[ELTWeekly Volume 8, Issue 5 | February 8, 2016 | ISSN 0975-3036]
Early in my career as an instructional coach, I worked with an enthusiastic new high school teacher who inspired most of her students to demonstrate their learning in all kinds of creative ways. Her ninth-grade English class performed skits, recorded radio plays, and published magazines that were of exceptional quality and showed mastery of learning. However, a handful of students were never in prominent roles, produced mediocre work, and weren’t mastering the content.
In my observations, I had noticed a trend in the teacher’s interactions with them — she didn’t push them as she did the others, she let them off the hook easily, and she gave them simple tasks. All of these young men were African American, and this group comprised almost the entire group of African American males in her classes. I gently and carefully probed into the teacher’s decision making, asking nonjudgmental questions about her assumptions about these boys, and then one day, she said this: “I think they’re just lazy. I don’t think they’ll follow through. So I give them tasks they can manage.”
I felt a mix of fear (would I know how to coach her through this?) and relief (she’d named it, not me) as I recognized the mental model that this teacher held about her African American boys — a mental model that did not serve them as learners.