I s it possible to reverse the achievement gap by transforming relationships between teachers and students? Alexs Pate, founder of the Innocent Classroom, not only thinks so, he’s doing it in schools across Minnesota and Nebraska. His secret? When teachers get rid of the stereotypes defining African American, immigrant and other marginalized students, those children are freed to find success in school and in life beyond the classroom.
A simple, perhaps obvious idea, but one that’s not easily put into practice. Stereotypes run deep, but Pate makes it his mission to identify them, root them out and rebuild relationships free of stigma.
Innocent Classroom leaves the traditional “professional development” notion in the file cabinet. Founded five years ago as a for-profit enterprise offering a single product — a multi-session training for K-12 faculty and staff — the program focuses exclusively on dismantling racial and ethnic stereotypes that frame the student-teacher relationships. It’s the brainchild of one man, Pate, whose reflections about growing up black in America churned inside him for decades before turning into a concrete idea, and whose sheer force of will and conviction found partners willing to test his radical concept.
Rooted in two hot educational topics— social justice (cultivating diversity and equality through curriculum) and empathy (strengthening community through understanding others’ motivations and needs) — Pate’s Innocent Classroom is singular in its premise: children are born into racial and ethnic stereotypes that define them before they even enter the classroom. These negative stereotypes cling to students throughout their education, usually reinforced by their teachers, often subconsciously, and become a self-fulfilling prophecy that hijacks their education and their potential. The solution, according to Innocent Classroom, lies with the teachers’ relationships with students and a deep-seated understanding of those students’ lives beyond the classroom. Innocent Classroom forces teachers to grapple with their own subconscious views, to find and unlock the real kid, and then nurture a relationship devoid of the stereotypical weight that has traditionally burdened both student and teacher.
On its face, it seems impossibly straightforward and naïve: get rid of pervasive, harmful racial stereotypes and millions of kids can be freed to work hard and achieve.
The notion’s not new, but given the nation’s history, not one that’s seen much success.
Until now. By the measures available — independent data showing significant shifts in student engagement and achievement and teacher accounts of classrooms transformed — this surprising approach is showing success. “I believe what we’re doing has the potential to change education (for marginalized students) across the country,” Pate says.
A renaissance man of sorts, Pate grew up in Philadelphia, went to Temple University for his BA and the University of Southern Maine for his MFA. He worked in corporate America for a while, then became a writer (he’s the author of seven books, including the award-winning Amistad, based on the movie) before landing a teaching position in University of Minnesota’s Communications and African Studies programs. Nothing would suggest he’d found an education reform project in the twilight of his career. (Nor would he approve of the twilight characterization; he’d argue that he’s just getting started.) Pate doesn’t occupy middle ground. His colleagues and students love him, hate him, fear him and admire him, citing equally his passion and ego, his intensity and intellect.
IInnocent Classroom first took flight in Minnesota, begun as nothing more than an idea debated among friends and colleagues, including a few people at the Minnesota Humanities Center. The center is a nonprofit known for its work leveraging humanities — art, literature, philosophy, music, history and language — into professional development courses for teachers. “I knew he was onto something,” says David O’Fallon, the center’s executive director, who decided Pate’s program fit well within the organization’s course offerings. O’Fallon and Pate traveled the same circles in Minneapolis and had spent hours talking about real education reform, how it couldn’t be another program or new curriculum, how it had to go to the core of the students and the community.
Then Omaha called. Their public schools were facing huge achievement gaps and no clear answers. Administrators wanted the Humanities Center’s help. “‘We want everything you have,’” O’Fallon remembers them saying. “With 100 different languages spoken by their students, they felt they’d tried everything and nothing had worked.” The center’s teacher-education courses focus on four areas: student-centered practices, the power of story, community engagement and strengthened relationships — where Innocent Classroom was a natural fit. Pate, O’Fallon and the center’s continuing education staff struck out for Omaha.
Five years later, Innocent Classroom’s nine-person staff is an eclectic mix of young professionals, political and policy wonks, and one recovering litigator all putting into practice one man’s big idea — not exactly the ivory-towered reform organization of educational elites one might imagine. “Education reform is filled with jargon and false promises,” Pate says. His intent seems almost counter-culture, jettisoning much of the conventional reform-talk the way he trains teachers to re-think stereotypes. He looks instead to his corporate training, relying on “effectiveness, efficiency, and accountability” to measure success.
