Zaretta Hammond
episode 31 to the classroom podcast
February 5, 2024
Jennifer Serravallo:
Zaretta Hammond, I'm so excited to have you on the podcast today. Welcome.
Zaretta Hammond:
Thank you. Thank you for having me, and I'm so glad we can finally make this happen.
Jennifer Serravallo:
I agree. I agree. All right, so the first thing I wonder is whether or not there's an increased attention on your wonderful book, Culturally Responsive Teaching and the Brain and all of your other resources because of this increased attention on neuroscience, cognitive science, and the importance of a science-based approach to teaching literacy.
Zaretta Hammond:
Well, first off, I'm super excited that people are leaning into the science of learning and the science of reading. And embedded in both is the notion of culturally responsive teaching. It's something that undergirds every subject I was a writing teacher when I was in the classroom and I understood that my job was not only to teach students proper punctuation and coherence and all the wonderful things, but to also help them become more powerful learners so that they can learn about their own moves that were not working for them and how to manipulate that. So that was a whole process where I had to better understand the science of learning and how to help them become not only metacognitive, but also meta strategic.
Metacognitive just means I'm aware of my thinking and processes. They could be some broken processes or missing pieces in the process. It does not tell you how to fix that. And that's where I've lift up Ron. Ritchart's work coming out of Project Zero where he talks about this idea of being meta strategic. And that is so rooted in the science of learning this notion that I have to not only become aware of my learning moves, but I have to learn how to manipulate it. And so I always have wanted to make sure that people understood if only the learner learns, so whether they were trying to improve their fluency, trying to improve their comprehension, stretching their writing stamina so they can get beyond five sentences in a paragraph (because that ain't a paragraph.) And so being able to do that, I had to coach the student not by telling them, not by red marks on the paper, but by this dialogic to help them see and then learn to manipulate their own learning moves, step back so that the feedback that they got can be internalized and then acted upon.
And so this in itself was a whole process and this is in essence what chapter eight is in Culturally Responsive Teaching: ignite chunk chew and review. How do you help them get to the point where they have awareness and then they want to apply their effort and brain torque, if you will, to this effort we all have of trying to change our learning moves. Sometimes they can calcify into habits and we have to break them. So that is kind of the source of science for me. And honestly, I will tell you the other reason I leaned into science is because despite my success with my students and I start to bring culturally responsive practices in to help them better get the structures and routines where they could lean into their work differently, peer editing, again, it wasn't just more group work. That's a misconception of culturally responsive teaching.
Instead, it was how do you leverage distributed wisdom of the group? And we set up peer editing. You brought in five copies of your essay, distribute 'em to your pod members, they read them, took them, and then they came back. And then in trios...it was a lot of dialogue, it was a lot of talking, but you had to talk from what we learned about writing structure or coherence, whatever the thing we were talking about. So it was kind of this double loop learning while they're talking about it to better help their peer. They were learning it, so they started to have awareness like, oh, I see where that comma splice is in that paper. And he keeps doing that like, oh, snap, that's showing up in my paper too, despite the fact that for weeks I've been circling it with the big red markers, like now they can see.
So I brought those practices in, but I knew that they needed to have that capacity to do the work themselves, carry that cognitive load, but I needed to coach them, be their personal trainer, be there to guide them, give them feedback on their form, and then set up the classroom as a dojo. The dojo in the martial arts is you're coming in to work it out, you're going to practice and you're going to flip and do the kicks and the things and then bring it all together. So that was kind of what I did in my classroom and I weaved together all of these, the science of reading, because of course writing is just the cousin, sister, I don't know.
Jennifer Serravallo:
Flip side.
Zaretta Hammond:
Yeah, flip side, decoding encoding and then the science of learning and then culturally responsive teaching. So it was this kind of Venn diagram of those things intersecting. So the student became the primary actor.
Jennifer Serravallo:
Looking closely at chapter three I am fascinated by the neuroscience and cognitive science that you discuss in that chapter. And I think all the listeners could benefit from hearing a little bit about that and how it relates to your principles around, or rules as you call them for culturally responsive teaching. So we'll start off with the brain stuff. Can you give us a really basic 101 tutorial on what teachers most need to know about the different areas of the brain as it relates to the learning science?
