Leadership magazine Sept/Oct 2016 V46 No 1

Building connectedness: CAPITALIZING ON STUDENT PROTECTIVE FACTORS Students who have historically been left behind deserve a higher quality and more proactive educational experience. The challenge is discovering how to make it happen. How do educators bring these students along with them on a journey of discovery instead of blazing ahead without them? 22 Leadership Research has shown students who come from economically disadvantaged households, as well as non-white students, are more likely to experience academic failure and disengage from school experiences. In too many schools, these students are educated in teacher-centered classrooms, where there is little student engagement and a prevailing sitand-get educational atmosphere. Disadvantaged students have other cards stacked against them, including less access to highly qualified teachers. To make matters even worse, “research has shown that teachers’ expectations of students indeed are often influenced by student characteristics such as social class and ethnicity” (Becker and Luthar, 2002). Teachers may expect students in some subgroups to perform poorly, and often give them less rigorous work. This leads to a self-fulfilling prophecy for droves of children. They are expected to do poorly, and unfortunately their lack of progress meets those expectations. These children are our future, and it is a statistical certainty that our nation shells out far fewer funds to provide a highly effec- tive education for at-risk students than is currently spent on welfare, law enforcement and incarceration. I feel strongly that students who have historically been left behind deserve a higher quality and more proactive educational experience. The challenge is how to make it happen; how can educators bring these students along on a journey of discovery, instead of blazing ahead without them? The answers can be found in the study of resiliency, a theory and belief that every person can overcome adversity if “important protective factors are present” in their lives (Krovetz, 1999). This theory asserts that if people in a school community care about students, hold high expectations for them, and provide “purposeful support,” the school culture can foster hope, and students will be able to conquer adversities. Unfortunately, some programs and interventions follow a deficit model that involves only knee jerk reactions when students do not learn. In addition, a large number of studies By Gabe Simon

Leadership magazine Sept/Oct 2016 V46 No 1 | Page 22