TTeachers enrolled in Innocent Classroom attend a series of six workshops over an extended period, with some 16 hours of classroom time plus homework. In the first session, Pate and his team ask teachers what culture tells them about students of color. They inevitably write words like angry, poor, drugs, welfare, single parent and promiscuous on the board, a false narrative that Pate believes frames the cultural landscape. “The child knows that list just like the teacher does. It’s the script,” he tells the teachers. “You’re not looking at that child; you’re looking at that stereotype.”
Those who sit through the training report it’s a compelling place to start. “You have to meet your biases head-on, realize what impact it’s having on your kids,” says Carol Nelson of Omaha’s Blackburn High School.
Innocent Classroom grew out of Pate’s own experiences growing up a young black man in Philadelphia.
“Children are saddled with the weight of negative stereotypes when they walk through the classroom door. They don’t believe they can trust — so the security to engage, be curious, just isn’t there,” he says, recalling things like being taught to cross the street to avoid white women, even as a child. The program rests on a simple premise, yet one that is complex and potentially difficult to convey: if a child can be freed of those stereotypes, her sense of innocence can be restored, and with that innocence restored, she can engage with curiosity, genuine interest and the drive to do her very best. Pate calls it “freed to achieve.”
Having trained some 3,000 teachers by now, 50 at a time, Pate knows what to expect from the teachers, and he’s not surprised by their surprise. A professor himself, he knows teachers’ dedication, particularly those in struggling schools. He knows they often don’t realize they’re responding to stereotypes, a subconscious thread they have to work hard to overcome. “Most teachers believe they have a great relationship with their kids,” he says. “What they don’t realize is that it’s a construction made just for them.” Students comply with the teacher’s notion without sharing it, a kind of role-playing that has become as much a part of the classroom as pencil sharpeners and raised hands.
Once he cracks open these perceptions, Pate systematically deconstructs teachers’ thought processes, helping them recognize and get rid of these stereotypes so they can focus on the student in front of them. “I’m making the case that when a child believes that you care about him — truly care about him — he will learn from you,” he says.
Pate returns to the word “good” frequently, grounding his work in Aristotle’s teachings that the good in each of us matters above all else — something that’s hard to wrap your head around. According to Aristotle, everything we do — all our actions, both constructive and destructive — are driven by our dedication to achieving that “good,” the personal life end-goal we try to envision. While Aristotle goes on to define happiness as realizing our highest potential, or good, how that happiness is achieved varies greatly, and that’s where Pate focuses his attention. What’s that driver — that ‘good’ — that motivates the students to behave the way they behave?
Pate pushes teachers to find each student’s good, and then build a strategy to connect with that student. “They can’t see you coming,” Pate says, laughing that a teacher can’t walk into her classroom and announce that a program called Innocent Classroom says she has to find each student’s good. Her work has to be organic, genuine — a deep-dive to find what it is within that student that matters most to him, what he is trying to convey, to achieve. Perhaps he struggles with a sense of guilt that he doesn’t even understand. Maybe he fears failure or needs to feel loved. Maybe he needs to be heard, or something else entirely. All these things obstruct him, squashing his ability to pursue that good, and in turn, feeding the stereotypes. “The least visible thing, that’s almost always the good,” he says, the thing that matters above all else for that student, the thing that can unlock the real kid cloaked beneath the stereotypes.
Towards the end of the six sessions, the program moves into the laboratory phase, teachers identifying three students they want to get through to. They share the student’s behavior with the group and brainstorm what his ‘good’ is, what motivates his behavior above all else. They might discuss whether he’s acting out because he’s one of eight siblings and needs to feel heard or whether he’s disruptive because he craves undivided attention. “Maybe you could have lunch with him, one-on-one, to get to know him better,” one teacher might suggest. Another might say, “Perhaps you can ask him to read the class news daily, or help hand out papers, give him a leadership role.” The teacher comes up with a strategy in collaboration with her colleagues, heads back to class to test it, and returns the following session to report back.
“’He’s changed,’ she’ll say. ‘He smiled at me today,’” Pate reports. It seems small, but for these teachers, it’s those first glimmers that sow personal connections between student and teacher. The lab experiments continue, and at the last session Pate returns to that first teacher to ask how her student is doing. “’Oh yeah,’” Pate says she’ll say. “‘I’d forgotten all about that. He’s doing fine now. He’s not doing any of that anymore.’” Pate’s voice is almost giddy with the wonder of it, that time and time again he sees a transformation in teachers, and in turn, they see it in their students. “When you create trust between teachers and students,” he says, “You free children to achieve.”
Nelson admits it’s not always easy, finding the good, but she swears by it.