Zaretta Hammond:
What I try to help people really understand is that the brain science, the science of learning, if you will, cognitive and social neuroscience are there to inform us, but just repeating the parts of it doesn't actually tell us. So what do I do with that information? So the core things I think they need to understand, and this is really on pages in Chapter 3, starting with page 45.
This is the idea that the brain has a safety threat mechanism, which when we start to think about learning, it is so critical if what we understand about the science of learning is we learn through productive struggle. And productive struggle is not just any kind of struggle. It's a struggle that is we are on the edge of flow, meaning there's challenge, there's skill, but it's just a little into risk and ooh, this is stretching me, but it has an element of pleasure in there. I wouldn't say joy yet because we don't competence precedes confidence. And what we do when we stretch ourselves in the learning pit through productive struggle is we actually fail fast. We are okay, errors or information, this is all of what we have to set up in the classroom. So this information, this chapter is really helping the teacher understand what's going on in the brain.
So the cortisol, the amygdala, that's one thing the teacher really needs to understand, not just telling the students about the amygdala -- they don't care. You want to understand how do I keep that brain calm and ready? So this is now from the teacher standpoint, understanding and creating the right environment. Now I have to get the student into that learning pit for productive struggle. So there is a little anchor and twist, not bait and switch. So you're using that information about how to reduce the cortisol and you want to up the oxytocin. So there are three chemicals that I think are important that I lay out in pages 45 to 49. Cortisol--this is the stress hormone. We move away from things that are raising our cortisol. Then there's oxytocin. We move toward things that are raising our oxytocin. This is our social bonding brain chemical. We want it and when we get low in it, we will talk with others we'll seek out others.
This is why kids turn and you think they're off task, but they're really just feeding their oxytocin. So the teacher actually could be thinking about this. The third, which I think it's underplayed as dopamine, meaning our brains are actually learning machines and evolution has geared it such that there's actually the most yummy brain chemical that gets released when we do hard things to the point where we'll want to do that hard thing again because it released dopamine in our brain and this is actually the seed of addiction. It is so yummy to our brain that we'll keep doing whatever that thing is, and this is what opioids do. They overstimulate the dopamine center. So we don't want kids going down that road. No, just say no to that. But what we do want is as learners, as teachers who are getting the learner to do a new thing, to stretch, to be okay with taking risks, they've got to get a dopamine hit and the brain has this thing called "progress principle," meaning if I see I'm making a little progress, it'll give me a hit of dopamine, keep going, keep going.
And so the teacher needs to understand that and then look out into the classroom and say, how am I helping the students generate dopamine? They can't generate it on demand, so there's no reason to say, Hey, your brain has dopamine. They're just like, "okay..." It's like, you're right, you're telling me that. So the reality is the teacher has to understand these three things, but that amygdala, here's the last thing I'll say about these three. The amygdala gets to run all of the brain if there's a threat, if that cortisol goes too high and it has a reticular activating system that is watching, it's the watcher. That little amygdala gets to override everything and it shuts down learning. This is the intersectionality of what we understand about trauma and trauma-informed practices. Those two things aren't the same, but what connects them is the fact that we want to manipulate that amygdala so it's calm and ready. You can't fool it. So you literally have to be creating a classroom in which that brain can calm itself. What I see is too much of a pedagogy of compliance. That's not calm, it's just stress induced compliance. I'll stop there because, girl, I could go on and on.
Jennifer Serravallo:
I know it's fascinating and it's so important I think that you can kind of look behind the curtain because then we don't see a student's behavior or even a student's performance as something that's unrelated to these things or that's unchangeable.
Zaretta Hammond:
This is why inquiry collaborative inquiry is so important to collective efficacy because just because you got this information doesn't mean you know how to apply it immediately. You're now looking in your classroom in a way that you haven't looked before. Videotape is so important for this because you can't slow it down. So unless you're doing some design work, instructional design work ahead of time, and this is not lesson planning. This, I am actually looking at the interactions of my students in response to that who's talking. And this is not about engagement. That's another place where we think, oh, I'm going to use the brain science to up engagement. Just because you have students engaged doesn't mean they're learning. So unfortunately we've kind of lumped all these things together. So I think that I would kind of push that one step further.
