Exploring the ‘social ecology of productive classrooms’

Jeffrey Lewis has seen it many times in his elementary classroom case studies: Two African American boys with essentially the same ability levels, the same desire to learn, the same socio-economic profile, who experience dramatically different results in the classroom.

Lewis, a professor of human ecology, has devoted his research to discovering why this achievement gap is occurring. His work is targeting solutions for the “scandalous” level of academic failure and dropout rates among African-American boys in the United States.

In some states, including Wisconsin, Lewis says that roughly one in three African American boys are graduating from high school, compared to 80 percent or higher for white boys.

In recent years, Lewis’ research has focused on inner-city school districts in Oakland, Los Angeles and Trenton, N.J., where he has developed case studies based on interviews with students, teachers, administrators and parents. This fall, Lewis will take the same approach in a partnership with the Beloit School District.

The most revealing aspect of Lewis’ findings is that positive classroom environments play a big role in fostering the success of African American children — and that teachers are the driving force for change.

“I am trying to identify the social ecology of productive classrooms — and how they are developed and sustained by exemplary teachers,” Lewis says. “Teachers have enormous power in constructing these environments.”

Lewis found just such an environment in after-school learning laboratories developed in elementary schools in Oakland and Los Angeles. These districts faced the common adversity of urban school districts, including high poverty rates, social upheaval and high teacher turnover.

But the kids in this program were showing greater success, and Lewis says the biggest difference-makers were teachers. They engaged students by asking them to help construct the program. Their ideas and experiences were built into the curriculum. “The curriculum itself became an artifact of the children’s lives,” Lewis says.

And children responded. A follow-up study of the identical program in Trenton found students from the after-school program scored significantly higher on standardized tests of reading and math than a district matched sample.

Lewis has completed some early interviews this spring in Beloit schools that appear to reinforce some of the bedrock findings of earlier work, including:

• African American boys were generally enthusiastic about learning, but show some ambivalence toward school itself, often stemming from a perception of unfair treatment.
• The boys generally liked their teachers and rated them as good teachers, but also felt they were too quick to respond toward them negatively. In fact, the “deficit-oriented view” was a pervasive observation among teachers.
• When asked what they enjoyed most about school, the most common response was reading — even from boys who struggled academically.

Lewis’ ultimate research goal is to tease out what works and what doesn’t in creating a positive classroom culture. What can teachers do to bring out the best in children, especially those who are statistically at-risk?

It’s not an answer that can wait for fundamental policy changes or resource reallocations, he says.

“The way I see it, is by fourth grade, that’s a generation lost,” Lewis adds. “Because if kids are far behind in fourth grade, they likely won’t make it up through fifth grade. And middle school is the worst place in the world to try to narrow the gap.”