After several well-publicized violent incidents last school year, Baltimore's teachers got a lesson on how building stronger relationships with their students reduces the chance of classroom disruption and increases achievement.
"When students have positive caring, nurturing and supportive relationships with their teachers, classroom problems decrease," said Donna Ford, who holds the Betts Chair in education and human development at Vanderbilt University.
After attacks on teachers last year, including one at Reginald F. Lewis High School that was videotaped on a cell phone and replayed on national news, teachers told schools chief Andres Alonso and Mayor Sheila Dixon at a forum that they needed more professional training to help them deal with disruptive students. The school system brought Ford to Baltimore to instruct all 7,000 of its teachers. Sessions for those at the high-school level are being held today; while teachers of younger children gathered yesterday.
While Ford did not speak in depth about school violence, she linked teacher-student relationships to students' behavior in the classroom. In a 2 1/2 -hour presentation at Morgan State University, Ford explained some of the misconceptions that teachers have about their students and the effect on student achievement.
Blacks, particularly boys, are too often assigned to special-education classes and left out of gifted classes, Ford said, because their teachers have low expectations for them and misinterpret their behavior. Low expectations can be manifested in several ways. Most obviously it is not pushing them into advanced placement classes, and more subtly it is dumbing down language that teachers use in the classroom.
"Remind yourself to talk up to children," she said, adding that use of complex vocabulary should be standard no matter how young the children or how poor their backgrounds.
Often drawing on her experience growing up in an African-American family living in poverty on Cleveland's east side, Ford said she succeeded largely because of the expectations of her mother and her white teachers.
But she also said teachers can have misconceptions about families and black culture that alienate them from their students and make it more likely that those students will be turned off in the classroom.