How is the teacher being a detective in his or her own classroom using videotape as a partner to act? Or if you have instructional coaches, even better partner, they can talk back, but you've got to slow it down or you've got to step back. Or maybe you are kid watching, and I talk about this in the book, meaning you're just tallying something, but you have to assess your current reality versus, oh, this is an interesting strategy that I got at a PD session, so I'm now just going to do it. So this is the antithesis of what it means to be responsive. And again, folks lean heavily on the culture part of culturally responsive teaching thinking, oh, it's about anti-racism and cultural identity being honored versus what do I do when the student is stuck? How do I help them? And if the more I understand about how the brain learns, and that's why I put those brain rules in there. The more I understand that the more I can craft responses that are going to help the student loosen that cognitive log jam for him or herself.
Jennifer Serravallo:
And a lot of that is on the spot decision making. What's happening with the student and what am I going to say back?
Zaretta Hammond:
It's what they call the discretionary instructional decision-making in discretionary moments. But the fact is you have to have anticipated where students are going to get stuck. If you've been teaching fifth grade, you know how fifth grade writers go ,where they're going to start to venture off the types of students that come in, there're probably five or six types. So it's not a mystery. This is what you plan for. This is why lesson planning isn't the only thing You have to plan for the type of instructional decision making, and this is where knowing a student's culture comes in because one of the brain rules is culture organizes our schema. So all new learning must be coupled with existing learning. Well, if I think culture is only about racial politics and talking about race and racism, I will miss a core component of the science of reading, which is however I'm experiencing the world is organized through however I was socialized from zero to seven before I came into a school environment from my home environment, my community, extended family. So all of this means that the teacher has to understand what is the student, what do they have floating in their head that I can toggle and help them better integrate this new information or help them have an aha moment? What do I say? But if I haven't practiced that, if I don't have some kind of stuff in my back pocket that over time I've accumulated, if you're a teacher in the first three years, we're going to give you a pass on that.
That's what you're accumulating. If you're seven years in what've you been doing? You've got to accumulate this stuff. That's how we grow as educators, right? It's like a Olympic coach. The reason people come to you is over time, even if you did not place as a gold medal Olympian, if you are turning out year after year Olympians, you have over time understood mindset. Oh, this one has, these are the tools to correct that mindset, but it's not the only set of tools you have, and this is the responsive piece, and this is what I find teachers aren't getting in their professional development.
Jennifer Serravallo:
So let's talk about these brain rules. You talked about one of them before, but I think they're really helpful to talk about one by one, you have these six core design principles that you call "culturally responsive brain rules." The first one, you talked about this a little bit already with the amygdala, is that the brain seeks to minimize social threats and maximize opportunities to connect with others in community. Actually, you talked about it with the oxytocin already too a little bit. If you could elaborate a little bit more beyond what you already talked about?
Zaretta Hammond:
Yeah, I think we are socialized into what is threatening and what is safety. So this is where the culture part comes in, collectivist cultures, what are the symbols and signs that you would read when you walk into a room that says this is safe, that your brain is reading these signs? It's not because someone's saying it to you because you recognize something. We all have walked in a room and felt tension and thought, and nobody's saying anything like this doesn't feel safe for me. Same thing with microaggressions. If you walk into a room, you may be the only Latina African-American person and someone ignores you and everybody else is getting service, you're running a program in your head that your amygdala is starting to tell you, we are not going to wait too long for you to know this is a dangerous situation. So it is so important for us to understand that culture determines what's a threat and what's safety.
White people get socialized to Black people being threatening because that's a dominant narrative in the US, right? The assumption of criminality or the assumption of low intelligence or the belief in the lack of betterment, those are the three top narratives of racial difference. For dark-skinned people, primarily African-American, but wherever you go in Australia, it's their Aboriginal and New Zealand, it's Maori and other places you have the same -- wherever colonization has happened. So my point to you is teachers have to be aware of how they're showing up as not to be sending the wrong signal. This is cross-cultural miscommunication.
Jennifer Serravallo:
That's super powerful. And as a former teacher in New York City schools, I would tell you that my typical classroom would have at least a dozen different cultures represented in it. And I think there's probably many teachers for whom that's true.
