I never thought I would get to the point where I am helping to put on a conference. What a blessing. A big thank you to Denise Kraft for her belief in me and allowing me to participate. I will never forget this moment friends.
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We all have moments of excitement. i'm standing in the same room as Kath Murdoch at the Igniting Inquiry Conference. She is presenting with Misty Paterson. Eek! I can't believe I am here and meeting with her in-person again. Like many of us, I am always inspired by her ideas and touch on the learning community. Thank you Kath for all you do! New York City and I have a longstanding relationship. I moved to Long Island, NY when I was just 18 years old to live with my older brother and his family. It was a magical time of self-discovery and wonder. This was the time before cell phones and the internet. You had a paper map of the city and your intuition. I came to love everything about the place from the people, the noise, the pizza, and the bagels. More importantly, it was the first city that embraced me whole-heartedly and said, "Welcome Home." As an adult, whenever I return I am filled with memories of my first love, my family, and my growth into a young woman. I will forever be grateful for what NYC has taught me about myself, culture, and the arts. Here is another example of beauty which is the Grand Central Station. How do we capture pure excitement for ourselves and our learners? Excitement is a big part of how we learn, because it shapes our connection to the ideas being shared. When learning is dull or boring, there is very little to remember for the future. What do you do to get you learners excited about the process of learning? What has you excited to learn more about? Currently, My partner and I are learning how to take random ideas and put them into a book form that will bring about curiosity. This is has been a challenge, because it's so easy to go into information mode. The world has plenty of those books. Instead, we want to spark ideas and get teachers excited about teaching again. As a child, I was not very appreciative. I didn't know the things that I had in my own community, because no one pointed it out. It was just my surroundings. As I've matured into my own preferences, I've come to appreciate architecture, town planning, orchards, fields, and so much more. Where can we fit appreciation of our surroundings into our curriculum, so our learners develop this skill early on? In this video, we focus on cooperation, where we each have our own part that works towards a bigger goal of moving the marble farther down the hall. As we engage in professional development as a staff, how are we modeling different ways for learners to engage in meaningful cooperation focused on content mastery? If you look at this video, you might first think of force and motion. When I take a deeper look, this engagement could be focused on measurement, use of materials, variables, etc. What are you doing to get your learners to cooperate in short investigations that spark curiosity and wonder? Have you heard about the #tccbookclub? Well, be sure to join our next book club event beginning on April 6th. We have readers from around the world who are interested in learning more about universal design for learning. To learn more information, be sure to watch our video. To join our book club, be sure to become a member of our Facebook group: Confessions of a PYP Teacher. The Zoom link will be there. For timings, please look at the information below.
Hammond begins this chapter by stating, “The true power of culturally responsive teaching comes from being comfortable in your own skin because you are not a neutral party in the process. You can never take yourself out of the equation.” This is sometimes difficult to talk about when society can be polarizing. If you express your views, you may be canceled or dropped from a friendship circle or school. If you don’t say anything, you allow uncomfortable behavior to persist, which will impact the next generation of young people. A reminder that the lizard brain, which is composed of the amygdala and reticular activating system (RAS) have been created to protect us. When we deal with uncomfortable situations, it “sounds an alarm designed to remind us of the dangers that exist outside.” This can come in many forms, but in this case, it’s about talking through uncomfortable topics not normally shared in polite society. Let’s be clear, this book is not about placing blame. It’s about our self-awareness about our actions. That’s it. We all can be better, so it’s time to reframe this conversation by beginning with intention. What do you want to learn more by going through this book study? What do you want to learn about yourself? This intention will put you on the right course. How does our cultural identity shape the way we operate our classrooms? It all stems from prior work of surface, shallow and deep culture. Hammond asks some profound questions to guide this work. Here are some ones that resonated with me. Surface cultural beliefs
