Culturally-Responsive Teaching - A Conversation with Zaretta Hammond

Welcome to the Future Learning Design Podcast.

There are a lot of people who focus when you talk about cultural responsiveness only on anti-racism or social justice topics in the curriculum. They totally miss getting students ready for rigor. So now leaders are tied to these performative equity initiatives, but the chronic underachievement is still happening.

Hi, and welcome back to another episode of the Future Learning Design Podcast. My name's Tim Logan, I'm your host, and the podcast is brought to you with the support of Notosh. This week, it was an amazing opportunity to speak with Zaretta Hammond, who is the author of the acclaimed and best-selling book Culturally Responsive Teaching and the Brain: Promoting Authentic Engagement and Rigor for Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Students. Zaretta brings a unique focus on neuroscience to the conversation about equity, literacy, and culturally responsive pedagogy to make it understandable and practical for educators. She's an international educational consultant and holds a master's in education in English education with a concentration in writing from the University of Colorado in Boulder. Zaretta is a former high school and community college expository writing instructor. She's also served as adjunct instructor at St. Mary's College School of Education in Moraga, California, where she taught Foundations of Adolescent Literacy. As a consultant, she has advised and provided professional development to school districts and nonprofit organizations across the world around issues of equity, literacy, and culturally responsive teaching for the past 25 years. In addition, she has been on staff at national education reform organizations, including National Equity Project and the former Bay Area School Reform Collaborative, and she sits on the Board of Trustees at the Center for Collaborative perspective classrooms. Hi, Zorita.

Hey there.

Hey, how you doing?

I am good. My morning. Well, how did your day go?

Good.

Yeah, it's good. It's an absolute pleasure to talk to you and I'm really excited about this conversation because we've spoken once prior just to think about some ideas, but your book, Culturally Responsive Teaching and the Brain, is such a great, I mean, I loved reading it just from the perspective of the kind of big overview, but I think it's also so important and useful for teachers in classrooms in terms of the way that we can apply some of the, the big ideas and the big, sometimes inaccessible neuroscience ideas, for example. And you're making it super translatable and really practical for teachers. So firstly, welcome. I'm so happy to be able to talk to you.

Yeah, I am glad to be here, and thank you for the invitation. It's always great to be, you know, getting together with other folks to kind of dig into stuff so that, you know, we all get smarter together.

Precisely. That's it, right? And so just starting then with, maybe if we could start a bit more personally with your, the way you came to these big ideas, cuz obviously you're bringing two, in a way, two really big meaty areas together in terms of the cultural responsiveness, the kind of almost anthropology, right, of education, and then this kind of neuroscience. So what was it that led you personally and professionally to that point where you were kind of making those connections?

I think there were two things. First, my own experience in school was that my mother, in an effort to get, you know, her children a quality education, put us on a city bus 2 hours each way to a school in a neighborhood and school district we didn't live in. So she lied about our address.

Yeah.

And it was predominantly white and Asian. And I will tell you that it was there that I realized I loved learning, but I did not necessarily like school and things I didn't really have words for. But it stuck with me that outside of school, inside of school, but there were just certain dynamics in school that I really didn't like. And it came to a head, I think, when I was in middle school for sure, because I was just really— I was that problem student, you know, I was, you know, pushing back on the teachers. And unfortunately, I At a certain point, that became literal, and I was up for expulsion twice. And I will tell you, one of those hearings at the Board of Education, I had teachers come down there and say that this is not what she needs and really talked about my love of learning and other things and really talked about we just have to look at these conditions that we're creating. And it really was— they were trying to put me in a box, and I didn't want to be in a box. And I didn't need to be in a box just because I was poor, just because I was Black, just because I was a female. I didn't need to be in their box. And that a lot of that tension was because of them trying to fit me into this pedagogy of compliance. You know, my spirit wasn't having it. So that was one part of that. You know, I really started asking this question, what's the difference between school and learning?

Yeah.

And that led me to some of the neuroscience. Now, the other piece of that in terms of the cultural responsiveness, I eventually went into teaching, you know, after some work in education policy. I tried to get closer and closer to where I thought the source of this problem was. Yeah, I was out in the world like, okay, I want every kid to find joy in learning in school where it should be.

Yeah.

And so I went down the policy path and didn't find you know, resolution there and decided I'll go and get my teaching credential, become a classroom teacher. But even before that, I started as a writing tutor at the University of California, Berkeley. And I started to see as I was tutoring writing, that students were not making progress. They had been admitted to the university, but they did not have the credentials or the capacity, right? They weren't proficient.. And if they didn't pass the writing requirement, meaning they can demonstrate they can write an expository essay, they can have a 4.0 in engineering and math. They were asked to leave the university.

Doesn't matter.

Doesn't matter. Because again, math gets you into college, writing keeps you there. As the saying goes. So I then made it my business as I was working with folks, I started using what I was learning around neuroscience and coupling that with what I knew these students who had come from historically marginalized communities— Black, African descent, Latinx for the most part. You know, I had learned to— I knew what their culture was. So it was kind of an anchor and twist because one of the primary rules of the science of learning is all new learning must be coupled with one schema. Knowledge you already know and have it in your, you know, and wired into your brain. So my approach to culturally responsive practices is to say, you know, what cognitive hook can I use, not as a gimmick to get them motivated, but as a pathway to help them with deeper learning and understanding.