Zaretta Hammond:
Well, I write about that in Culturally Responsive Teaching because over time, again, if you're beyond your third year and you're in the same school for a number of those years, you should be keeping notes. What is the culture around the school? If there's Afro-Caribbean, what are the holidays? How people roll, what do they do? And you should be making it your business to take these notes. The children can be good partners. So this notion of learning partnerships is just that: how are you studying your kids to actually learn that and understand a few basics of say, collectivist culture in context, meaning collectivist culture with Alaska native students looks different than African American students in New York City. And understanding that allows that teacher over time to accumulate this knowledge that people who move abroad are expats.
It's really not a matter of you having to morph yourself, but how do you help the student actually? How do you communicate across that difference? You get to still be who you are, but most of us have a wider palette of cultural ways of being that we can adjust to, still being ourselves, holding onto our identity and being authentic. But we understand, oh, okay, if you're from Britain, maybe this is what you do. People of color have to be students of white people to order to survive, to not get shot, not get marginalized, not get harmed in any way. All you have to look is Jim Crow era where it was much more blatant, but even nowadays, this is what the Black Lives Matter in the George Floyd. That minor things, if you don't study and know, then you actually can't navigate that. That's what a culturally responsive educator does. I call it widening my aperture in Chapter 4.
Zaretta Hammond:
What I would add to that is and practice it because it's not enough to know and you don't want to reflect that like, oh, I know something about these people. You could still come into that knowing in a very paternalistic way. Versus I actually can adjust the way I do without ever saying a word, but gesturing that. For example, in collectivist culture, the first five minutes are really important. So if you're having parents in, the first five minutes should be social. How are you doing? What's up? A little selective vulnerability, then that's using the knowledge and not always taking a learner stance as some way it's point. You need to be a practitioner of having a wider cultural palette and being able to move in and out of that.
Jennifer Serravallo:
Let's talk about the second rule is positive relationships. Of course it relates to the first one we were just talking about, and there's a tremendous amount of research about positive relationships, but I think you bring an interesting perspective with bringing in the brain science as well. So why is it so critical and how does it relate to culturally responsive teaching?
Zaretta Hammond:
It's our amygdala and our RAS, that Reticular Activating System that get to determine safety. So it's not by you telling me you're safe, it's by demonstrating through the things you do that the brain reads the room. And so this is why positive relationship that our brains have something called mirror neurons, meaning I cross my leg, you cross your leg. It is the way we signal non-verbally. Almost 90% of our communication that tells us whether we're safe or not is non-verbal. And so understanding how that flows in a collectivist culture, understanding how that flows when you are helping a student calm their brain because frustrated as they're trying to read, what does that look like to be able to do that when parents come in? How are you building that partnership with parents so that those positive relationships are really about that mirroring, having those mirror neurons firing.
And the challenge is we can detect when it's authentic or when you're just being performative, what happens is it just gets worse. The more I think you're performative, the more I think you're being distrustful and sneaky. And if I am a parent who's gone through the same system which marginalized me and ignored me, I'm already on a defense. I'm already not trusting. So it's really important to do that and build that with parents, with students, particularly if they're dependent learners. And so I think this is a lot of our social emotional learning movement has a lot of positiveness here, but I think we need to move the emotional social supports closer to cognition.
Jennifer Serravallo:
I'm thinking back to your conversation earlier about productive struggle and how it's critical to get into that zone to be able to learn. And I'm thinking there must be connections between whether or not I feel comfortable enough as a learner to be struggling in front of someone. I've got to trust them. I have to know that they are trustworthy, that I'm not going to be embarrassed or be put down.
Zaretta Hammond:
The science tells us there are trust generators that there is a way to build trust quickly. And again, it's not a performative thing, it's not what I'm saying to you, it's what I'm doing because the brain is always looking and kids are really, really observant and they will smile and they'll be compliant because that's the nature of being a child in our culture is you are unfortunately have less authority or power for self-direction. So you're at the behest of adults, but kids can read adults really quickly as to their authenticity. So this is why that partnership has to truly be one in which there's trust, and that's the personal warmth and active demandingness, if I help you become more competent, that's trust is built. If I see you in a way, I see you out and about the grocery store and we nod heads, I don't have to stop and have a chat with you, but it builds trust just the same way that we think we know our barista because we go to the same Starbucks and then we have a little chitchat and how's your day going?
