced due to uncertainty, isolation, anxiety, stress, … was due to conditions beyond our control. When students in certain groups seem to have limited cognitive capacity because of the negative effects of poverty, racism, classism, homophobia, etc., it’s real, and no more under their control than the pandemic is under ours. That recognition, going forward, is the first step to creating learning environments in which ALL students can learn and thrive.