C128 (Book Club): Culturally Responsive Teaching and the Brain (pg 1-13)

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​Welcome my friends to a new book study.  I have wrestled with what to talk about next within my podcast series and I kept circling back to Culturally Responsive Teaching and the Brain: Promoting Authentic Engagement and Rigor Among Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Students by Zaretta Hammond.  This book changed me this past year and I couldn’t wait any longer.  There will be insights from Zaretta’s book, my thoughts, and my meanderings.  If you’ve been listening at all, you know I tend to get off track a bit, but I believe these are the times that I make the most ahas.  I hope you do too. 

​Let me start off by saying that, Zaretta Hammond is the first person in a long time that made me excited, weep, and find hope in a short span of time.  This book made me excited to see all of the possibilities that are available to learners from diverse backgrounds if we just focus on building rigor instead of watering down curriculum.  She made me weep, because I think of all the learners I wasn’t able to reach during my teaching career, because I didn’t have this book to guide me.  Zaretta made me hope that if more people read this book, then we will have less learners falling through the cracks of the education system.  I choose to focus on hope.  

In the forward, Dr. Yvette Jackson makes a harrowing statement that has stayed with me for the past year.  She purports, “If all brains are wired for expansive learning, high intellectual performances, and self-determination, then students of color should be experiencing this state of being.  Since neuroscience has proven the variety of the premise of this syllogism, this is the time for a seminal question to be reckoned with:  Why are so many students of color underachieving?”

This does make you wonder.  If we are all neurological created to think at the same capacity, why is there always a deficit in certain communities and not others.  Zaretta speaks about being able to get access to a different type of education than her peers within her neighborhood, because her family used her grandparent’s address.  Even as a young girl, she noticed the differences in experiences, types of explorations, and resources that she had access to that her neighborhood friends did not.  

​Having grown up an hour away from Zaretta, I know about the political and economic divide in the San Francisco area. It’s amazing how one action allowed Zaretta to be granted education, while others were not afforded the same opportunity.  The question that springs to my mind, In a country as wealthy as the United States, how can this be happening in our present-day?

In chapter one, Zaretta speaks about the recurring achievement gap in most American schools.  She calls it an, “epidemic of dependent learners unprepared to do higher order thinking, creative problem-solving, and analytical reading and writing.”  

As a trainer, I see this all the time.  There are many well-meaning teachers who are working diligently to make school meaningful for their learners, but they teach to the test or to parent expectations.  I call it checklist teaching.  They look at all of the content standards or expectations within a given period of time and check off when they have taught them, because this is how they were trained.  

One thing I try to do is to look at content and process standards as tools to build learner independence.  I train teachers to look at learning from a progression of gradual release of responsibility from a teacher-driven to a learner-driven process.  This isn’t new and I didn’t come up with it.  Many people have used this model to discuss inquiry (Kath Murdoch, Guy Claxton,  Trevor MacKenzie) and assessment (Silvia Rosenthal Tolisano and Janet A. Hale), and other areas of teaching.  

Zaretta Hammond considers the difference between communities in access to learning skills for life.  She states, “Classroom studies document the fact that underserved English learners, poor students, and students of color routinely receive less instruction in higher order skills development than other students.  Their curriculum is less challenging and more repetitive.”

This made me reflect on my own experiences as a teacher and which schools were routinely less challenging and more repetitive.  These were the schools that were so worried about their testing outcomes than learner growth.  They put pressure on teachers to prepare for the end of the year exam from January through rote reading and math exercises.  Teaching became a process: a reading passage put on the overhead projector, learners parroting what the teacher stated, and repeating the process with a new question.  This is not learning, this choral reading.

As learners, we thrive when we are put into moments of productive struggle, where we must solve problems individually and collectively that rely upon skills that we have recently mastered.  This process allows learners to apply their thinking to relevant and significant issues, so they can transfer it again in the future.  When we teach the test, this productive struggle is not happening.

​One common comment I hear from people who live outside the United States that testing is only an American thing.  There are many cultures who may not take a final exam at each grade level, but there are exams along the way that determine what track of education they will be eligible for in the future.  By fourth grade in Germany, it is recommended by the teacher if the student will attend a middle school headed to university, college, or tech school.  In other countries, there are such high testing pressures in secondary school to perform on exams to save face for their family.  If they fail, it is devastating not only for the learner but their entire family. 

​This pressure around performance creates a huge anxiety in learners, especially those missing fundamentals skills to keep up with the rigor of the curriculum.  This creates a dependence on the school-to-prison pipeline.  Without adequate skill development, many children of color are “pushed out of school because they cannot keep up academically because of poor reading skills and lack of socio-emotional support to deal with their increasing frustration” (Hammond, 2015, pg 13).

All of these ideas made me think about what we are doing as educators to aid or block learner agency from happening.  This beginning portion of the book is quite heavy, because this is a deep-rooted systemic problem in my country.  We have a strong divide of who is properly educated and who is not. 

As an IB educator, I’ve always believed that every child deserves the same access to education.  Yet, have I always provided them the tools to be independent?  Honestly, I have not.  

I hope the rest of this journey in the book study will help both of us to awaken our understanding of what it means to be culturally responsive in our teaching practice.  For now, what have been your aha moments as we have explored the first portion of this magical book?  If you could tell Zaretta Hammond one thing, what would it be? 

In the meantime, check out Zaretta’s keynote address at the Toddle TIES 2023 conference.  You can access it here: https://www.toddleapp.com/ties/speakers/

I can’t wait to uncover the hidden gems in this book and see how it impacts my practice.