Summary Of Teaching With Poverty In Mind By Eric Jensen

In Eric Jensen’s book Teaching With Poverty In Mind, he deliberates the risk factors that children living in poverty encounter every day. However, Jensen most valid themes in his book are how poverty affects behavior and academic performance, school wide success factors, and classroom success factors.

Poverty affects behavior and performance of most school age children. Jensen states that “DNA accounts for 30-50 percent of our behaviors (Saudino, 2005), an estimate that leaves 50-70 percent explained by the student’s environment (Jensen, 2009, pg13). Thus, numerous students living in poverty do not perform well in school because the environment makes up more than half of their genetic makeup. Epigenetics are responsible for how we learn and

Even more, the four main stressors for children in poverty are emotional and social changes, acute and chronic stressors, cognitive lag, and health and safety issues. For emotional and social changes children require ten to twenty hours a week of interactions with their parents. If they reside in a low standard income household, they usually are not giving adequate interaction time with their parents because the parent works odd shifts or picks up shifts in financially support the child. On the other hand, acute and chronic stressors play a big role in the child’s behavior and academic performance. According to Jensen “Stress can be defined as the physiological response to the perception of loss of control resulting from an adverse situation or person (Jensen, 2009, pg22)”, which is acceptable to experience stress in small dosages but too much stress can be devastating to the child’s physical, psychological, emotional, and cognitive functioning. Acute stress is severe stress from an event such as abuse, were chronic stress is sustained over time. Children in poverty have a significantly higher chance of being exposed to unhealthy stress and a variance of

To Support the whole child the school most, provide adequate care and serveries to the child. Students who receive wraparound support can focus on educational opportunities available to them instead of going home with a tooth ache or an empty stomach. Also, the school needs to keep hard data instead of district tests as the only measure of achievement. Per Jensen, “Successful schools generate their own high-quality, useful data on an ongoing basis and provide immediate feedback to both students and teaches (Jensen, 2009, pg73)”. It is critical to collect this data because each child is different and we need to meet their individual needs. It is also important to allow teachers to correlate with each other so they can build great lesson plans and fix ones that are not quite working. Furthermore, schools need to take accountability of what happens in their school. Stop blaming low performing students and take responsibility. Then you can start by hiring good teachers who are qualified to teach that subject and grade level. Formerly support the teacher and allow them the self-determination they require to teach the children what they actual need to know. In addition, you must have relationship building in your school because “secure attachments and stable environments, so vitally important to young