Yeah.

So the more I did that, particularly with writing, I started to see their writing change because there was not enough red ink. I could put on their paper, I could keep circling the run-on sentence, you know, or the comma splice, but that in itself wasn't going to get them to change. They had to not only see it, but understand what the problem was they were making, and then actually get coaching to know how to change it and then work on changing it. So the degree to which they were able to do that was, you know, directly related to my understanding how to set that up for them. And so there were some things I changed in my classroom. There were some ways in which I coached them. There were other structures I put in place that allowed us to do that work together and allow them to make the changes.

Yeah, that's brilliant. And can I ask what— obviously having had that experience as a learner yourself, did you carry that with you? And it was kind of a almost inevitable that you would take on the challenge of actually making it different for other learners coming through? Like, when did that spark happen for you as a graduate or an undergraduate, or did it just feel like that's just what you wanted to do, that was your kind of course?

That's my, that's my God-given mission. I understood that mission when I agreed to be a writing tutor, because what I came out of high school saying is that no child should ever experience school like like that.

Amazing.

And I didn't know that that's what kind of led me to the policy, because that's what I thought. I had no idea. I— it wasn't teachers who honestly I saw were changing things.

Yeah.

So I started, you know, after I'd done my undergraduate, which was in writing, I decided to go back and get a master's in teaching English, secondary English, right? Students in middle school and high school here in the States with a concentration in writing instruction, or what they call composition. So that really was, now how do I fulfill this mission? I need these tools, I need these credentials. There were things I know I needed to actually be able to do that thing. But that was— I just didn't want students to have to have that experience. And I think I understood we knew better and we had more science that wasn't coming into the professional learning life of teachers. And honestly, teachers didn't have any clue about learning theory, which I thought was absolutely ironic.

Yeah, no, it is interesting, isn't it? You think surely that's the meat of what they're learning in, in teacher education college or whatever. But interesting. And did you experience that kind of going the level up to work with policy? I mean, did you have frustrations there and then come back to the level of like empowering teachers, or was it, did it kind of always end up staying with actually working at the teacher level was where you felt you could have most impact?

I started, like I said, I graduated from college and I went the policy route. I was not interested in the classroom at that time, even though I'd had this experience at UC Berkeley as a tutor. That was kind of like hands-on. So I thought, oh, the things that I learned there, I can actually contribute to this policy conversation. And I certainly wasn't at the level to do that. I was a research analyst. But it also was my own learning, you know, opportunity. So I learned more as I was preparing briefs for the policy analyst. And the more I learned, the more I was like, mm, and the more I saw where they were getting stuck. And then I had to step back and say, am I really going to have impact here? And the answer I got back was, for myself internally, was no. So that's what led me to my program to get my teaching credential and master's at the same time. And of course I decided, you know, why not be a new mother too? So I had a 3-month-old.

Make it easy for yourself.

Yeah, don't do that. So, but here's the thing about it, it was so funny because even as a new mom, what I was learning, I turned into how could I be a better parent? And oh my goodness, you know, my son came to visit last night and he still, you know, kind of remembers and some of those foundational things we did and, you know, that I understood about neuro social science, I still see the reverberations of that. He said—

That's interesting. That is interesting. One, that's one of the things I'm thinking a lot about at the moment, cuz I think we're quite boxed off in the way that we think about education as these institutions, right? And like, for me, education is everywhere. Like it's in the interactions that parents have with their children and it's in the inter— or just all these different educational encounters that we have across our entire lives. And I find that it's quite interesting how we're so obsessed about these particular institutions that seem to be the educational ones, but actually it's like it's water we're swimming in.

That's interesting.

Here's the thing I would say about to add on to what you're saying is I think we actually even have it reversed, right? We have the belief that all learning starts in school and maybe there's some learning that happens outside when it's just the opposite. The brain is a learning machine. So from the moment it enters the world, its whole prime directive is learning.

For sure.

So it is the opposite. So learning all the time, parents are first teachers, then we for a short period of time concentrate so they can learn a particular body of knowledge, but learning continues to happen in other places, in other ways. So we don't give enough respect to parents as first teachers.

Yeah. And that's interesting because what you were saying, that experience you had of that kind of cognitive dissonance between school and learning and why were they almost in conflict with each other, why were they not mutually supporting. And so I'd love to then ask you about your brilliant phrase, ready for rigor, because I think that is just such a powerful phrase. And so I'd love to spend a little bit of time with you just on that, because I think we hear about these conversations about rigor all the time in education. I had a recent conversation with Joe Bowler about rigor in mathematics, and you know, it's this word that we kind of almost get obsessed with as educators, right? It's like, It's somehow a mark of quality if it's rigorous, you know, but as we've discussed off recording, the readiness part is almost kind of ignored. And so firstly, I'd love to spend a bit of time with you on that. Of course, the rigor is important and we'll come to that, but this whole idea of readying, in a way, it feels to me like having read your book, the readiness part is almost, that's the thing that you are really speaking to is helping teachers to understand how do they ready themselves and the classroom environment and the kind of relational aspects within the classroom for those young people bringing, you know, their own cultures and their own schemas and all those things with them to kind of get the best learning that we can. So first off, could you just talk a little bit about what is that readying process for you?