As I reflect on these questions, I think about my own racial identity. I grew up in rural and suburban areas as a young child within a tight familial network in South Korea, the land of my mother. When my father was transferred back to California when I was 41/2 years old, many things changed for me. The identity that I knew ceased to exist and I was quickly taught that I must lean into my American heritage to survive. The stories that I was told about my mother growing up was that she was emotionally unstable. She divorced my father to live a party lifestyle and failed at a remarriage. Yet, as I unravel my own issues with being bi-racial, I can only imagine how much a shock it would have been to lose your cultural identity by coming to a new culture. We have evolved somewhat from this narrative, but there are still attitudes within my own culture that create this polarity. I can’t tell you the number of times that I’ve heard people say, “You are in America now, so you have to speak English.” Having lived in non-English places, I can clearly state that this is not always easy. You may have a strong desire to learn an additional language, but your brain has difficulty processing the grammar structure Shallow cultural beliefs
As a young child, I remember that I was told to remain quiet at all costs from my mother, grandmother, and teachers. I followed their lead to a fault where I eventually became a selective mute. I never spoke. Largely it was due to my Korean language. I had no space to speak my language once my mother moved out of our home. My means of expression died with the divorce. While traveling through my educational journey, I discovered a false narrative that all Asian children are smart. When I did not perform up to the expectations of teachers, I was questioned about my level of Asianess. I was continually asked, “Are you sure you are Asian, because every Asian kid I’ve known was really smart.” This implied that because I did not have the skills to express myself orally or academically that I was not smart. I carried this with me for decades. Deep cultural beliefs
As I grew into a young adult, I did a lot of reflective practice about the harm of the cultural narrative. By the time I was ten years old, my father married outside of my race. My new mother was caucasian and had different stories to tell about her childhood in Utah. During her childhood, it was a growing state with many possibilities and people with similar points of view. Through my experiences with my new mother, my viewpoint towards the world became even whiter. I began to change the narrative in my mind from I have to be smart at everything to let’s try everything, because in white culture this is the narrative that is shared. When people challenged my level of whiteness, I stood up representing 50% caucasian and 50% korean. Neither were less than the other, but I recognized that I needed to lean into my whiteness to survive and thrive in 1990’s America. Unpacking our InterpretationAs I reflect on my own experiences as a child in the public school system, I connect to Hammond’s “cultural frames of reference”. She refers to a story where a teacher gives a directive to a child through a question, which is opposite to how the child operates in his home culture. The teacher took offense to the lack of compliance and the child was sent to the principal’s office. When you peel back the layers, we discover that the teacher had a different cultural frame of reference of gaining student compliance. It wasn’t the child’s fault for not reading the signs.
This leads us to a conversation about misinterpretation. As educators, we are not in the role of fixing our learners based on their socio-economic situation or linguistic challenges. Instead, we are here to try to understand learning from their lens, so we can provide scaffolds for success. Hammond refers to a simple protocol created by Gudykunst and Kim (2003) for widening our interpretive aperture to see what is truly going on. Description: Describe what you see. Leave out any judgment or interpretation of a situation. Your own implicit bias will want to make assumptions, but you must not allow them to enter the conversation. Interpretation: Interpret what is going on. Write down all of your interpretations of a situation. What pattern do you see in your observations? Are some of them driven by your own cultural view of the world? Evaluation: Review your interpretations. What do they say about our own views? How do they impact how we see our learners? What judgments have been made? This simple tool will help you to identify some patterns in your practice. In the next episode, we will continue discussing our roles as culturally responsive educators and what we can do to spot our implicit bias. It's almost that time! I can't believe that we are finally getting back together for a book club. This time, #CITLreads and morphed into #TCCBOOKCLUB. I'm super excited to join old friends to read new books. If you are interested in UDL and helping your learners, please feel free to join our book club. The more the merrier. Here is the book club outline. See what connects with you. It's BOOK CLUB time ! We are going to begin our deep dive into Seen, Heard, & Valued by Lee Ann Jung. I've had the chance to read this book already and I have to tell you it's a good one.
If you have time, please feel free to join our little book club. We are small, but we engage in some amazing conversations. This time, we have Ragini joining us as a co-host too. Exciting!
