How Will You Get To Know And Understand Your Students In Order To Create An Experiential Learning Opportunity For Them?

Shared Foundation: INQUIRE
Build new knowledge by inquiring, thinking critically, identifying problems, and developing strategies for solving problems (AASL, 2018).

This text will assist you as you INQUIRE, think critically, identify problems and develop strategies as you get to know your students well, so you can create a personalized, experiential learning experience for them.

To learn more about the AASL National School Library Standards, please see this web-page.

Table of Contents:

Introduction
Community Mapping
Examining Local Community Data
Poverty Learning Gap - Language Learning Challenges
Poverty Learning Gap - Lack of Resources
Poverty Learning Gap - Empirical Data
Collecting Evidence to Understand Students and Their Experiences With The Learning Challenge
The Key To Successful Learning Outcomes Is In Creating Relationships
Develop A Plan to Get To Know And Understand Your Students: Critical Consciousness
Develop A Plan to Get To Know And Understand Your Students: Culturally Relevant Pedagogy
Create An Identity-Safe Classroom
Develop A Plan To Get To Know And Understand Your Students: Identify and Describe Students
Student personal narratives impact student learning: Discovering My Identity
Strategies That Allow Teachers To Identify And Describe Students And Be Culturally Relevant
Experiential Learning Experiences Support ALL Students
So, What Exactly is Experiential Learning?
Examples of Experiential Learning
Reflection
Works Cited

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27-28
29-32

Introduction:

Welcome to this informational book on How to Develop And Implement A Plan To Know And Understand Your Students In Order To Create An Experiential Learning Opportunity For Them.

This book will help you understand what experiential learning is and how the personal narratives (their life experiences) of our students in Slate Valley have a direct influence upon their ability to learn. You will also gain an understanding of how your own critical consciousness can affect your ability to reach all students. Only once we understand how our own critical consciousness affects our teaching and we know and understand our students and the lives they live, or have lived in the past, will we be able to fully support our students in their endeavors to learn.

We will begin by taking a look at an opportunity gap within our school community. The gap is based upon the fact that 33-47.24% of our students live in poverty. We will look at literature that will help us understand how we can best help our students in Slate Valley. We will review strategies educators can take when designing their curriculum and learn about additional resources and ways in which we can support ALL students.

Incorporating the principles of culturally responsive pedagogy and experiential learning into the design of our curriculum will enable students to engage in deeper learning experiences and improve the relationships we have with all our students.

Community Mapping

To be able to identify and describe our students and answer questions about the population of students that we are serving, we will first need to do some research. We need to be able to answer the following questions, as we develop our plan to get to know and understand our students:
1. Who is the population we are serving?
2. Are there any opportunity gaps?
3. What do our students have in common?
4. How do they differ?
5. What does the literature tell us about this particular type of opportunity gap?

According to the journal article titled Community Mapping as a Tool for Developing Culturally Relevant Pedagogy by Tambra O. Jackson & Brandy S. Bryson, community mapping is something you should do to gain an understanding of the "story" of the community in which you teach. They assert, " by identifying assets, networks, and opportunities in the community; and by relating their new understandings to their developing identities as teachers. It is not enough to simply know that there are various kinds of communities in which students live" (123).

To begin mapping our community, you can start with websites, such as the Rutland Regional Planning Commission, which links to demographic, housing, employment, and industry information. Another site to begin with would be The Town of Fair Haven, VT website. To learn more about community mapping please read this journal article.

Examining Local Community Data

Now that we have learned about community mapping and you have a better picture of the local community, we need to do some research about the income levels of families living in our school district.

According to the Vermont Agency of Education (AOE) 2019 Free and Reduced Eligibility Report 33-47.24% of the students in the school district live in poverty. Almost half (47.24%) of our students at Fair Haven Graded School live in poverty. The statewide average eligibility is 40.14%. This means that at this school there are 7+% more students living in poverty than the statewide average.

According to the AOE report, to be "eligible" for the National School Lunch Program, "a student (must have) submitted an application and (must have) been certified as qualifying for free or reduced price benefits based on the Family Size and Income Guidelines published by the United States Department of Agriculture. To be eligible for free meals a family’s income must be at or below 130% of the Federal poverty level, the family/household receives 3SquaresVT or Reach-Up, or children are Directly Certified as free eligible” (2019).

Poverty refers to the socioeconomic status of a person. Poverty is an opportunity gap at our school that I have identified, which affects nearly half of all our students within our school district. This presents many challenges, not only to our schools, but also for our students.