Yeah, you just laid some of them out, but here's the way I would kind of level that up and, you know, augment it and expand it. That is that when we understand the context, particularly for those students that have been historically marginalized in the States, we know those are students of Mexican descent, African American students, Indigenous, First Nation students. We know that simply because of our historical context. Colonization did not start in America.

Right.

Thank you.

For sure.

Yeah. And that exported all around the world. Right. That phrase, the sun never sets on the British Empire really is about colonization. It's about we are in so many places in the world where we have decided we are going to be the monarchy and the empire in somebody else's land and continent that displaces their culture. So the fact is colonization not only displaced culture, but it set up a dynamic to maintain itself, which was cognitive underdevelopment. So for certain, in the United States, our brand of colonization was to keep literacy from people of color, Indigenous people, to underdevelop their cognitive capacity by not engaging in rigorous content, by not actually allowing that. Focuses on very low-level tasks that don't stretch the brain and cause the dendrites to grow. So now this is something that's not talked about. So the Reading for Rigor is really about upending and interrupting these cognitive red lines that have been put in classrooms as a way in which colonization has maintained itself. So we worry about certain groups of students not prospering or chronically underperforming. Or not feeling a sense of belonging, that's not just relational, right? If I feel like a competent learner, I feel like I'm coming to school, even my— maybe hard, but it's joyful. I'm making stuff, I'm learning stuff. Oh, I'm going to want to go back. And that's not happening for particular groups of kids. And that's why I wrote the book for people to understand in order to upend this kind of current residual element that is in our education systems in any Western country that has practiced colonization, then we are going to have to root it out and, and kind of reconstruct it. The only way we can do that is by helping students who have been generationally impacted by this underdevelopment get ready to take on more rigor. It's not just like, oh, today we decide we're going to stop doing that. Now we're going to just throw you in there and give you rigor. Nobody learns to swim like like that. No one learns to run a marathon— if you decide today I'm going to run a marathon, you don't just practice running 26 miles. You literally have to get your lungs ready for the rigor of that long distance. And the way you do that is incrementally, right? And this is what Vygotsky talks about when he talks about the zone of proximal development. That is the zone where we get students ready for the productive struggle that grows dendrites and brain power.

Yeah.

So the thing that people kind of focus on is, oh, we want more rigor, we want kids to be motivated. But what they don't understand is you have to have cognitive structures. You have to understand how to navigate the emotions of cognition. You have to reframe errors as information so that there's not this emotional response of Oh, I failed. So, you know, now I don't want to try. That's where growth and fixed mindset come in. It is a little more complicated. Let's just kind of rigor everything up because I can't, you know, it's like saying, you know, come and let's get healthy and everybody start off with a 50-pound weight. There might be a few people in a class of 10 that can, you know, swing that kind of weight. But the majority of people like, can I start with the 5-pound weight? You know? But the way our muscles work, yeah, very much like our brain works, that when our lungs— when you press it over time, start with 5, stretch it, the gift of 10. That first few times you do 10 weights, it's going to feel hard, but eventually not going to feel that hard.

Yeah.

And then somebody's going to say you're going to need a 15-pound weight to keep progressing.

Sure.

We don't do that for students. So the reading part that you talk about is that incremental process. That starts to reposition so students can build competence, so that competence begets confidence, the confidence begets the student's willingness to try and stretch themselves further into that zone of proximal development. I call it leveling up their learning.

Yeah, no, that's brilliant. It feels like one of the amazing additional richnesses of your work is that you are saying, because I, I find that we, we end up talking about some of these kind of cognitive aspects, cognitive architecture, different, you know, the schemas and all of this language that sounds, it sounds very sciencey and it sounds very objective. But actually what you are saying, as I understand it, that there is such a rich cultural dimension to everything about the way that, that people, Is that, is that what I'm saying? No.

Okay.

Talking about the cultural parts. And I think that's one of the things people forget. Or again, very much like rigor, people go on to, oh, it must be culture. I need to say something about their culture. The piece that I'm trying to help people understand is the process of underdevelopment of cognition is really about are you setting up the classroom so the student can engage in productive struggle, or do you have a narrative? Sure. Students actually need to be control. No, we can't do it because, you know, the darker students, you know, they're prone to acting up and acting out. But the students are bored, or the students are— they get and they know they're behind. This is an emotional— I hope— yeah, what I'm saying is we continue to either go into those two camps, white progressive educators, sure, and culture, or I need to be talking about anti-racism or implicit bias. What I'm saying is the social justice piece is learning about cognitive science and actually just using it.

Okay. Yeah. Interesting. The same, like irrespective of anything that people are bringing into the—

and, and the fact is for everybody, culture is the software to your brain's hardware.