We need to do that and we could do that quickly in the classroom. Meaning when you help someone become more competent and you're not belittling them, but you're also not downplaying it. Kids actually, if you don't help them get better, it actually erodes trust. If I'm going all year and I see other kids are passing me in their reading ability and I'm still stuck, I'm looking at you as if to say, "why are they moving forward? But you're not helping me." So even if you're saying something like, oh, you'll get it. It's nice. It's okay. I don't believe you.
So trust building is really, this is why the science is so important. What are trust generators? What is selective vulnerability? What is proximity? How do we build rapport and then move that to the therapeutic alliance being the personal trainer of cognition because you'll continue to build trust as you help them get better. Competence precedes confidence, and we all remember that teacher that helped us get over a hump. Like years, Ms. Alexander was my first reading teacher that was first grade. Listen, I'm old enough to be well beyond first grade, and I remember it like it was yesterday, that these imprint us and this is why helping children learn to read so that they can become powerful learners is so critical. It's not a technical thing to get our test scores up. It is a relational thing. Helping a student actually see their own progress, like I'm getting better.
Jennifer Serravallo:
I think it's so important to underscore how it's we can't lower expectations or make so many concessions to seem nice. You've got to have high expectations and you've got to show them that they can do it.
Zaretta Hammond:
You have to have this thing called the "act of demandingness." This is that. I will show you the way. I'm not doing it for you, but I'm coaching. Think Mr. Miyagi Again. Daniel came, I want to learn to do karate. All right, go paint my house. Go wax my car. He knew he needed to give him skill. He knew he needed to do in a low stakes way. He knew he needed to keep pushing him only to have him. That was the productive struggle because Daniel at a certain point said, ah, I'm tired of this. I want a teacher. He said, you've been learning all along. And so the fact is high expectations that is not coupled with active demandingness is performative. You telling me that means absolutely nothing if you're not showing me how and high expectations is not showing someone how.
Yeah. Let's move on to the third one. culture guides how we process information. Is there anything you want to elaborate beyond what we've already talked about?
Zaretta Hammond:
There's so much to say. I think we undervalue information processing, and this is different than positive relationships. This is literally the effects of cognitive redlining in schools where we saw segregation, and it's still evident, particularly when we look at who's reading and who's not reading. We know the opportunity to have that productive struggle to internalize the sound spelling correspondence to work on word study and vocabulary development and just all that in a generative way is aided by information processing, and we are not giving kids enough of that and productive struggle and having things on the working memory where you're chewing on them is key to that because again, that's schema and I'm altering and expanding my schema. How do you make learning sticky? Because teachers are covering content, but if the student doesn't learn it, have we actually taught if they're not learning to read?
Jennifer Serravallo:
So information processing you're saying is the same as when you're talking about chewing on information, having to grapple with the information and getting in the moment feedback while you're working on something. Do I have that right?
Zaretta Hammond:
You don't have to get in the moment, but you do have to pull things apart, chew on it, wonder about it. It has to get muddy. You have to understand your confusions. It's just like taking something apart. At a certain point, you're going to put it back together, but curiosity can drive us, creativity can drive us, and we'll put it together in a new way. And I like Ron Richart's thinking routine: parts purposes and complexities because that's what we're processing. But too often we pre-digest the content so students don't have to grapple. And for a lot of teachers, they don't know how to organize their classroom where that grappling can happen without them feeling it's on the verge of going out of control. This is why I go back to you have to prepare the dojo. A dojo has padding on the beams and everywhere.
Why? Because people are going to be thrown about. I don't know where you're going to land, right? There's no chalk outline land here. And so therefore you've prepared the environment for it to get a little messy, but it's contained mess. And so this is the piece I find is not happening, and then this is certainly going to connect to 4, which is attention drives learning. If that intellectual curiosity isn't there, then that brain torque to actually do the processing isn't going to happen. That's that elaboration stage of chewing. I just can't tell you "start chewing." That has to be the brain is ignited to actually say, oh my God, I want to understand this. Let me pull this apart. Ooh, where is ooh ooh for kids when they're learning to read? If I don't hear that, I'm like, I'm doing something wrong. There needs to be some intellectual curiosity popping off because that's the engine. That's the energy and fuel for information processing.
