Black Male Students' Perceptions of Effective Teachers: A Qualitative Study of Compton Middle Schools

This study investigated the characteristics of effective teachers of African-American male middle school students. Black males are underserved throughout all levels of the educational pipeline and experience an achievement gap. Researchers have posited several causes of the achievement gap: teachers' beliefs, students' cultural capital, and teachers' pedagogical skills. Moreover, the transition from student-centered elementary school settings to curriculum-centered secondary school settings can be disproportionately jarring for Black male adolescents. Using a community nomination process, students and principals at 4 Compton middle schools identified whom they perceived as the most effective teacher at each site. Fifty-three students participated in 8 focus groups. Each of the 4 teachers was observed 4 times (for a total of 16 observations) and interviewed 3 times (for a total of 12 interviews). In the effective teachers' classrooms, (a) nearly 100% of Black males participated throughout lessons, (b) teachers and students used high levels of academic vocabulary, and (c) teachers used humor and code-switching to elicit positive responses from students. Students described the importance of humor, high expectations, and fairness, as well as multiple types of teaching practices. Teachers believed (a) that teaching was their means of effecting social justice, (b) that their students' intelligence was malleable rather than fixed, and (c) that their personal experiences were instrumental in shaping their teaching philosophy and practice. These findings began to coalesce into an emerging profile of effective teachers for Black male middle school students: (a) a social justice stance, (b) cultural congruence with their students as a result of lived experiences, and (c) the ability to wield a robust arsenal of pedagogical strategies. The findings point to the importance of recruiting teacher candidates who can relate to the lived experiences of their students, of designing hiring protocols that test for the characteristics of effective teachers for African-American males, and of restructuring middle schools to allow for multiple attempts to demonstrate mastery of complex academic concepts