Sure.

If you don't know this, it's in front of you.

Yeah.

How would you know how to create cognitive hooks to make the content sticky? Where are you giving them infor— opportunity to chew on it. That's where I talk about ignite, chunk, chew, and review. The chunk isn't make it smaller. The chunk is where are the hooks, the cognitive hooks. That's just how learning happens.

Yeah, yeah, no, absolutely. So I'm interested then, because I've perhaps misread it to some degree in the sense, because I was reading things like phrases of yours like cultural displays of learning and meaning making, as when you talk about culturally responsive teaching as an educator's ability to recognize students' cultural displays of learning and meaning making. Are those cognitive hooks that you are referring to kind of affected by culture in the way that we all bring our own culture into and, and prior learning, wherever that's come from? It's come, as we've said before, it comes from our, from our home, from our peer relations, all the different things we're bringing into the space of learning. What does that mean in terms of cultural displays of learning?

Yeah. So let's talk about cultural displays of learning. For example, in collectivist culture, Let's just do that, right? So we don't even have to say every student has an individual culture.

Yeah.

We are with the two very broad ends of a continuum, individualistic culture, collectivist culture. One is neither better than the other. They're just different in terms of how they process information, what a learning environment or a learning episode looks like. So if I am a teacher and my way of learning, I've come out of an individualistic culture. That says learning is happening when there's no talking, when I'm just kind of, you know, got my head down. And you have a collectivist group of students who come from collectivist culture that says learning is happening when I'm talking to others, when I'm confused, that I go to the hive for information. Yeah. So now I'm in a classroom where learning is happening, and I've got a group of students who keep turning to talk to themselves. That's a cultural display of learning. But if I misinterpret or misread that, I now think we have a behavior problem.

Absolutely.

Guess who keeps getting sent to the office? Because now what they're doing, what their brains have naturally done in their home environment for maybe 5, 6 years before they came to school, and then every night when they go home and their parent is asking them to learn a new task as they take on more responsibility in the home or in the community, right? So now this is where the conflict comes in.

Yeah.

The thing my brain has learned to do to actually make that learning sticky, you're telling me is a problem.

Yeah.

Whereas most white people think culture is something other people have. And secondly, that it looks exotic. So the display is how have you learned learning at home? And there's a belief that just because people may be low income, or their own family may have low literacy or may not have been to school, that there's no learning that happens. That's a very elitist, white supremacist cultural orientation.

Yeah.

That those people are less intelligent and they can't have some, you know, sophisticated ways of learning.

Yeah. Because as you said, that kind of, it's that invisible colonialism piece again, right? Is that the—

Hey, listen, sometimes it ain't so invisible.

Well, sadly, yes. Laughing, but yeah, sad, but very true, right? But I think absolutely it kind of, it goes into this, what sociologists have called the hidden curriculum, right? It's all the, as you were saying, it's all the things that are pathologized or the behaviors that are decided that fit the mold of this thing we've defined as learning. But it's a very culturally specific approach to the way that we think is good learning or not. Yeah.

So I can add to that, Tim, that in colonialized mind, you would want certain people to fit in whatever the caste system that has been set up.

Yeah.

Now, if you aspire to do higher level math, you aspire to do these things and you're learning in this way, you're still being put in a box. Yeah. No, girls don't get to do math. No, you are a Black person, so no, you don't get to do literature. You're going to do something over here where you just use your hands. You're going to be a service person, right? You're educated for the level in which most people from that background, that racial, ethnic, linguistic background have been allowed to be in. And this is the thing we don't talk about. So we keep wanting it to be like, I just need to learn all the different cultures and make them feel good about— this is not a motivational program. Culturally responsive teaching is a response to honoring the way Learning happens for a variety of people. But when you look at cultures, you can see collectivism on a spectrum. One of the core things in collectivist culture is learning by doing and processing by talking. Right. So the fact is there is not just, oh, everybody wants to be in a group. So the uneducated white educator most often, and by extension, those of us who have went through education programs, oriented in that way believe that, oh, you know, everybody is going to be, you know, I just have to do this thing and everybody will be learning because it is culturally responsive. Yeah, right. Not because I understand enough cognitive neuroscience to understand this is how the brain learns. And I understand enough about collectivist ways of learning that the core principles, they're probably about, I'd say, 7. So when I'm working with educators, this is what I teach them. Here are 7 ways in which in collectivist cultures, learning to, you know, process some new information or learn a new skill, you're going to use some combination of these 7. And a lot of them stand antithetical to what teachers who may not have come from that collectivist culture understand. They think it is, that's a behavior problem, or I have to control for that. So a quiet classroom is never one in which real cognition is happening, but in terms of a pedagogy of compliance, that's typically what we want from students who we think are uncontrollable.