How will people learn new stuff? It can't be all project based going learning constructivism. The fact is that you have to give them new information and then you have to do that. Just like Mr. Miyagi, I'm going to show you the moves. There are moves related to this, but we don't have what I call instructional conversation to help the student actually become meta strategic. So direct instruction is about, "Hey, here's the new information, but I still have to help you choose. So you can couple that with your existing body of knowledge, funds of knowledge, schema." So direct instruction doesn't take the place of those operate alongside. Information processing in itself is not going to generate new knowledge.
Where will the students get that? So I think we set up a false dichotomy. You don't have to take students through the whole thing. I call it the theory of the first pancake. Nobody shuts the kitchen down becauase that first pancake comes out of the looking all jacked up, right? Burnt on one side, gooey on the other. No, this is a harder productive struggle. The cook says, Hmm, I need to heat the griddle a little higher. I need to thin that batter out. Nobody says, oh my God, that first pancake shut the kitchen now and this is what we do to kids.
We snatch things back. I'm like, I'll take it now. I'm going to do this over scaffolded direct instruction. I think over scaffolding when we're trying to teach reading without giving students opportunities to grapple, My mother was a library technician. I got the run of the public library and there were books that were too big for me, but I also knew, Ooh, I'm stretching myself. Ooh, look at that word. But that word is kind of similar to this word or this, oh, it's the cognitive workout. Where are our kids getting a cognitive workout? So we should not misunderstand the need for small doses, microdosing of direct instruction without over scaffolding, with opportunities to process information. It's not an either/or. And that is the only path to students becoming powerful readers and writers.
Jennifer Serravallo:
So much of education is not either/or it is both/and we've got to do both of them. The fifth one is "all new information must be coupled with existing funds of knowledge in order to be learned." There have been a couple of guests on my podcast who have referenced Moll's work before, but just in case people aren't familiar, what do you mean by "funds of knowledge" versus background knowledge or prior knowledge and what would you like to say about this rule?
Zaretta Hammond:
So some people call it prior knowledge. Some people call it background knowledge. Some people call it funds of knowledge, but when Moll and his associates did that study, they said that we typically ignore the Funds of Knowledge that students -- diverse students --bring to class. So it's not something different they have, it's just that teachers aren't tapping it. It's still background knowledge. It's just we discount it as they don't know anything because it doesn't happen to be the same stuff that we assume should be the body of knowledge from our own cultural orientation or individualistic orientation or socialization.
So this is again, widening the aperture, helping students activate that background knowledge, get into what are the funds of, what do you know and how do you know that even if it's not direct, right? And so there's a way in which we still have to honor what kids are bringing because this rule tells us we have to not because of some moral cultural identity honoring. That is just kind of performative doublespeak. It's like the brain has to already couple. If you fail to do that, the student might repeat it, but they're not going to hold onto it. Consolidation in the brain happens 24 to 48 hours after the learning episode, so there's no review and then I'm going to learn it. You learn it and it integrates until it becomes part of your background knowledge 24 to 48 hours later. So if it's easier for us to come at this through the science, that's why I wrote those things in Culturally Responsive Teaching. And the same holds whether we're learning to write, we're teaching students to rewire their brains for reading or we're learning math.
Jennifer Serravallo:
Yeah, these are learning principles. It has nothing to do with the content necessarily. Your sixth one, we've already talked about really with the discussion of neuroplasticity, which is that "the brain physically grows through challenge and stretch, expanding its ability to do more complex thinking and learning." Is there anything related specifically to culturally responsive teaching and this particular rule that you want to talk about?