Sometimes called Omaha’s “end of the road school,” Blackburn High is the alternative school where kids land after they’ve washed out everywhere else. Nelson prefers to call it “the second-chance school.” Blackburn made the decision to go all-in when the school district contracted with O’Fallon and Pate and sent everyone through the training — teachers, secretaries, janitors, cafeteria workers and security guards alike. “We struggled with the vocabulary at first,” Nelson recalls of her first sessions with Pate five years ago. “He was just getting started, figuring out how to explain this thing that was burning inside him, trying to get out.”
“A kid says to me ‘What the fuck are you looking at?’ and I’m supposed to find his good, what he does for the sake of all other,” Nelson says, laughing. “It’s hard!” The Blackburn team came out of the training changed, however, and agreed to commit together to bring the Innocent Classroom vocabulary back to their hallways, to support each other, to find the good in their students and connect with them.
“When you are finding the good in a student rather than asking ‘What the hell is wrong with you?’ — that’s a game changer,” she says. “We created empathy. We started looking for the positives in students — improved attendance for example — and everyone from the teacher to the security guard reaffirms it,” saying something to the student, high-fiving him. “Pretty soon, the kids start to change.”
MMarkel Devers landed at Blackburn in the school’s early years of the program. “I was living in a group home, into gang life, angry,” he says. “It was rough.” Talking to him now, it’s hard to reconcile that image with the gentle voice and put-together demeanor of the young man applying for jobs and holiday shopping with his girlfriend. Devers, like all students exposed to the program, knows nothing about Innocent Classroom. He just remembers that teachers understood him. “They understood my real world,” he recalls, “what kids face outside the school.” He recalls it as a transformation, that his teachers helped him learn to accept the things he couldn’t change (like the group home) and find his way. “Blackburn made me see life is more than I thought it was,” he says, remembering how teachers always made time to listen to him, one-on-one, even when they were busy.
“You can make it. That’s what they taught me.”
Devers still checks in with his mentors at Blackburn, stopping in every month or so. When the career counselor died, Devers felt the loss acutely, remembering him as a man who explained life to students, life beyond Blackburn’s doors. Even though he’s got an offer to work as a bank teller, Devers is applying for a job at Blackburn, to go back and work with kids like him. “That’s where my heart wants me,” he says.
SSo far, Innocent Classroom has trained thousands of teachers across Nebraska and Minnesota, and it’s difficult to find any detractors to the project. O’Fallon believes Innocent Classroom is a critical cog in reform, but only a cog — that for real, meaningful change, the community must be vested in the process, part of the dialogue. “Given all that’s happening in education, people come and go,” he says. “Systems eat gurus alive. Unless you look at community engagement and rethink curriculum, it won’t all stick together.”
Probably true, but for the teachers interviewed for this article, there seems a universal sense that Innocent Classroom gives them a way to turn the tables and make progress with students they’d almost given up on. As Pate puts it, “It’s our job to save our children right now.”
He’s got the data to back it up. TerraLuna Collaborative, a Minnesota-based research and consulting firm, tracks the results of the partnership between Omaha Public Schools, the Minnesota Humanities Center and Innocent Classroom every year, measuring student engagement, classroom transformation and shifts in teachers’ techniques and behaviors. In their 2016 report, Innocent Classroom in Practice, TerraLuna found that of the teachers surveyed after participating in the Innocent Classroom training,
· 86 percent report stronger relationships with their students
· 95 percent cite greater student engagement and 81 percent cite greater student academic growth
· 86 percent report feeling like they are part of positive change happening in their school community as a result of the training
· 77 percent report using different language when they talk about their students
· And roughly three quarters report picturing themselves in their students’ shoes when hearing of their life outside the classroom, an indicator of increased empathy.
Because the program focuses entirely on teachers, the data does not measure students’ academic improvement, although teachers in schools in which the program is in place have reported a change for the better — increased attendance, improved graduation rates and other indicators of student success. Are those improvements exclusively due to Innocent Classroom? Hard to know without another study.
Robert Rail teaches algebra at Omaha South High School, an inner-city magnet school known for its performing arts, tech program, dual-language offerings and a diverse student body that represents most of Omaha’s marginalized communities. He doesn’t pay much attention to the TerraLuna results, looking instead to his students for proof that the program works. “Alexs and I fought tooth and nail every day” during training, Rail says. “But we walked away friends. He’s got a good system.”