Yeah, interesting. And one of the things I liked also is, and maybe this was intentional, I'm not sure, I'd love to know, the way you talked about practice areas. Because I think for me it feels like practice is kind of, that's a good word to use in this space because we're gonna get things wrong, right? And you know, as you're talking there, I'm thinking there's a, there could be a dangerous flip to assumptions about collectivist cultures when you walk into a room when actually you're just making assumptions about people again, they may be the opposite assumption, but there's still an assumption and you haven't met that person where they are and understood where are they coming from. What's their particular kind of situation and what are they bringing into that learning space. So I like that idea of practice. Was that intentional?

Yeah.

And I think this is where the idea of learning partnerships come in. The relational piece is because you want to gather the information. So like now I know how to design instruction. It's not just, oh, I want to get to know them. Right. And how do we give space for practice, right? So that as they are doing, I am learning. We have to become the personal trainers of students' cognitive development. And that is what is going to upend the impact that colonialism and colonization, right, and segregation has had, that you have to give students back this power to grow their own intellectual capacity. And just giving activities, just doing interesting lessons that have a cultural flavor to them is not the same as growing dendrites. You have to actually know how to create those conditions, but you can't create those conditions. So let's go back to the idea of readying. One of the ways in which we ready students for rigor is to have them understand that all learning involves failure. And it's not just like a is not a byproduct. It is the feature of learning that we never get it right the first time. So we have to actually use those errors as information. Well, now you're reculturating the classroom around this idea and you can't just say it and move on. How do you practice it now? What are the structures? What are the protocols? What are the routines in the classroom that not only reinforce the message but actually takes students through the practice of learning from those errors.

Yeah.

And that's where I think a lot of teachers don't have a lot of modeling for that. Even if I say that in, say, a workshop, if I'm working with them, they then don't know where to turn because there's not a lot of resource put out for how you do that. So now they're kind of stuck because we know from cognitive neuroscience— this is what Vygotsky talks about needs to happen in that zone of proximal development. But if I can't get students to believe that making mistakes is actually good for them, they're going to avoid going in there.

Yeah. I mean, in a way what you're talking about is kind of setting, or it's not necessarily setting because it's not a top-down process, but trying to kind of create and support a culture to develop in that room when you are the educator. And as much as you can, you are trying to invite particular moves and particular actions that will create a certain kind of generative culture. And that's, that I, I think I feels like, yeah, it's very connected to that idea of readying. It's very, it's very rich and messy and deeply cultural, but in the sense of people interacting together in somehow in community, if they're, you know, they're with each other quite a lot of time, you know, every day, every week, there's a culture that develops within that group of people.

And if that's a generative and supportive one of the state, be deliberate, meaning you have to now invite students to not just be friends in the classroom, but a community of learners that very much like scientists, we're up to trying to figure this out. Right. And so one of the protocols I have in the book is called the Success Protocol. I'll probably rename it when I do the second edition, which I'm working on for next year or the 10th anniversary, which I— that's hard to believe.

Cool.

But it is the Success Protocol because the Success Protocol is really asking the students to get together in helping trios, right? 3 students. And each student has an opportunity to say, I went from not understanding this to being successful at it. But what they're talking about is that journey. What did you change? When did you have your aha moment that you needed to— of the 5 moves, there were 2 that were getting you stuck. How did you get yourself unstuck? Because if a student doesn't have a process for getting themselves unstuck, they will never move forward. They'll depend on the teacher. They'll just sit there, and when the teacher comes— and one of the things we have a habit of doing as educators is we over-scaffold, so we can get students through the lesson, but they're still going to have to be stuck at step 2 or 3 the next time they encounter the same thing. So getting students ready for rigor is getting them prepared to know how to be cognitively independent, not just independent by figure it out yourself or, you know, study skills, but literally when I get unstuck, here are the 3 moves I make. Now, it's interesting because every learner has a variation on the core principles of the science of learning, right? Cognitive neuroscience. And it's always good to get students together so that when they talk about, oh, that's how you recognize, right, right. This is what I did in my writing classroom. I realized, you know, the curriculum that they wanted me to use, well, this is not going to get students, you know, here's a prompt, we write to the prompt. I set up peer editing where students had to write a draft of their paper, then they had to make They were in groups of 5, 4 copies for everyone else. Everybody had time early in the week. They get together and everybody's just reading. I'm reading my teammates' papers and I'm making comments, and I am going to give this paper back with my comments in the margins, and I'm going to get my paper back with their comments in the margins, right? This is a reader response approach. We're not grading. It's not good or bad. It's just, as a reader, this is where you lost me. You know, as a reader, I didn't really believe that. I didn't see where you back that up with any evidence, right? That didn't seem connected. You raised that point. So now they're giving you a reader response so that now you can see something that you couldn't see before. Interesting enough, I remember one student, Adam, who for the life of him, he just could not see this comma splice he was making. And It was after, I want to say, maybe 4, 4 and a half weeks of peer editing, and they had gotten the hang of it because it takes that long for a new practice. They're just learning the moves, let alone getting something out of it. But after 4 and a half weeks, and we had a conference, right? Just he and I. How's it going? Let's look at this part of your writing. And he says, you know, I realized there's a— I'm making these comma splices. And I realized that he saw this in— this is what I asked him, how did you come to understand this is what was happening? People kept marking it. I kept seeing this happening in someone else's paper, but I couldn't see it in my own.

