On the power of teachers to counter the effects of poverty


  • July 26, 2016
  • /   Shannon Nickinson
  • /   education

Tammy Pawloski, professor of education at the Francis Marion University Center of Excellence to Prepare Teachers of Children in Poverty in Florence, S.C.,
spoke to Escambia School District principals and teacher-leaders on July 25 at Booker T. Washington High School in Pensacola. Credit: Shannon Nickinson.

Tammy Pawloski believes in the power of the brain.

She also believes in the tremendous power that people have to influence it.

Pawloski is director of the Center of Excellence to Prepare Teachers of Children in Poverty at Francis Marion University in Florence, S.C. She was the keynote speaker at the July 25 Escambia administrators conference at Booker T. Washington High School.

Nearly 300 principals and teachers gathered to hear from Pawloski, who spoke as a kindergarten teacher and as head of a center that offers a certification of specialized training for teachers who will work in poverty schools.

She also spoke as the mother of a child of poverty. Pawloski’s son, whom she adopted, had a birth mother who had no prenatal care during her pregnancy and who used alcohol, drugs and tobacco during her pregnancy.

Her son — who Pawloski said did not speak a word until he was more than 2 ½ years old — is now at college on an academic and football scholarship.

“Poverty matters,” she said. “It can have a significant effect on brain development and school achievement.”

Pawloski noted advances in the study of the brain in recent years have made it possible to understand more than we ever have about how the brain develops and functions. She noted that studies show the importance of the formative years of birth to 5 in early brain development — and the toll poverty can take on a developing brain.

It’s harm that can show up in school later in everything from vocabulary skills that lag peers to poor impulse control and the lack of the ability to focus, she said.

‘Life hacks’

She talked about defining poverty not at just an income level set by the federal government — which for one person with a child is $16,337 a year.

It’s more revealing to measure poverty rates in terms of “the absence of resources” — things like sleep, good nutrition, access to health care, time with their parents, relationships, money and role models — that can help mitigate the effects of poverty and stress on children.

Those are what she calls “life hacks” that some people have access to and others don’t. Things that make it easier not just to live, but to thrive and survive.

“If you didn’t have the resources,” she said, “how would you know what opportunities you’d missed?”

That’s why, Pawloski believes, schools can be a place of “solid, unwavering support if we use what we know about the brain” to make good choices for children.

What is the achievement gap — and why it matters

The “achievement gap” — first identified by researchers Betty Hart and Todd Risely — shows that children from poor families hear fewer words by age 3 than their peers from wealthier families.

Not only do they hear fewer total words, poor children are more likely to hear more prohibitive words and phrases than their peers. Both phenomena limit a youngster’s ability to develop language at the rate they might otherwise.

Kids who hear fewer words are less likely to develop on time the skills they need to become good readers who can synthesize new information and apply it in the future.

That’s why the Studer Community Institute and the University of West Florida included kindergarten readiness in the Pensacola Metro Dashboard when it was created in 2014. The dashboard is a set of 16 metrics meant to provide a snapshot of the economic, educational and social well-being of the community.

Kids who struggle to read at grade level in elementary school are more likely to struggle throughout school, are less likely to graduate on time, and therefore are more likely to have their job prospects limited.

That link to economic prosperity — for the person and the community — is a key piece of why communities have a vested interest in making early learning readiness a priority.

Even if you don’t have young children in your life.

Big and small wins

Pawloski offered advice, large and small, to help students — from having students strike a yoga “power pose” before doing work to using what is known about brain development to change the way teachers respond to the children “who challenge us the most.”

I_used_to_think_now_I_think

Pawloski shared an exercise her center did with South Carolina teachers who were working in a high-poverty school. The exercise is based on the premise of a book by Richard Elmore, “I Used to Think ... And Now I Think”; it uses interviews with teachers sharing how their thoughts on school reform changed over time.

As Pawloski shared, teachers at this school used to think  their students lacked motivation, that their parents didn’t care if they did well, and they didn’t understand why parents don’t come to school events or meetings.

They came to think, Pawloski said, that their students “lacked background experience” rather than motivation; that parents “may not have the means to see that their child can do well because of stress, money, time, etc.”; that their students’ parents working multiple jobs, swing shifts or odd hours couldn’t be at school at a certain time of day.

While changes in mindset like those can take longer to put in place, Pawloski also noted tangible changes that helped some South Carolina schools improve.

One school that Pawloski’s center worked with set up a room where children who were late to school could go get something to eat, even though meal service for the morning was closed.

“You could see the referrals (for discipline) go up at 10 a.m. because the kids were ‘hangry,”” Pawloski said, describing the term that is shorthand for “hungry-angry” — an anger or acting out born of hunger and stress, as much as anything else.

Hungry, stressed out brains, she noted, can’t focus.

At first, some criticized the move as “enabling” kids who were late to “skirt the rules” about when breakfast ended.

But, she said, when those 10 a.m. referrals declined, the criticism dimmed.

Another school made recess the first class period of the day over loud parent protests, she said.

Attendance went up, achievement scores went up, “re-teaching” (going back over concepts taught once) went down — and the complaints faded.

That’s because after exercise, the brain is primed to focus, and cortisol, a stress hormone that activates the “fight-or-flight” response in humans, is flushed from the system.

“Stress lowers your IQ,” she said, noting that stress hormones make it harder for the brain to use its higher-level cognitive functions in favor of fueling the “fight-or-flight” impulse.

She also challenged them that seeing a student from a certain ZIP code or socioeconomic status as “only able to go so far” hurts that child — and in the long run, the community.

Brains are moldable, she said. They are changed every day by the words we hear, and the experiences we have.

“We can change every brain in positive ways,” she said.

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