Ruby Payne: Nine strategies help raise the achievement of students living in poverty

Educational Leadership, April 2008, | Volume 65 | Number 7 Poverty and Learning    Pages 48-52

Students from families with little formal education often learn rules about how to speak, behave, and acquire knowledge that conflict with how learning happens in school. They also often come to school with less background knowledge and fewer family supports. Formal schooling, therefore, may present challenges to students living in poverty. Teachers need to recognize these challenges and help students overcome them. In my work consulting with schools that serve a large population of students living in poverty, I have found nine interventions particularly helpful in raising achievement for low-income students.

1. Build Relationships of Respect
2. Make Beginning Learning Relational (Collaborative)
3. Teach Students to Speak in Formal Register ("academic language")
4. Assess Each Student's Resources
5. Teach the Hidden Rules of School
6. Monitor Progress and Plan Interventions
7. Translate the Concrete into the Abstract
8. Teach Students How to Ask Questions
9. Forge Relationships with Parents

More detail: Update:

(a) the following has been misread by more than one commenter at the original Kitchen Table Math post.

As I understand Payne's work, the point of the "Assess Each Student's Resources" strategy is for the teacher to examine, not assume,  the extent of the student's  resources in each of the eight domains.  Let us take the "physical health" domain--a teacher may assume that the child's vision is excellent, because the child doesn't wear glasses, when in fact, the child's vision is poor and has never been evaluated.

(b) the "spiritual domain".  Not to my preferences.  However, let us take a non-trivial example: in the United States, a high-school student who had never even heard of Adam and Eve, the Garden of Eden, Cain and Abel, Abraham and his son, Moses, or any of the New Testament stories will struggle in both history and literature classes.  

4. Assess Each Student's Resources

School success, as it's currently defined, requires a huge amount of resources that schools don't necessarily provide. Teachers need to be aware that many students identified as "at risk" lack these outside resources. Interventions that require students to draw on resources they do not possess will not work. For example, many students in households characterized by generational poverty have a very limited support system. If such a student isn't completing homework, telling that student's parent, who is working two jobs, to make sure the student does his or her homework isn't going to be effective. But if the school provides a time and place before school, after school, or during lunch for the student to complete homework, that intervention will be more successful.

Financial: Money to purchase goods and services.

Emotional: The ability to control emotional responses, particularly to negative situations, without engaging in self-destructive behavior. This internal resource shows itself through stamina, perseverance, and good decision making.

Mental: The mental abilities and acquired skills (such as reading, writing, and computing) needed for daily life.

Spiritual: Some belief in a divine purpose and guidance.

Physical: Good physical health and mobility.

Support systems: Friends, family, and resource people who are available in times of need.

Relationships and role models: Frequent contact with adults who are appropriate role models, who nurture the child, and who do not engage in self-destructive behavior.

Knowledge of unspoken rules: Knowing the unspoken norms and habits of a group.

5. Teach the Hidden Rules of School

People need to know different rules and behaviors to survive in different environments. The actions and attitudes that help a student learn and thrive in a low-income community often clash with those that help one get ahead in school. For example, when adult family members have little formal schooling, the student's environment may be unpredictable. Having reactive skills might be particularly important. These skills may be counterproductive in school, where a learner must plan ahead, rather than react, to succeed. If laughter is often used to lessen conflict in a student's community, that student may laugh when being disciplined. Such behavior is considered disrespectful in school and may anger teachers and administrators....

The simple way to deal with this clash of norms is to teach students two sets of rules. I frequently say to students

You don't use the same set of rules in basketball that you use in football. It's the same with school and other parts of your life. The rules in school are different from the rules out of school. So let's make a list of the rules in school so we're sure we know them.

8. Teach Students How to Ask Questions

When you have asked a student what part of a lesson he or she didn't understand, have you heard the reply, "All of it"? This response may indicate that the student has trouble formulating a specific question.

Questions are a principal tool to gain access to information, and knowing how to ask questions yields a huge payoff in achievement (Marzano, 2007). In their research on reading, Palincsar and Brown (1984) found that students who couldn't ask good questions had many academic struggles.

To teach students how to ask questions, I assign pairs of students to read a text and compose multiple-choice questions about it. I give them sentence stems, such as "When ___________ happened, why did __________ do ___________?" Students develop questions using the stems, then come up with four answers to each question, only one of which they consider correct and one of which has to be funny.

I highly recommend that you read the whole article.  Of course, the Nine Strategies are also useful in all classrooms.

Also see:  Times article on Payne along with a link to the follow-up post at Kitchen Table Math  on oral cultures and direct questions.

Comments

[Rob O.]

Amazingly, I don't see "thrust computer technology upon student" anywhere on this list. Yet, that's the predominant approach that everyone seems to favor when dealing with third-world children. Why should poverty-stricken American children be any different?

Point is, sticking a $100 notebook in a kid's hands isn't magically going to equate to a better learning experience or improved educational opportunities. I'd contend that there are far better applications for that $100 within nearly any school system - and that's even ignoring the considerable back-end costs required to make that notebook usable.