Okay.

Yeah. But now he has new insight because of the conversations they were having. Very powerful stuff.

It is, yeah, absolutely. And it's like what you talk about, the learning partnerships, but not just between the educator and the students, but between students and creating that kind of almost like a community of practice feel in the whole classroom. Again, that's cultural as well as kind of deeply cognitive and rigorous and all of those things, right?

And that's my point. It is cultural. If you look at collectivist cultures, artisans, other, you know, The medicine folks, healers are coming together to share techniques or to understand, no, that's poisonous, to apprentice new people into their guild or their, their, their profession who, oh, we've identified that child is really having a gift for, you know, healing. Okay, well, let's now apprentice you so that you can actually learn all the things, right? Let's go out on nature walks so you can recognize that herb is poisonous. Let's go at different times of the year so you see what it looks like. It will mimic that one. How do you know the difference? This is what parents do.

Exactly.

I remember the first time my husband and I let our son, he must have been maybe 8, maybe 9, walk to the corner store.

Oh yeah. Whoa. Big moment.

Yeah. Big moment. He asked, we looked at each other. And of course, my husband let him go out. My husband is hiding behind every tree, every little mailbox. But it's like training wheels, right? And it's the moment where you've taken the training wheels off, you're running beside your child as the child is pedaling, and the child says, look at me. And then you have put your hands up and they realize it's all me. I'm not supporting you. And that is a tricky moment. It's a fragile moment.

Yeah.

What I believe about myself as a learner is going to determine if that little bike falls over or if I keep going. And this is where teachers in that alliance with their students and that learning partnership where their peers who can cheer them on, that you can talk about how you went from not knowing and understanding to understanding. Right. But most classrooms don't have that. No, let's talk about rigor, but we do it by, we're just gonna get more homework or more complex lesson.

Yeah.

No, that's great. And it's like the story that you tell yourself or that you kind of come to embody about yourself as a learner, right? I mean, that's, that's really powerful.

Yeah. And let me, let me add to that, that for students of color, those stories you tell yourself are also influenced by the societal narratives about people who are in your group, who look like, whose skin color is dark like yours. So if there are narratives of racial difference that other and marginalize, the student is hearing those and over time connects those because teachers say the darndest things, the most inappropriate things to students about their capacities and that fragility as dendrites grow, as students stretch themselves, then they coil back into themselves.

Yeah, well, no doubt. I mean, you can't not internalize that stuff, right?

That's the intention. Listen, if the media is telling you, of course, there you belong to criminals and, you know, you're suspect, or you're followed around stores, or you're shot in the back for no apparent reason, you start to question. And it takes a strong community to keep a student to understand that's not you. It's a parent's job. Now the job— the parent is working against the narratives that the student is getting in school.

Yeah, well, exactly. Yeah, it's like a deeply countercultural narrative that you're developing there. But I mean, God, we need, we need them desperately, right? We do.

And to me, that's the social justice part.

Exactly.

Exactly.

Not only are we creating counter-narratives, you can do this, not only have you done it, but look, in the face of oppression, folks in your community, your people have continued to not only excel by contributing, but have led in some ways.

Yeah.

Right. And so that's one narrative, a counter-narrative. Then we just have to give students the practical space to grow their intelligence. I don't need to talk about racism. I don't need to talk about implicit bias in that area. I just need to make sure I'm keeping the conditions free of those microaggressions so the student actually can practice the thing that will actually help the brain growth. Just like if you were going to learn to run that marathon, you have to make sure there's a clear road and you have the right gear.

And, you know, you take care of the readying and the rigor takes care of itself in some ways.

Yeah.

But, you know, the biggest challenge is you have to look and make sure that it is graduated, right?

Of course.

Yeah. It's not just, hey, now we got rigor, come and get rigor. It is really building capacity to do that.

And is there anything there you want to say just in terms of what that means? We've talked a lot about readying, but the idea of rigor and yeah, maybe rigor emerges, but how do you know? I mean, what do you look for? What do you help educators to look for when you, in order to say, I, you know, yeah, I've got the conditions right because that's rigor and that's happening.

That's a really, really good question. I've, rigor has two components. To it. A lot of us just use the word, right? Not really unpacking what rigor is as a concept or condition. It has complexity, graduated complexity, right? But that complexity is in direct relationship to the student's autonomy, meaning the student has to be able to do it by themselves, right? So the degree to which they are able to figure out complex things, at least two things that they have to rub together, something they have to figure out or solve. The brain is a puzzle solver. Pattern recognition master, and complexity is really about those things. What are the relationship of things that don't look like they're connected? What's cause and effect? There are about 4 or 5 things that the brain naturally, every time it encounters something new, it runs it through these things like, what am I looking at here? You know, so giving students the opportunity to figure that out, right, to engage— this is what we mean by productive struggle. Yeah, but that means they have that autonomy. They can do that without the teacher being the one to tell them, this is how you do it.

Yeah.

