Books Available at:
Book: A Framework for Understanding Poverty - ISBN-13: 978-1929229482
by Ruby K. Payne, Ph.D.
How does poverty impact learning, work habits and decision-making?
People in poverty face challenges virtually unknown to those in middle class or wealth—challenges from both obvious and hidden sources. The reality of being poor brings out a survival mentality, and turns attention away from opportunities taken for granted by everyone else.
If you work with people in poverty, some understanding of how different the world is from yours will be invaluable. Whether you’re an educator —or a social, health or legal services professional—this breakthrough book gives you practical, real-world support and guidance to improve your effectiveness in working with people from all socioeconomic backgrounds.
With a million copies sold since 1996, A Framework for Understanding Poverty has guided hundreds of thousands of educators and other professionals through the pitfalls and barriers faced by all classes, especially the poor. Carefully researched and packed with charts, tables, and questionnaires, Framework not only documents the facts of poverty, it provides practical yet compassionate strategies for addressing its impact on people’s lives.
Book: Bridges Out of Poverty: Strategies for Professionals and Communities
Bridges Out of Poverty is a unique and powerful tool designed specifically for social, health, and legal services professionals. Based in part on Dr. Ruby K. Payne's myth shattering A Framework for Understanding Poverty, Bridges reaches out to the millions of service providers and businesses whose daily work connects them with the lives of people in poverty.
In a highly readable format you'll find case studies, detailed analysis, helpful charts and exercises, and specific solutions you and your organization can implement right now to:
- Redesign programs to better serve people you work with Build skill sets for management to help guide employees
- Upgrade training for front-line staff like receptionists, case workers, and managers;
- Improve treatment outcomes in health care and behavioral health care;
- Increase the likelihood of moving from welfare to work.
Book: Crossing the Tracks for Love
Crossing the Tracks™ is a guide for successfully negotiating the barriers that divide economic classes. It explores the ways that people from poverty, middle class, and wealth view the world and operate within it in terms of intimacy, gender roles, employment, entertainment, decision-making, raising children, dealing with in-laws, food and dining, and free time. This powerful book exposes the mindsets and attitudes that trigger conflict between people of different economic classes, and provides solutions you can use immediately to improve your relationships, smooth your own transition between classes, increase opportunities for someone you care about, and move confidently in any social setting.
Book: Hidden Rules of Class at Work
Hidden Rules of Class at Work, at Work is written for people who supervise others. It provides tools to identify an individual's strengths and weaknesses by looking at his/her resources, an understanding of how economic class influences opportunities to develop resources, an understanding of how economic class influences - often subtly yet significantly - behaviors that show up in the workplace and an understanding of how the levels of an organization reflect the hidden rules of class.
Further Hidden rules of Class at Work provides tools that will help supervisors develop employees to function at the level of the organization to which they have been promoted or are expected to function. There are also tools to help determine how to spend training dollars and assist with one's own promotion.
It's important to note that most supervision comes from mid-management types of positions, which generally follow the hidden rules of middle class. This book has no intention of judging one class as better than another. Rather, different realities demand different types of behaviors that, in turn, generate hidden rules. The ability of an individual to fit into a work environment and be productive in that environment is crucial to understanding workplace success.
This book's principal objective is to identify and articulate a number of issues that are alive in the workplace - but that have seldom been articulated previously. The book is intended to look at how issues of class determine one's ability to survive in the workplace - and to offer the tools necessary to move to a different level of the organization if one so desires.
Book: Understanding Learning: the How, the Why, the What
Dr. Payne has written Understanding Learning: the How, the Why, the What to complement her workbook Learning Structures which includes numerous strategies to help students learn vital content while building cognitive abilities. Understanding Learning provides key background information about how and why these strategies work, along with a synopsis of brain research and cognitive studies.
Book: Removing the Mask: Giftedness in Poverty
Our educational culture typically categorizes students based upon identified needs. When the mainstream program does not appear to meet students' needs, they generally are categorized and aligned with a special program that more closely addresses those needs. The placement of gifted/talented students in special programs has generated identification processes that emphasize fairness, ignoring the very discrepancies that have created the differences in the students. Under the guise of fairness, students are treated equally, but equity is compromised in the process.
In Removing the Mask: Giftedness in Poverty, Paul Slocumb and Ruby Payne present an identification model that is based on a new paradigm. They maintain that environmental factors often mask giftedness in students from poverty, making their gifted attributes unrecognizable in schools that operate by middle class's hidden rules.
Paul and Ruby propose that equity, not equality, needs to be at the heart of any gifted assessment process. Without equity, students from poverty will never be judged fairly, and disproportionate numbers of affluent students will continue to be identified for gifted services while excluding the non-affluent students. "There is nothing so unequal as the equal treatment of unequals" (Felix Frankfurter, U.S. Supreme Court Justice).
Removing the Mask is a highly instructive book, providing dozens of practical suggestions for teachers and administrators of gifted students. The book offers an equitable identification process to find the gifts in students from poverty. It also offers suggestions for teachers and administrators on how to help gifted/talented students from poverty be successful and remain in the program once they have been identified.
Book: Think Rather of Zebra: Dealing with Aspects of Poverty Through Story
Think Rather of Zebra is a delightful collection of short stories crafted and adapted from more than forty classic and modern folktales by Jay Stailey who reset them in an urban neighborhood. The book follows two main characters, Carlos and Pete, as they tell stories from their neighborhood and share the lessons of poverty. The stories that these two characters tell are insightful, particularly to readers who come from a middle-class or wealthy background.
These stories closely follow the work of Dr. Ruby Payne on understanding the culture of poverty and the strong emphasis on oral tradition. At the end of each chapter, Dr. Payne provides a series of questions that can be used for discussion and deeper understanding. Jay and Ruby wrote Zebra to help schools better understand and teach students from poverty. The book can be read by adults or given to children to help educate them about the effects poverty has on individuals.
If Framework had been written as the first installment of a sequence of books, Think Rather of Zebra would certainly be the second offering in that meaningful series.
Jay's talents are a natural fit for aha! Process, Inc. As a veteran educator, freelance storyteller, and former chair of the National Storytelling Association board, Jay gains daily insight into the lives of today's students and is skilled at making stories relate to their lives.