Poverty Learning Gap - Language Learning Challenges

Next, we need to examine what the literature says about Poverty:

According to Ruby K. Payne, Ph.D., "To better understand poverty, one must understand three aspects of language: registers of language, discourse patterns, and story structure. Many key issues for schools and businesses are related to these three patterns that often are different in poverty than they are in middle class" (2005).

Because our students who live in poverty acquire their language skills at home, they will either need to develop a significant relationship with a teacher or mentor from the middle class, or will require "...the direct-teaching of a language...at a more metacognitive level...(furthermore) Montano-Harmon (1991) found that for students to move from *casual-register English to **formal-register English required them to translate because the word choice, sentence syntax, and discourse pattern are different" (29).

* Casual Register English: "Language between friends and is characterized by a 400-800 word vocabulary. Word choice general and not specific. Conversation dependent upon non-verbal assists. Sentence syntax often incomplete" (Payne 28).
** Formal Register English: "The standards sentence syntax and word choice of work and school. Has complete sentences and specific word choice" (27).

Formal testing is always constructed in formal register English, thus students who live in poverty will most likely not be able to understand the format of English on such tests (Payne 28).

Another finding is that students who grow up in poverty avoid written assignments, due to the fact that they rely on non-verbal assists to communicate, rather than words (Payne 28).

Poverty Learning Gap - Lack of Resources

What the literature says about poverty continued:
Students living in poverty lack a number of resources, according to Ruby K. Payne. They include:
1. Financial: Having the money to purchase goods and services.
2. Emotional: Being able to choose and control emotional responses, particularly negative situations, without engaging in self-destructive behavior. This is an internal resource and shows itself through stamina, perseverance, and choices.
3. Mental: Having the mental abilities and acquired skills (reading, writing, computing) to deal with daily life.
4. Spiritual: Believing in divine purpose and guidance.
5. Physical: Having physical health and mobility.
6. Support Systems: Having Friends, family, and backup resources available to access in times of need. These are external resources.
7. Relationships/Role Models: Having frequent acces to adult(s) who are appropriate, who are nurturing to the child, and who do not engage in self-destructive behavior.
8. Knowledge of Hidden Rules: Knowing the unspoken cues and habits of a group (Payne 7).

Poverty Learning Gap - Empirical Data

What the literature says about poverty continued:

According to Lauren Dotson Davis in her journal article titled Common Core and the Continued Socioeconomic Achievement Gap: How Can We Better Prepare Future Teachers?, "...empirical data shows that students from low-SES (Socioeconomic Status) schools enter high school 3.3 grade levels behind students from higher SES schools. In addition, this same study illustrates that students from the low-SES groups learn at slower rates over 4 years than children from higher SES groups, graduating 4.3 grade levels behind those of higher SE groups based on achievement data from reading, mathematics, science, and social studies (Palardy, 2008, para. 15)...Correlational studies also exhibit a strong relationship between high poverty and poor academic performance (Sirin, 2005; White, 1982, White et al., 1993)...Additionally, a child's environment is said to effect 66% of a child's academic performance, while genetics only affects 34% of academic functioning (Pawloski, 2014)....high poverty students are set up to fail in our current educational system..." (2).

Collecting Evidence to Understand Students and Their Experiences With The Learning Challenge

We need to dig deeper to understand the exact cause of such high poverty levels. Is it due to generational or situational poverty, or are there other causes? What was the poverty rate 25, 15, 10, and 5 years ago?

Once we determine more specific causes we need to figure out how to support our students and their families:
1. Do they need access to counseling (for addiction, etc.)?
2. Do they need transportation?
3. Do they need shelter, or clothing?
4. Can we help them directly, or can we point them in the direction of places, where they can receive help?
5. Do parents/guardians need access to further education to help get them out of poverty?

Possible Course of Action to answer the above questions:
1. We can provide informational workshops, working with anchor institutions to help with those who are addicted.
2. If they need transportation, do we know of any places where people can donate cars?
3. If they need shelter or clothing...can we work with Habitat for Humanity? If they need clothes, we could proactively engage in more clothing drives.
4. We could, at a very minimum, create a brochure to help direct parents to institutions that can provide help for all kinds of different issues our families may have to deal with. We could also create a social-emotional kit, like the Depression and Autism Kits featured in this School Library Journal article.
5. Can we offer workshops to parents on wellness, financial, literacy, how to obtain a GED, etc. issues they may need to deal with? We could do this together with anchor institutions, who have the expertise to guide, both the school (educators) and our local community.