So the hallmarks of that— and this is one of the things I do when I'm working with teachers— is we actually have a rubric. How do I know my students moving from dependent learning to cognitively independent? Right. And there are several steps. But one of the things you can see is the student just has a recognition that I understand it. So there's a thinking routine that Ron Rickard in Making Thinking Visible use. I used to think, but now I think, or the student starts to see that they have misconceptions, or in the case of math, they start to understand, oh, I keep doing that thing, and they start to self-correct.

Yeah.

So they may make the mistake, but they self-correct correctly.

Yeah.

In the very beginning, they'll self-correct, but they're still wrong. Right. There's gradations. Sometimes the student won't even, you know, recognize they're wrong and they just plow on like, oh, that baby is not self-aware. Right. So self-awareness about my learning moves is one of those hallmarks. Now they'll be self-aware, but they're still not getting better, right? Then they're self-aware with, oh, impulse to self-correct, but it's still wrong. Okay, now I got to get the student to the point where they're self-aware. They have the impulse to self-correct. And they're actually correcting. Now they're able to bring 2 or 3 things together at once. This is how we see students actually progressing. I'm working on my second book and it's all about this. How do we move students from dependent to cognitively independent? What are the things we do? But how do we become the personal trainers of their cognitive development? Because only the learner learns. If I can't get them self-aware, I can't get them to self-correct. And I can't get them to self-correct correctly, they're going to be dependent all the way through school.

That's great. Yeah, brilliant. So we've kind of spent quite a bit of time on the reading piece, and I don't necessarily want to go back there, but I did want to ask you just about the, the potential conflict or clash between culture within an organization. So we've kind of talked about culture at the, you know, the meta level of colonial import of an education system that has these certain modes and certain ways of working and certain structures. But then, you know, I'm sure you see as you work with educators or with leaders that certain organizations also might have their own distinct kind of a culture. And then you take the classroom and, you know, educators set up, as we've talked about, the kind of conditions within their space where they have some degree of, of kind of autonomy and control over their space to create a culture. And how do you see those nesting or kind of interacting where perhaps you want to be doing culturally responsive teaching in your domain, but actually it's somehow running counter to the organizational culture that you're working in or that, you know, broader policy culture, maybe even?

Absolutely. It's a great question. It is one when I'm talking with leaders, teacher leaders, administrators, it's an important conversation to have because the organizational culture supports the instructional core. This is the work of Dr. Richard Elmore. He was a professor at Harvard Graduate School of Education. He coined this term instructional core as the primary business of schooling. Yeah, right. The teacher, the student, the content, always in a dynamic dance. So one of the things I find misaligned often is that it works unfortunately in reverse, that the central office or the school district or the organization that is, you know, managing schools is dictating for efficiency, right? This is our factory Tim Logan.

Yeah.

Dictating for teacher quality. Every teacher needs to be on page 5 of this curriculum. You know, they've got a pacing guide and we're going to check with these assessments. So now we're in a testing cycle. So a lot of this is about kind of factory model efficiency that actually starts to impact the classroom because now teachers are teaching in a way that is counter to the science of learning. And it's also counter to the collectivist learning practices of students. Yeah. So if— and therefore we cannot be responsive to not just those students, but all students, because these practices are good for all. Right.

Of course. Yeah.

And they're— and they're going to allow students who historically have not gotten access to the most powerful learning to have it. So while some other students may kind of like, okay, we've learned how to do school, those students who learn in a way that is in this more of this collectivist cultural vein and are othered within the society because of the historical colonization are going to be disadvantaged by this kind of factory model. So what has to happen is has to flip. So what happens is we strengthen that instructional core. We make sure that productive struggle is happening, every child is learning to read, and that they're progressing in ways that we don't have to have so much focus on testing and remediation and pull-out programs and extra. If we really just attended to making sure every student was a powerful reader and learner, we would have less need to, you know, have to get programs in and then worry about budgets and all these other things. So I think it's just the way Dr. Elmore has always talked about it is this flipped Right? Pay attention to what should be happening in the core. Train teachers so that they can do that. Provide an ongoing professional learning space so that they can continue to build their will, skill, knowledge, and capacity. And then let policies support that, right? Let evaluation support that. So the principal walks through to evaluate, has already been communicated to the teacher, for example, if I see no innovation in a classroom, if I walk in, everybody is at their desk, at the desk, or neat in a row, and everybody's quiet. I would, as a principal, have a problem with that because there's no— that's counter to the science of learning, that students should be talking, they should be making, they should be doing. Even if they're just processing, they can do that quietly. But sometimes there's, you know, I might turn to, you know, most of us do that at home. It could be quiet time at home, but somebody is reading and someone says, oh, this is an interesting passage. And then they go back to what they're doing. So it's very unreal in terms of how— what the brain needs to actually process. And so he suggested it has to be the other way around, that policy, these other supports, the organizational culture and structures all should be supporting the use of the science of learning cultural responsiveness to build the cognitive hooks and schema of students so that every student is learning. And if what we're talking about also is, you know, using techniques so that students who are from white, you know, Eurocentric culture are learning and they're cross-pollinating in terms of awareness of other learning processes and the history and the content. That's an added benefit, right? There are a lot of people who focus when you talk about cultural responsiveness only on anti-racism or social justice topics in the curriculum. They totally miss getting students ready for rigor.