Well, I would just say that it's all related to culturally responsive teaching because it is not something separate, all instruction is culturally responsive. The question is whose culture is it oriented to? So the reality is these brain rules supersede that, and that's the whole point of information processing. That's the whole point of why you need to know what the student knows so that you know where to couple that new content so they can grind. It's easier if I have some connection to it than if it's totally new. Then we're going to have to find our connections to it. So yeah, I would simply say that literacy is so related to social neuroscience, cognitive neuroscience, and both of those things undergird this thing we call culturally responsive. And I really want people to kind of loosen up the definition. It really is about understanding how the brain uses its existing schema and network of understanding in a way that allows it to take in this new information rapidly and to make it part of themselves and so that they can keep kind of expanding their learning power and their agency.
My final question for you, given all you've shared, I wonder what advice you have for teachers who have a student in their class that they're not connecting with, maybe a student who's struggling, who's showing us through their behavior that they need something different. Where might that educator begin?
Zaretta Hammond:
I think you begin with intellectual curiosity. I think you have to figure out, usually acting out behavior issues are because the brain is bored, boredom creates the same anxiety that high levels of cortisol and create in the brain. And so again, being able to get the brain to lock into something that it finds curious and this is why you have to know your students. Being able to do that becomes so important. So I think that's the starting place for teachers to be able to do that.
Jennifer Serravallo:
Thank you. Zaretta, thank you so much for being my guest today. I really appreciate your scholarship and thank you for your time today.
Zaretta Hammond:
You are so welcome.
Jennifer Serravallo:
I am so excited to have my colleague Jerry Maraia with me. Jerry, welcome.
Jerry Maraia:
Thank you so much, Jen for having me.
Jennifer Serravallo:
I loved that conversation.
Jerry Maraia:
My brain is spinning. It is so filled with inspiration and so many ideas for practical use in the classroom. So exciting.
Jennifer Serravallo:
I felt like it was just really helpful. I find the neuroscience fascinating and I think knowing the background behind the why of what's going on, why kids are acting how they are, why they're learning what they're learning or not learning when we want them to be learning, I just feel like it has endless possibilities to inform our practice.
Jerry Maraia:
I completely agree. There's something that really stuck out to me regarding the brain research, and that's specifically around this notion of ways to stimulate dendrite growth and really thinking about new neural pathways and how teachers can do that. One of the things particularly is how it's so essential for learners to apply their new learning with real deliberate and authentic practice, by students doing the work, doing the intellectual lift, really giving time to do that. Which then got me thinking about how is classroom teachers and we provide that space, how do we ensure that that happens in a real practical way? So one of the thoughts that just came to mind is being intentional around the ways in which we use our time with kids, which is sacred and
Jennifer Serravallo:
Limited.
Jerry Maraia:
Limited, exactly. I always make a joke that in my teaching sometimes it's like if I say one more thing now the kids are going to get it. Well, if I say one more thing and keep saying one more thing, now I've just eaten up the whole period and now kids don't have opportunities to actually engage in the real work of practice. And to Zaretta's point, new neural pathways might not be strengthening or strengthened or activated. So I just think it's important to think about time.
Jennifer Serravallo:
And you get cognitive overload with one more thing, one more thing, one more thing. And if you look really critically at a lot of the reading programs or curriculums that are in use today, some of them are a little overfull. If we're really thinking, our goal is to get kids practicing, working, grappling, chewing, doing the stuff, some of them just have too much that you could ever cover in a given class period. And it means making really careful strategic edits to what is this lesson going to look like so that I'm prioritizing that practice time and her discussion around the importance of practice that sets kids up to productively struggle, not be frustrated and not have it be boring. But that sweet spot of that productive struggle and the important role that the teacher plays in providing feedback during that time, again, has a lot of implications for how we organize our time. How do we make sure that everyone's not just practicing, but that they're practicing with struggle and with really meaningful, valuable feedback.
Jerry Maraia:
Yeah. This is so big. This is so big. I was noting as Zaretta was talking in my notebook how many times she mentioned the word coaching, right? Certainly with that reference to Mr. Miyagi and other references to the importance of being a personal trainer, she really sort of thought and got us thinking about how our role is to coach students.
So I heavily rely on systems and structures to ensure that there's time built inside of the period for students to get that one-on-one opportunity or maybe one-on-four opportunity in a small group. I think that the conference is just such a beautiful way, not only to build positive relationships between teacher and student, but also to provide that feedback to students. This idea of researching where a student's at in the beginning of a conference, really sitting down and being present, leaning in to what they're doing, to what they're doing well, where they need to improve, complimenting, right? I think Zaretta talks about this idea of a dopamine hit. Remember that part of the episode?
