Rather than addressing the disparities among public school students, one woman is showing teachers how to shrink the achievement gap with group exercises that pool the strengths of all students.

At a NYSUT symposium devoted to ending the achievement gap, Ahmes Askia, a project director for the National Urban Alliance, showed participants several ways to get those disparate groups of students to work together to the benefit of all.

One exercise, which Askia said works for all grades, asks students to create a taxonomy of a word — a list of words from A to Z associated with another word or topic, be it "weather" for primary graders or "calculus" for high school students.

In this way, she noted, students with smaller vocabularies can contribute and learn from those with larger vocabularies.

"We know the statistics on kids who come to school with fewer words than others. What we at NUA do is use student strengths," said Askia, who trains teachers across the country. "They might not know all the words but they can help."

The NUA was founded in 1989 with a mission to "substantiate in the public schools of urban America an irrefutable belief in the capacity of all children to reach the highest levels of learning and thinking demanded by our ever-changing global community."

After making a list of words associated with "learning," teachers said they could see the exercise appealing to a child's competitive instincts, including children in "repeater" classes who are not often rewarded for what they know.

"And if it's done in a group, kids feel safer," added high school teacher Wendy Dale, a member of White Plains Teachers Association.

Another exercise, titled "Strength of the Urban Learner," asks students to think of words to describe their positive qualities. Again, the groups of teachers produced series of words that were similar but not identical. She also had them incorporate a cultural story — one that involved a student's family or background — into a popular song, while also plugging in key words and a drawing. 

Active learning

Learning in active ways — chanting or dancing — can help less-confident, perhaps less-educated children, feel comfortable expressing themselves creatively in a group, Askia noted.

While many agreed with the approach, they noted that students are generally discouraged from "active learning" by the time they reach middle school.

"By seventh grade, kids are supposed to sit in their seats and listen," said retired teacher Donna Christmas, an instructor with NYSUT's Education & Learning Trust.

Describing herself as "goofier than any of my kids," Christmas said her students were reluctant to become active learners until she led the way and "they saw it's OK to sing or dance or do any of those things."

Askia also referred to those students she called "school-dependent," who gain their sense of stability and support at school more than at home.

For these children in particular, she said, feedback from teachers is crucial.

She urged the teachers to find ways of connecting with their students, who tend to be increasingly overlooked as they fall behind.

She spoke of a school where an administrator had the names of every child taped to the wall of the gym and asked teachers to put a dot next to the name of each student they knew.

"One kid had died and no one even knew it," she said. "Some kids had no dots at all. No teacher in the school knew them by name."

— Jane Gottlieb