The teacher might have said that her school tried to be color-blind. Who could blame her? But the parents could take that as a red flag. It might not quell their sense of threat at all. To do that would require something more: some sign that, in this setting, they are seen and respected for who they actually are. They’d need this because of the worry pressed on them by those stereotypes. They’d need a concrete signal that despite those stereotypes, their full humanity is understood and respected.

This could take many forms. It could be the teacher inviting the parents to join her in a working relationship to support their son. She might express confidence in his potential. She could be specific about her goals for his development and pathways for getting him there. She could offer regular check-in phone calls. Down-to-earth help like this is the heart of wiseness. It shows that she understands and accepts their full humanity and the importance of the situation to them. It disambiguates her intentions, clarifies what she’s thinking.

As Mark Lepper and his colleagues put it:

Exactly those things that one would do to present information to students most efficiently about the existence and sources of their errors and misconceptions are, at least for unconfident remedial [reputation-threatened] students, precisely the same things that seem likely to further undermine these students’ sense of competence and control.

The expert tutors understood that students’ first need was for someone to believe in their potential to learn, despite their reputation. The best tutors understood that students wouldn’t learn much without this. They understood the importance of being “wise.

Think of Tyler showing up to school— possibly prospecting for food in trash cans along the way. He’s undoubtably in a preoccupying state of churn. He knows he might be seen and treated in school based on the poverty and status of his family, on skill and vocabulary deficiencies possibly tied to that poverty, on having a dialect and even clothes that reflect his social status, on not having seen much of the world outside his neighbourhood, and so on.

So, the cognitive-accountability paradigm may keep out of view, or at least in dim view, something very important to the academic achievement of students like Tyler— the social-psychological dimension of his school experience, including that tied to his identity. The cognitive-accountability paradigm is essentially identity-blind. It knows that this aspect of a student’s experience can affect school achievement— for example, that it can be helpful when student experience is shaped by a middle-class background and less so when it is shaped by a lower income background.

Looked at from the standpoint of cognitive accountability, these strategies— socio-emotional learning strategies or strategies reducing the identity threat many students can experience in school— can seem beside the point, of marginal importance, not rooted in cognitive principles of learning. But looked at from the standpoint of building students’ trust in their schooling and their identification with it, they have a clear unity: They all address Tyler’s primary need to trust, care about, and engage with school. The good news here is that from an expanded paradigm— the identification paradigm— falls a much-expanded set of fixes.