Jennifer Serravallo:
Yep, Absolutely.
Jerry Maraia:
And I think there's something so powerful about the compliment being a little bit of that dopamine hit right there in the conference, really teaching into one explicit skill and strategy and then coaching along the way, getting them to practice it right there, actual application right there before you set them off to go work independently.
Jennifer Serravallo:
And I think when time is tight, and it usually is, pulling kids into a small group and doing a lesson around something that the group has in common that they all need. Right there, you're building community amongst the students. We're all in this together. You're still giving the individual opportunities for coaching and feedback, and hopefully that time is also full of dopamine hits, right? You're getting it. You're getting it. I'm raising the challenge. So I think that element is whether it's one-on-one or one in a group of four, you can have that same relationship-building and that same repeated practice and repeat that grappling, that chewing on content, that information processing together with the really meaningful feedback.
Jerry Maraia:
Another area that sort of struck me that, and it's connected to what we're talking about here, but really thinking strategically about the difference between dependent versus independent learners and more specifically our tendency at times as teachers to over-scaffold and how over-scaffolding doesn't provide opportunities for productive struggle.
Jennifer Serravallo:
And I think that's really critical to think about, and I think it connects in some ways to something she was bringing up a lot early in the conversation, which is this development of meta-strategic knowledge. This was really interesting to me. And I think whenever I talk about strategies, I talk about the importance of knowing when to apply them. You're strategIC. And if you don't have a little time without someone coaching you and talking to you and telling you to redirecting you. If you don't have the opportunity to sit and have a little bit of struggle on your own and think, what do I need here? What strategy, from what I've learned, am I going to apply? What's going to be the best tool for this particular job? I think it just makes another case for the importance of having some alone, I do it, independent practice time carved out and set aside in the classroom.
Jerry Maraia:
Yeah. I think that alone, time to figure it out, to make some important strategic intentional decisions as a learner is key. And I would add to that, that I think it's so important that they're doing it also in the community of others in the context of conversation and talk with partnerships or small groups or whole class even. This idea of talk really being a great place to help students process what they're learning or help students connect with others, help students expand on their thinking when they hear new ideas from others. So not only that individual time, that independent time, but time for students to talk. True story. I was in a middle school not too long ago, and one of the things I realized was that there were not many opportunities for students to talk with each other. And in some cases, in classrooms that I visited in a middle school, there weren't any times for students to talk. There were no times for students to engage with processing the material they were learning or for students to connect with others in more of a social context around their learning.
Jennifer Serravallo:
And having students be leaders for their peers I think is so powerful. Let's say a student has worked on a goal for a long time and they've learned some strategies, they could teach others, they could be a leader, and what a way to cement that learning and to inspire their peers and to just spread the learning in the classroom than to have students be in the driver's seat of, let's say, pulling a small group together and teaching their peers something that they've learned or leading an examination of a mentor text and helping their peers notice it. And going back to the brain research that she talks about, the importance of social connections and how it releases the oxytocin and that kids crave these relationships and these opportunities to talk with other people.
Jerry Maraia:
I wanted to lift up one more point that Zaretta mentioned that just feels so applicable to our work in classrooms and working with kids, and that is to be a detective in your own classroom, to show up in a learner stance and to really lean into this notion of kid watching. I love this idea of watching and that we learn so much by studying our kids, and it's not just about my knowledge of who the kids are that I teach, but it's also about adjusting what I do based on my knowledge of who they are, which I think is so at the heart of what we mean by responsiveness, being a truly responsive teacher and meeting students individually where they are every day, it means that I need to do that work of collaborative inquiry, thinking about what is my classroom, who's in my classroom?
Jennifer Serravallo:
I love that. I think that's such an important point, Jerry. That spirit of being endlessly curious and fascinated by the kids, not just how they're learning, but who they are, and approaching everything you do in the classroom with that stance, I think is a lesson that we should all take away from this conversation too. Jerry, thank you so much for joining me today.
Jerry Maraia:
Thank you so much. This was so fun.