I've been reading Paul Tough's How Children Succeed, and found some of the information on KIPP Academy's methods interesting. One of the standbys to KIPP's discipline program is a system of expected classroom behavior called SLANT, which stands for "Sit up. Listen. Ask questions. Nod. Track the speaker with your eyes."
While some people felt this was too rigid an approach, emphasizing superficial compliance rather than an internalized buy-in of the rules and expectations, KIPP founders saw it as the foundation of a fundamental key for student success: code-switching. I haven't heard that term since I was getting my teaching credential, but it's an important skill for inner-city children to master. The idea is that life on the streets in tough cities or impoverished rural areas requires a certain set of skills, attitude and persona. You need to be tough, aggressive, loud and mouthy, a persona that's downright intimidating to anyone who hasn't grown up in that world. And that's the whole idea. The persona that keeps you safe and successful in your own little piece of the world leaves you disadvantaged when you step out into the broader world. Ghetto attitude won't win you jobs, and won't help you fit into a middle-class life. You need a new way to interact with people from other walks of life.
Expecting children to give up their street personas to develop a successful middle class personality isn't realistic. They need those street skills to navigate the dangers of their home turf. But they still need to learn to act in ways that will help them move up the economic ladder. Hence code-switching. They are encouraged to basically develop a second persona, a separate person that fits into a school environment, a work environment, and a larger society. This persona needs to be radically different, so the child essentially switches over to a different set of behaviors just like they may change clothes. A school like KIPP not only requires a special uniform that is different than street clothes, but requires a mental and behavioral uniform as well. The more the superficial elements of this persona are drilled and emphasized, the more routine they become, until it becomes perfectly natural to leave behind aggression, back-talk, and poor attitude in favor of sitting and responding appropriately to adults and fellow students like middle class children do.
I wish my daughter's school had emphasized code-switching. Maybe she'd still be teaching there, instead of having found a job in the suburbs where students don't need to code-switch, having learned from infancy to act in a manner that will meet society's expectations.
