Her research has found that three conditions need to be in place for individuals to successfully "de-bias": "De-biasing" requires a level of metacognition. A number of leaders discount it because it seems too "touchy feely" or only focused on raising students' self-esteem, when they need to raise achievement levels.

Students remain dependent learners; they never internalize cognitive routines and procedures. They are confronted with a new dilemma: distinguishing between multicultural education, social justice education, and culturally responsive education so they understand how each approach will (or won’t) get them to instructional equity and the closing of the achievement gap. Centers around the affective & cognitive aspects of teaching and learning. People learn better when surrounded by warmth and productive struggle, and Zaretta feels strongly that coaches can help teachers become what she calls a “warm demanders” of cognitive development, and help students gain more control over learning in the classroom. What might you do differently in offering more wise feedback? I ... is to bring formative assessment in. Zaretta Hammond is a teacher educator and the author of Culturally Responsive Teaching and The Brain: Promoting Authentic Engagement and Rigor Among Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Students. Reversing is taking students from being dependent learners who rely on over-scaffolding and helping them become independent learners. That's not the way it's generally promoted to teachers—it's promoted to them as a simple toolkit of strategies or surface content changes like adding diverse authors or including hip hop. But they are not interchangeable and not all will get you to educational equity. After talking with her and reading her book ,Culturally Responsive Teaching and the Brain, we want to highlight three specific examples of using neuroscience to help students and teachers reach their full potential. Your cultural identity, however, is much deeper than those elements and more engrained into your daily life. Here’s the reality: These teacher workarounds can’t go with the child to the next class or into a testing situation. You have misgivings about some current tendencies in professional development on culturally responsive teaching.

A “best practice” is often simply a popular practice. In this case, you're not thinking about your thinking, but thinking about your unconscious reacting.

That's what coaches are there to promote. But we know that’s not enough; the tendency is for that to get reduced into diverse books about boycotts and basketball or injustice topics of the day. For Zaretta, achievement in learning happens when students feel competent they become confident and in charge of their own learning. Ms. Hammond has also served as an adjunct instructor at St. Mary’s College School of Education in Moraga, California, where she taught The Foundations of Adolescent Literacy.

It takes ingenuity.

But, art is what you teach, and Hammond’s text explores how you can teach and be more responsive to all of your students. The coach has to understand what truly makes instruction "responsive" and assess how is the teacher igniting intellectual curiosity and chunking content so there are cognitive hooks that draw on students' understanding and current experience. Be a hawkish observer of student learning. One of the nation's leading implicit bias scholars, Patricia Devine of the University of Wisconsin, compares implicit bias to habits that, with intention and practice, can be broken. Being able to create the structures in your classroom, over strategy that allows students to actually say, “Oh. So, creative tension is a kind of gap analysis. Boot camp prepares soldiers by making them go through grueling training, and that at the end of that eight weeks, they are like, oh, snap! “Separate, but equal” continued this practice de facto. The book can help you understand how the brain is wired to: Having a better understanding of how your students’ brains are functioning can shape how you structure your classroom, lessons, and interactions with students. This is a critical element to bring into equity conversations.

Grade-level texts need to be accompanied by focused instruction using responsive pedagogies that focus on advanced decoding, building word wealth, and deepening background knowledge. When we call these practices “best,” is the unspoken message that these children can’t learn to read? “It is all about helping students not only reclaim their sense of confidence but be the leaders of their own learning – getting them to the point where as independent learners they are carrying the majority of the cognitive load – they self-initiate.”. From a coach’s perspective, the use of fine grain data, for example, can help teachers see their progress and keep them engaged and committed to implementing strategies. At PBL World 2020 she’ll fit right in, challenge and inspire us, and give us practical advice for using PBL as an equity strategy. We're always looking for new TCHERS' VOICE bloggers! Maximizing your potential as a teacher requires a commitment to all facets of education. Here is where things get a little tricky. —

That's another misconception—that group work equals culturally responsive instruction.

This is the work of teachers: they must understand how to move students into their ZPD, and recognize that their students won’t go into it spontaneously or willingly, and that’s natural. Instead, we postpone more challenging, interesting work until we believe they have mastered “the basics,” which are often low level. For example: Most notably is the WISE feedback model that Hammond offers as an alternative to the common sandwich feedback model of starting with a positive, then a negative, and ending with a positive. Under those conditions, these once-helpful strategies become negative reproductive practices leading to inequity. What message do they communicate about core values?”, “Were you allowed to question, or talk back to, adults? She blogs at www.ready4rigor.com. Instead they focus on social justice education. Or, if it’s nonfiction, are they asking, What has been left out of this? But truth be told, most educators are not really sure what it is or what it looks like. Culturally responsive teaching is a multi-pronged methodology that works through synergy. To make progress in educational equity, we need leaders, teachers, and other stakeholders to understand the different aspects of equity and how, when put together, they create more equitable outcomes for children. 518 Main Street, Suite A

Here’s a thought to consider: Second graders don’t want to talk about oppression, and when we as educators make that our sole focus, we’re doing students a disservice.

When educators defend their methods by characterizing them as “best practices,” that is not sufficient justification. In general, educators, especially at the elementary level, don’t interrupt this wishful thinking around multicultural books because it’s easy and appealing, especially when grappling with institutional equity around reading practices feels too complex. If students sense hostility in the classroom, their brain shuts down. (See Figure 1: “Dimensions of Equity.”). Here’s how the publisher describes her book: If you’re like me, you’ll be glad to hear that Zaretta began her career in education as a teacher—of expository writing in high school and community college. ©2020 Instructional Coaching Group.

She has a passion for books and teaching reading. I like the National Equity Project’s definition of educational, or instructional, equity: reducing the predictability of who succeeds and who fails, interrupting reproductive practices that negatively impact students, and cultivating the gifts and talents of every student. Remember, it is NOT a continuum. How are we reversing the systemic underdevelopment of these students? Subscribe to Culturally Responsive Teaching and the Brain by Zaretta Hammond My people, has there ever been a time when you knew something with your whole heart? She is a former high school and community college expository writing instructor. Instead, if we can find the will to pause our advice and allow the teacher to discover her own methods, thus partaking in her own cognitive work, autonomy and ownership will increase, and teachers will gain more from the coaching process.

The intersectionality of feedback and trust, motivation, and learning. We still have children in our schools who are not reading at grade level. As educators we must ask ourselves: Are the children in our care coming through our programs reading at grade level? Zaretta Hammond is a national education consultant and author of Culturally Responsive Teaching and the Brain: Promoting Authentic Engagement and Rigor Among Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Students.