Interesting.

Yeah, that's the piece I would, I would want people to— it's a both/and for sure. But if I had to, you make me pick, you know, because, you know, you're about to push me off a ledge or something, I'm going to pick getting students ready for rigor because historically that has always, for people of color, for Indigenous people, that has always been our path out.

That's really interesting because I think so many school leaders or district superintendents would say that that's what they're doing with their, the way that they're setting up processes and cultures, but actually you talked about the kind of almost you need the space for that to be responsive and if you, if you're so kind dictated to by the broader culture of the district or the organization, there is no space to do that kind of—

That's right.

So, and then bringing it right back to that instructional core, the educational encounter between learner, educator, and content. And there's that, maybe that's just where we can somehow almost carve out some notional space about that's where we can have our impact. I love, I love that idea.

And then we grow that impact, right?

Exactly.

Individual teachers together, right? Every classroom has its own instructional core. And this is why we have to give teachers professional learning space.

Exactly. Exactly.

Together and kind of compare notes.

Yeah.

This is where videotape is wonderful. Not videotape of the teacher teaching as some evaluative thing, but videotape of the students moving from I can't figure this out to, oh, I have an eureka moment. Yeah, it's amazing to see on tape if we watch over 6 to 9 weeks. And that's what I have teachers do. Pick 3 focal students, film that focal student, have a conversation with them, film them learning in week 1, and document their cognitive growth and capacity expansion. Then get together with others to say, what patterns do we see? Yeah, what are we doing that actually can accelerate this? So now other teachers in the building can do it. We're not getting smart together.

That's interesting.

We think every teacher, every individual teacher. So now leaders are kind of tied to these performative equity initiatives.

Yeah.

Like everybody's spending big money, but the chronic underdevelopment or the chronic underachievement is still happening for the same groups of kids. So, you know, just like a plumber will come in and check the pipes, like you got a leak. And we fix that. But something else is off in the system.

Yeah.

Just like a doctor would say, you know, we gave them this medication, but the fever is still spiking. There is something else going on.

We don't know where it is.

Systemically. But we have to now be detectives to go in and have our own methodology for identifying without shame or blame. Yeah. It's not about blaming anybody. This is why I say this is a residual. Past structures that were overt and explicit. That's not the case. Those, you know, the law has kind of eradicated those, but the DNA of that, the residual, is still in our systems.

Yeah, but shame or blame, I mean, that's huge, isn't it? To be able to kind of create spaces and cultures where we allow each other to show up and make some mistakes, get some things wrong, bring our biases, and they actually, you know, and we're kind of, we feel uncomfortable or embarrassed or you know, we're not quite sure what to say. Like, that all has to happen in order for that kind of productive struggle and that openness to failure that you were talking about for learners. But that's got to happen for professionals as well. Otherwise, it's never really brought out into the open, right?

This is why I love neuroscience so much. One of the reasons I started to lean into it as part of my professional development and teacher education, you know, and working shoulder to shoulder with teachers was I found when they understood, rather than just like, let's just talk about, you know, DEI stuff or racism, you know, automatically that gets kind of the amygdala, right? The fear center. Right. And instead what I did was kind of like anchor and twist, right? Let's anchor this in neuroscience. And what happens is we're so flooded with, oh my goodness, as I'm learning, like dopamine and oxytocin toxin is flowing. Now we can look at the hard stuff.

Interesting.

Yeah, right. So again, we got to create the right environment. We have to come at it so people are actually wanting to lean in, not feeling blamed, and they're going to lean away from that. So one of those areas is nothing can be changed until it's brought to a level of awareness. So this is a principle of, you know, cognitive neuroscience, meaning in habit formation or anything, if I'm unaware of it, I cannot change it despite what people are saying, right? I want to do something different. I actually have to be aware of me doing this badly or like, oh my God, I didn't realize that every time I cook dinner, you know, I'm eating like my mini meal. Then I sit down and eat too. Like, why am I gaining weight? Right? The little things we don't know. But there are ways that allow us to kind of step back and see what we're doing, that awareness. And then once we have that in front of us, now we can make a change versus telling folks, get a new mindset or don't be racist, or don't— you just can't mandate change.

Yeah, well, that's the readiness idea, right? To come back full circle, that is exactly the readiness, is you can't mandate change. And you, you know, if you don't attend to the readying part, and if you just get everybody's amygdala firing and, you know, everyone shuts down and no, there's no readying happening there. You, you know, nothing's gonna change, right? That's brilliant.

Thank you, Zaretta.

What a lovely conversation. Thank you so much.

And I appreciate your willingness to lean into that readying part. And I hadn't thought of it that way, but that is exactly the part that I think is missing. And so it was really great to be able to lean into that. We all have to get ready.

Yes, we do. Amazing. Thank you so much.

Bye-bye.

Bye.

We hope you've enjoyed this episode.

Please feel free to continue the dialogues with our guests, with us on our blog or on social media, or within your own networks.