Rail is the algebra teacher you remember — tough, no nonsense, knows what he knows, and figures you need to know it too. Rail believes that all kids, particularly those living in poverty, come to school as at-risk kids, not just the African-American and immigrant students. But for both Rail and Pate, it seems a distinction without a difference at this point. While Pate founded the program on thinking derived from the experience of African-American kids in America, he now concedes the program resonates with all students of marginalized communities, regardless of race.
Rail looks at the results. “I went from 25 to 30 referrals a week (kids sent to the office for misbehavior or other issues) to zero referrals some weeks,” he says. He took Innocent Classroom’s teachings back to his classroom, creating detailed notes on each student, the stories behind the story. “I looked for who they are under the hardened shell, what their real inner core is, what they’re good at,” he says. “Now, my students care more about their grades because I care more about them.”
Rail concedes that his work is a drop of water in a big bucket since he’s the only teacher at Omaha South to have gone through the Innocent Classroom training. While most schools opt into the program for their entire faculty, Rail heard about it while subbing at Blackburn and was so intrigued he signed up on his own. He’s evangelical in his encouragement of other faculty to follow suit, chastising his colleagues whenever they complain about a particular student. “When you’re complaining about a student, the problem is you,” he says he tells his colleagues. “I know who can teach you to do this.” It’s a message that might resonate as his colleagues observe the shift in his classroom, and in his behavior. “I’m a lot more patient now,” he says, “And I’ve never been known for my patience.”
Pate knows that the program works best when an entire school buys in, but he shares Rail’s belief that the success is contagious for both students and faculty. “When there’s an absence of negative stereotypes, there’s innocence,” Pate says, “and with that, the student knows what’s possible.” When students experience a genuine relationship with a teacher even once, they will seek it out again. They won’t settle for that false narrative anymore; they know they don’t have to.
BBack at Blackburn, Nelson tells story after story to illustrate the high school’s success. One particularly difficult student argued constantly — with faculty, with other students, with anyone who’d listen. Rather than try to shut him down, she challenged him, bringing debate to the classroom and putting him in charge of one side of the argument (the side he didn’t want to do). The student dug in, spending hours learning everything he could about his position, oblivious to the fact that he was now caring about school. When debate day rolled around, he nailed it. Nelson told him how proud she was of him, how he’d make a fabulous lawyer one day, and started to cry. “Damn, Ms. Nelson,” the student said to her, “No teacher’s ever cried over me before.”
That student went on to use his skills of persuasion to tackle a school rule he found unnecessary. Nelson coached him, teaching him to use persuasion and patience over anger to make his point. He met with the principal, made his case and soon the arcane rule was abolished. Emboldened by his success, another group of students took their cause to the City Council, arguing that the speed limit in front of Blackburn should be changed. They succeeded. Their successes fueled a curriculum adjustment that went on to win the state’s top award for social studies. The students’ reaction? “Booyah, MF-ers!” Nelson laughs. “They were empowered. They had a voice, and they knew it.”
“I’ve been here 13 years, and the changes at Blackburn started after Innocent Classroom,” she says, noting that today families and students try to opt-in to Blackburn. “I thought Alexs was a nut-job at first, but he’s the real deal.”
In these days of a new year, a new presidential administration and a pervasive fear in classrooms among marginalized students, it seems Pates’ approach might be prescient. Nelson and Rail fall on opposite sides of the political spectrum, but both report the same post-election fears from their students and talk of how they relied on Innocent Classroom teachings when speaking to their students. “Schools experienced trauma and grief from the elections, and we have to meet kids where they are, address their fear,” Nelson says. “And that’s what this is all about.”
Rail agrees. “My job is to hear their fears and help them find hope,” he says.
Nelson laughs at Pates’ unconventional style. “Who knew that trippy little curmudgeon standing in the front of the room could do this?” Yet for Nelson, Rail, and almost 3,000 other teachers across those two states, the success of that trippy little curmudgeon’s idea can be seen in the students now finding their way in the community.
Ask Nelson’s student who aced the debate. He’s now a father for whom those skills of patience and persuasion in lieu of anger have been a life changer. Or Markel Devers, whose heart pulls him back to Blackburn to free other young men of the stereotypes that almost derailed his life.
Perhaps no one is more in awe of the program’s success than Pate. “When I first stood in front of a group of teachers, I’d say, ‘I don’t know if I’m right about this,’” he recalls. “Now I know we’re right.” Five years in, almost every school they’ve worked with has come back for more, and new schools are standing in line. “It took me a while to really believe it, that this was working,” Pate says. “But now I’m ready. I want people to see and feel the integrity of the program. I’m ready to have that national conversation.”