Ever since I was 18 years old, I heard about this magical place from my sister-in-law. She would tell me stories about her childhood, the places she would go, and the boy she used to love. All of these stories were mixed with her wonderful cooking and I quickly became entrenched in Peruvian culture. When the opportunity to lead a workshop arose in Lima, I was so excited to live my life-long dream to visit this magical country. What surprised me is that I felt like I was returning home instead of visiting for the first time. This speaks to how open-minded this culture is to foreigners and as a society in general. I bring this up, because we’ve just discussed how culture frames everything that we think, believe, and do in our lives. Now, we are transitioning towards how cultures program our brain. I’m not going to lie, this next part of the book makes me feel like a numpty. Zaretta Hammond begins the chapter by stating, “If we want to use culturally responsive teaching to support the cognitive development of dependent learners, we have to know how the brain uses culture to make sense of the world. When we know this, we can easily piggyback on the brain’s natural systems to activate its unique ability to grow itself.” I don’t know about you, but this sounds really beyond my pay grade, but I’m going to do my best. What are the parts of the brain?The one thing that helped me to understand this process is that Hammond describes the “physical structures of the brain as hardware” and “culture as the software”. Now, she is speaking in terms that are relatable. To help us understand our hardware, Hammond unpacks the three layers of the brain and the first layer is the oldest. Interesting. Let’s get into these layers and see what you think about all of this neuroscience. The first brain layer is our reptilian region or the lizard brain, because it’s made up of the two parts of a reptile’s brain: the brainstem and cerebellum. Apparently, this part of your brain does not think, but only reacts. The entire purpose of our reptilian region is to keep us alive. It regulations our breathing, heartbeat, body temperature, digestion, blood pressure and balance. Don’t ask why, but the picture in my mind is of Taylor Swift's bodyguards. I don’t see them personally, just a group of faceless men that must need to circle her at every given moment. They are constantly following her around to ensure that no harm happens to her when she is singing on stage or hanging out with that football player. For all the Swifties out there, you’re welcome for the plug for your queen. For those who can’t connect, you need to watch more YouTube and Tik Tok videos. In all seriousness, if we are using a computer hardware metaphor, this sounds like a cooling system to make sure we don’t physically or emotionally overheat. The second layer of the brain is the limbic region. Apparently, this region is only found in mammals. Yay for us. We made the club. I think this must be my favorite part of the brain, because it combines our emotions, behavior, and cognition to create memories and experiences. This helps us to be more prepared for future encounters that are similar in nature. In the limbic region, there are three parts that are important that Hammond refers to as the watcher, guard dog, and wikipedia. The Watcher (Reticular Activating System)
The Guard Dog (Amygdala)
The Wikipedia pages (Hippocampus)
When you put all of these parts together, it reminds me of an operating system of a computer that continually checks for viruses and any other threats to the system. The third layer is the neocortex region. This is where our executive functioning skills lie, such as planning, conceptual thinking, organization, and self-management. Per Hammond, this is where our “imagination lives.” Isn’t that just so beautiful? I think of every creative person that has shared their interpretation of the world through their choice of medium: visual arts, performing arts, coding, writing reports, sewing, furniture upcycling, and so much more. I’m on Canva everyday creating something, so my neocortex must be on overload. When I connect to the hardware metaphor, it reminds me of Windows Explorer with all of the folders that create organization for easy retrieval of the information. I’m always using it to find files and continue expanding on my ideas. Why does this all matter?When you think about our brains, we have to go to the neuron level. We have to look at all the layers of the brain work and how it impacts learning within a classroom. I know I’m not doing Hammond’s work justice, but she speaks to learning and the impact of complex information processing. Hammond states, “When the brain is learning something new it clusters neurons together to create a neural pathway, similar to a pathway in a forest. Neural pathways are important because when we go back and forth along this pathway when thinking or problem solving, it helps drive new learning deeper into long-term memory until it becomes automatic or deeply understood.” Basically, the neural pathways are important because it creates a track in our brain to tell us that this information is important and these are the ways to use it. We need these neural pathways to be revisited or the information will be erased. Hammond continues,”When we don’t practice or use new dendrites (the neural pathways) shortly after a learning episode, our brain prunes them by starving them and then reabsorbing them. It assumes you didn’t revisit the activity that grew the dendrites that information wasn’t important to keep.” This reminds me of things I’ve learned in the past that children need exposure within 24-48 hours to an idea or it’s lost forever. I’ve also heard that we need to revisit an idea 4-5 times before it permanently stays in our working memory. This makes sense based on what Hammond has proposed based on neural activity. How is the brain connected to culture?Be mindful of microaggressions. They are subtle everyday verbal and nonverbal slights, snubs, or insults which communicate hospital, derogatory, or negative messages to people of color based solely on their marginalized group membership. This reminds me of many films I’ve seen where someone walks into a shop or restaurant and they are not being served, while others enter freely.
Hammond warns, “ familiarize yourself with common actions or conditions that make students feel unsafe, even if they cannot articulate the sense of threat. Your definition of what feets threatening or welcoming may be different from the students’ definition.” This really resonated with me, because we don’t know the experiences different children have had while living in the world. We need to have honest conversations, so we don’t make these big mistakes. Cultural connections. Learning is more effective when we use “common cultural learning aids ---stories, music, and repetition.” This makes sense, because these are the things that we remember when engaging with our friends and family. Prior Knowledge connections. According to Hammond, “What we already know is organized according to our cultural experiences, values, and concepts.” Isn’t that beautiful? I want this to be my success criteria for when I’m teaching something new. Challenge thinking. Our brain growth is parked when we are learning something new. This thing has to be complex, open-ended, and a puzzle. We all yearn to solve these puzzles, because they stretch us beyond where we are to become independent thinkers. We all deserve this opportunity. I don't know about you, but my thinking has been challenged. This is the second time I have reviewed these ideas and it’s finally making sense. I strongly urge you to get a copy of this book, so you can make your own meaning of this section. This is foundational to everything else, so you need to know it well. |
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