Zaretta Hammond Challenges, Empowers, and Pushes Teachers to Transform the Educational Experience

Photo Cred: Zaretta Hammond's Twitter: @Ready4rigor

What position does an educator play in society? Some would say it is a reliable job that many choose when all else fails. A less cynical perspective is that teaching is the profession that holds the key to every career path. Athletes, chefs, designers, doctors, journalists, lawyers, politicians, and all other occupations would not exist had there not been a teacher that helped along the way.

While most, if not all, educators understand the importance of this responsibility, many school systems, especially those that serve marginalized students, share a sense of hopelessness in pursuit to identify and address the root cause of the system’s failure to adequately prepare students for the world. Zaretta Hammond, best-selling author, former teacher, literacy advocate, and national education consultant, has a solution for the “inequity by design” roadblock that exists in public schools.

Hammond’s best-seller, ‘Culturally Responsive Teaching & the Brain: Promoting Authentic Engagement & Rigor Among Culturally & Linguistically Diverse Students’, originally published in the latter part of 2014, opposes the broken system that doesn’t serve students. Hammond’s opposition calls out the root of inequity and aims to dismantle this system with the proposed solution that is culturally responsive teaching. Culturally responsive teaching is a practice of mindful education. In this practice, the false notion that culturally and linguistically diverse students cannot succeed that has long been perpetuated, is replaced and revolutionized by diligent teachers that have shifted and refocused their instructional efforts in the direction of helping dependent learners and thinkers build the skills needed to become independent learners and thinkers.

What becomes of the dependent student that is never provided the tools to learn and think on their own? On October 17, 2017, Zaretta Hammond was the keynote speaker for Inclusion Collaborative’s ‘Why Cultural Responsiveness Matters for Social-Emotional Development’ livestream. During her talk, Hammond names that culturally responsive teaching should be “oriented” in helping “vulnerable and marginalized students find their way back to their natural genius and confidence as learners”. Zaretta Hammond later goes on to state that when teachers “deprive students of productive struggle”, those students are deprived “of being on the path to grow brainpower”. When a student doesn’t go through the productive struggle of learning, he or she remains in the realm of being a dependent learner and thus, the system that underestimates their intellectual capacity is preserved.

What makes Hammond’s culturally responsive teaching approach so striking and necessary is the focus on a population of students that have historically had low-expectations placed on them. These students have been seen by the school system and society as marginalized and/or disadvantaged. They have experienced things along the way that have caused them to “lose their natural confidence”, as Zaretta Hammond explains in the October 2017 livestream.

How do you get a student that lacks confidence in their abilities to dream of or put in the work to become a chef, designer, lawyer, etc.? This is the challenge teachers face with their under-performing students of color, immigrant, and poor students.

Further in the October 2017 livestream, Hammond states that every student has a path within them that educators need to “help them be the leaders of their own learning”. In her definition of equity, she gives teachers the key to that charge: “helping children find their way, helping children find their confidence”. This moment of empowerment left educators in the room with Hammond, and virtual viewers, with the push needed to transform their teaching and their students’ learning.

So, what does this transformation look like? To build student confidence, educators need to first be confident in who they are and what they bring to the classroom. A confident educator is then able to construct an inclusive environment that promotes learning and growth, where students feel seen and valued. Once the environment feels safe for students to present and learn as their authentic selves, the teacher can help push and expand upon their learning abilities. When teachers don’t lower the standard of academic expectations and rigor, students can be stretched mentally. This affords teachers with the ability to not only recognize and build upon student strengths, but also to help shift the narrative that these students have about themselves-that they are destined to fail.

Once a student is empowered and affirmed, they are no longer bound to the confinements of fear, but rather able and willing to rise to the challenges of discomfort that await them on the path of fruitful and fun learning.