Connecting with Students

Connecting with Students: Strategies for Building Rapport with Urban Learners focuses on how educators can efficiently establish ongoing rapport with each student through three simple steps: Seeing beyond barriers, sharing their intentions, and showing their "face". Chapter details are narrated through anecdotal experiences, confirmed by research, and seconded by actual urban learners. Educators are prompted to consistently reflect on their classroom practices and implement new strategies and techniques. This text will provide immediate strategies and techniques to build relational capacity in the urban classroom, so that frustration levels are lowered, classroom management is enhanced and academic deficiencies can be addressed. The content of the text is delivered in a multi-genre format. Within the narration there are several true anecdotes, analogies, extended metaphors, dialogue, and genuine student reflections on teaching.

Connecting with Students: Strategies for Building Rapport with Urban Learners should be required reading for any teacher and school administrator working with urban students. As a veteran urban educator, Ms. Higgs relies on her extensive knowledge and successful teaching experiences to present realistic scenarios and case studies of the urban classroom and urban learners. Her common-sense strategies for developing more effective rapport with urban students make this a "must read" book on any educators' reading list., Connecting with Students: Strategies for Building Rapport with Urban Learners written by Crystal Higgs focuses on the importance of building relationships with urban students. Written in a lively style, this book describes essential practices that are simple to implement in order to build connections with students so that they can continue to develop personally and academically., If you desire to dig a little deeper, reach a little further, and create life-changing relationships with your urban students, Connecting with Students: Strategies for Building Rapport with Urban Learners will give you the insight and tools to make it happen. Through a genuine and in-depth look at the cultural, emotional, mental and physical dynamics of urban students, you will gain tremendous perspective, engage in meaningful reflection, and find skills to be an even better teacher than you are today., As the former Principal of Evans High school, an inner-city school that improved from an 'F' grade to a 'B' grade, we were fortunate to have educators like Crystal Higgs who understood the complexity of urban teaching and learning. In the words of Ms. Higgs, 'Urban classrooms possess a unique beauty.' In Connecting with Students: Strategies for Building Rapport with Urban Learners, she is able to deeply understand the beauty and complexity of an urban classroom and innovative approaches to teaching and learning in an urban classroom.

Crystal Higgs attended an urban elementary, middle, and high school located in the eleventh largest school district in the nation, Orange County Public Schools, where she now teaches. During her quest to provide the best instruction for her urban students, she received her Masters of Science in Urban Studies Education and her Educational Specialist Degree in English from Nova Southeastern University in Davie, Florida.