A review by engpunk77
Engaging Students with Poverty in Mind: Practical Strategies for Raising Achievement by Eric Jensen
3.0
Read with a discussion group of teachers in my district. The guiding principle here is to take 100% responsibility for the learning of your students. Every problem we find in our classroom (poor motivation, retention, behavior, comprehension, etc.) is due to poor teaching on our part, nothing more.
This was difficult to accept, but since I'm not particularly confident in my teaching ability (half of my students perform poorly), I was willing to take it. There are many methods, strategies, and tips that will help us motivate our students to succeed, and they were applicable to elementary and middle school students (some even for high school, but fewer).
A quick and beneficial read for any teacher.
Update: Read this over again for another book study with a different group of teachers, and I focused on different things this time (now that I've already accepted the shocking "you are 100% responsible for every student's lack of achievement and their behavior" thing).
I realize this time that this has one chapter about poverty, but the rest is just a lot of effective teaching strategies, the kind you can find in most teaching books, but again, many of them are quite useful. It doesn't necessarily help you target poverty issues in any way. A pretty good book for teachers.
This was difficult to accept, but since I'm not particularly confident in my teaching ability (half of my students perform poorly), I was willing to take it. There are many methods, strategies, and tips that will help us motivate our students to succeed, and they were applicable to elementary and middle school students (some even for high school, but fewer).
A quick and beneficial read for any teacher.
Update: Read this over again for another book study with a different group of teachers, and I focused on different things this time (now that I've already accepted the shocking "you are 100% responsible for every student's lack of achievement and their behavior" thing).
I realize this time that this has one chapter about poverty, but the rest is just a lot of effective teaching strategies, the kind you can find in most teaching books, but again, many of them are quite useful. It doesn't necessarily help you target poverty issues in any way. A pretty good book for teachers.