How can practitioners help prepare students for their aspirations?
- Jun 16, 2017
- 5 min read
All individuals have the right to earn a living in a fulfilling career and it is the role of parents, educators, and education policymakers to support our children's life dreams. Nearly all jobs in the future will require some form of postsecondary education and so all students must graduate from high school ready for college. For some students, this may be career and technical education at a community college and others will require graduate school to achieve their dreams.
When I say "all" I really do mean ALL students. Every child in your school is capable of earning a college degree or certificate. Practitioners reading this blog are aware of the statistics regarding the race- and income-based "achievement" gaps. Research has demonstrated that there are race and income-based differences in student grades, test performance, and high school and college graduation rates, and these differences persist later in life in employment opportunities and income levels. There are also race- and income-based gaps in students' aspirations for college.
When qualified students enroll in colleges that are less selective than the ones they are qualified to attend or do not attend college at all it is called Undermatching. Undermatching is dreaming too small, it is having college aspirations that are too low. Students from low-income backgrounds in particular, and also students of color, are more likely to be Undermatched than their peers. What makes Undermatching particularly devastating for these over-qualified students is that the more elite institutions that they should have attended tend to have higher graduation rates and their students tend to graduate in shorter periods of time--making this phenomenon a potential explanation for higher drop out rates and the persistence of the achievement gap once students leave high school and enter college. The explanations for Undermatching are complex and vary by the student, but researchers in this area identified that the causes may be inertia, gaps in information about college planning, and lack of encouragement. In other words, low-income students and students of color may not receive the same levels of encouragement and information needed to take the steps to attend high-quality colleges.
I used quotation marks around the word achievement earlier because many in education are reframing these discussions around opportunity. It is not helpful to talk about the differences among our students' backgrounds, it's far more helpful to consider how our schools can become places where all students have the opportunity to perform their best. More so, these differences in grades and test scores are not the result of true differences in the achievement or ability levels of these groups (in other words, white students are not actually smarter than their peers). Systemic racism and classism exist and we must acknowledge and challenge the barriers in place for students who are low-income, from marginalized racial and ethnic groups, English language learners, and whose parents did not attend college. Correspondingly, we must acknowledge white privilege and work to dismantle it.
What can educators do to help?
The first step in creating a school-wide culture of college aspirations is to ask the adults in the school to pledge the belief that all students--regardless of family background, language, socioeconomic status, race/ethnicity, or ability--can succeed in some sort of postsecondary education program, ranging from technical education to graduate school. Although simple on its surface, this concept may challenge the core beliefs of some educators. Collect and review data about your students' college attendance and disaggregate it by as many data sources that you have including neighborhood, race, parents' education, and FRPL status. Consider whether any of your students may have been Undermatched in the past. Discuss how you can better serve your students of color, English learners, and those who are from low-income backgrounds. These conversations will look different at the elementary, middle, and high school levels; consider how to help your students set short term goals as they transition from one level to the next. Encourage and allow time for discussions to emerge among your colleagues around what it means to embrace a culture of college readiness for all of the students in your school.
While you change the way you think and talk about student aspirations in your school, change the way your school looks and feels. Ask yourself: Does my school feel like a place where kids can dream big? Do something to change the environment to promote aspirations. Decorate classrooms and halls with information about colleges and regularly present information about different career options. Talk about your college experience and career path with students and encourage all students to explore a wide range of postsecondary options for after high school.
Beyond building a schoolwide college going culture, encouraging a growth mindset is one of the most effective strategies educators can use to foster student aspirations. Simple linguistic shifts can help students (and ourselves) attribute learning to effort, rather than ability (e.g., saying "You worked hard on this" rather than "You are good at this"). Intentionally shifting our language around learning will help us reframe our own mindsets as well as our students'. (For more information and strategies, Carol Dweck has great resources around fostering growth mindsets on her website.)
Parental education impacts college attendance in that students whose parents did not attend college tend to have lower aspirations and are less likely to attend and graduate from college. However, among students who take the steps to prepare for, apply to, and enroll in college, parent education makes no difference in attendance rates. Findings suggest that all parents, but particularly those who did not attend college themselves, have limited access to information about financial aid and tend to overestimate the cost of college tuition. Share information about postsecondary options with parents and help them encourage their children to set high aspirations for after high school.
Treat each learning opportunity as an experiment and tell your students that assignments and quizzes are a chance for you to teach them a skill and learn what they know, not a set-up for failure. Encourage students to take risks by reframing mistakes as growth or failed hypotheses. Remove shame from learning and remind students that all of us know nothing about something. Share your own learning challenges and the stories of others who persisted through difficult times.
Don't hide the ball! Your role is to facilitate the acquisition of knowledge. Be open with your students about your learning goals and help them use multiple modalities and information sources to access content. As facilitator, acknowledge within yourself that what we believe to be true today may be disproved tomorrow. Teach your students how to learn, show them how to access information and critically examine it for accuracy and bias.
Most importantly, foster and encourage student ownership of learning. Empower students to take charge of setting and working towards learning goals. Students develop greater confidence and self-efficacy when they are empowered to accomplish short- and long-term goals that they have set for themselves. Help students make connections between what they are learning and their futures. Relate the content and skills in each unit to career paths. Explore with students how knowledge builds and transfers, what they learn in 6th grade will build upon their 5th grade work and so on. At the school level, teachers can meet in cross-disciplinary and mixed-grade teams in order to make those connections among themselves and work together to facilitate opportunities for transfer.
For more information on what the educators in your organization can do to prepare students for their aspirations, contact EMG for customized college readiness evaluation and coaching services.
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