Zaretta Hammond: Rebuilding Students’ Learning Power

Podcast Episode

Episode Description

In this episode, I talk with Zaretta Hammond about her book, Rebuilding Students’ Learning Power, and what it means to position students as the primary actors in teaching and learning.

We explore the shift from a pedagogy of compliance to a pedagogy of possibility, where students have opportunities to think, talk, make mistakes, and work through challenges. Zaretta explains why explicitly teaching learn-to-learn skills is essential to making deeper learning available to every student and how these skills differ from instructional strategies. We discuss the teacher’s role as a cognitive mediator, coaching students to change their learning moves and become more independent learners.

We also consider what teachers, instructional coaches, and leaders need to make this shift within the realities of curriculum demands and pacing guides. Throughout our conversation, we return to a powerful reminder: only the learner learns.

Episode Resources

• Find Zaretta Hammond on LinkedIn
• Rebuilding Students′ Learning Power: Teaching for Instructional Equity and Cognitive Justice
• Culturally Responsive Teaching and The Brain: Promoting Authentic Engagement and Rigor Among Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Students

Episode Transcript

This transcript was generated using AI transcription tools to support accessibility and provide a searchable, readable version of the podcast. While we’ve reviewed and lightly edited the content for clarity, there may still be occasional errors or omissions.

Catlin Tucker

Welcome to The Balance. I’m Doctor Catlin Tucker, and today my guest is Zaretta Hammond. She is a teacher educator and national education consultant. She is the author of two books. Her first book, Culturally Responsive Teaching and the Brain: Promoting Authentic Engagement and Rigor for Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Students, was published by Corwin in 2015 and is one I’m sure many of us are super familiar with.

And in 2025, she released her second book titled Rebuilding Students’ Learning Power: Teaching for Instructional Equity and Cognitive Justice. Ms. Hammond is a former high school and community college writing instructor, and for the past 25 years, she has supported schools and other institutions in deepening their understanding of the integration of cognitive science, the craftsmanship of learning, the science of reading, and culturally responsive pedagogy. And I could not be more excited to have her on the podcast for this conversation.

Well, I could not be more excited to talk with you, but we will jump right in. And I would love for you to tell listeners a little bit about your journey in education, where it started, how you got to the wonderful work you’re doing now.

Zaretta Hammond

Yeah, I certainly can share a little bit of that journey. I talk about it in my first book, Culturally Responsive Teaching and the Brain, and it started very early. My mother was a teen parent, and we lived in the projects in Hunters Point in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her desire to have a better education for us meant she did her own form of busing and sent us from our inner-city community, largely African American and Samoan, to a school that was in the Richmond District, which was a place where my grandparents had been able to purchase a home.

So they were one of the few African American families out there. The school was predominantly white, and I would say that began my journey. I didn’t know what I was seeing, but I also knew that something was off in terms of the quality of education I was able to get in a school that was largely white, Asian, and the type of schooling my peers were getting in our neighborhood schools. And this became clear to me when we were playing on the playground, right? Some kids weren’t reading yet. It just seemed to be very low-level stuff they were getting. And as I progressed through school, I saw this to be the pattern.

And so as I got out of school on my career path, I started as a policy analyst, educational policy analyst, research analyst, just really wanting to improve education. And it’s so funny because every time I would get into that, like two years in, I’d realize, “Oh, I’ve got to get closer in.” And so I kept getting closer until I was in the classroom. It’s like, you know what? You can’t be on the periphery, you know?

But it’s interesting because I also led a parallel life in which I was a writing tutor at UC Berkeley, and I trained other writing tutors because this was how I had my up-close-and-personal experiences with pedagogy long before I even considered myself a teacher. But I was able to get results with my students to the point where folks were asking me to train them.

This was particularly effective with students who had been historically underrepresented at the college. So they were largely Latino, African American, Vietnamese, Hmong. The interesting thing about UC Berkeley is, if you had a 4.0, they did not care if you did not pass what they called Writing 1A, that basic writing course, because their belief was math got you into college; writing keeps you there.

And so as I was getting success with those populations, folks were asking me, “Well, what are you doing? We’re not getting that kind of traction.” So I started training tutors in the writing center how to really leverage the students’ schema, a.k.a. culture, and how you help them actually build their learning muscles, what I today call learning muscles. I didn’t have any of that vocabulary back then. And I really didn’t even think about those two paths intersecting, right? I was in the policy arena, like, we’ve got to be able to get the practices, get the policies. I found myself in the classroom teaching writing for probably a total of seven years, off and on.

And then I got called out at one point to do, again, professional learning and development with other writing teachers in my English department. And at a certain point, usually I would go back, and at a certain semester I did not go back into the classroom. These were now the teachers I had. So I was a teacher of teachers.

Catlin Tucker

Yeah. It’s so interesting to make that shift because I feel like the vast majority of my time now, too, is spent teaching teachers. And there’s so much I miss about being with the students, but there is so much impact you feel like you can have when you’re working with educators who are excited to dig into this practice and develop their skill sets and grow, which is exciting.

Zaretta Hammond

But I will tell you, though, that the work that I’ve been doing probably for the past three to four years is we’re shoulder to shoulder in their classrooms, because just teachers coming to PD is not transforming anything. So when I consider myself a teacher educator, it is because we are setting up a way in which teachers build their capacity to be the personal trainer of students’ cognition.

That means you have to be in the classroom to look at how students are moving through their own learning, how they are becoming metacognitive. So my teacher educator practice looks kind of different because just straight-up PD does not work. I don’t do one-day workshops because it leads nowhere.

Catlin Tucker

Yeah. You want to see the implementation and be able to help guide it.

Zaretta Hammond

Well, yeah. We could have a lot more conversation about this implementation gap. So it’s not just implementation; it’s models. It’s understanding the science of learning. It’s bringing that sensitivity so that when you’re designing, you’re designing with the idea of, how do I get the student to become aware of their own learning moves? So now I’m the coach. I’m the personal trainer of that cognition.

Too often, implementation, when teachers hear that, what they’re hearing is getting better at covering my content or the newest strategy that the district has said we’re all going to do. I’m going to get good at that. And you are missing the equity boat because only the learner learns.

Catlin Tucker

Which you say in the beginning of your new book. And I was listening to your conversation with Jennifer Gonzalez on the Cult of Pedagogy, and you were discussing, because so many people will be familiar with Culturally Responsive Teaching and the Brain. That was such an important book. It’s such a popular book. So many people have read this book. And you were talking about your newest book, which is Rebuilding Students’ Learning Power.

And I was kind of fascinated because she was asking you about how this connects to or extends or relates to your prior work. And you said the idea for this book was in that first book, and this one kind of gave you this opportunity to explore it more deeply. So I’d just love for you to share, for people who are familiar with you, your work, your first book, how is this extending? How is it different from what they have read?

Zaretta Hammond

And that’s a great question because what I started to see is people were reading Culturally Responsive Teaching and the Brain, and they were strategy stripping. So they missed very much the ethos behind the Ready for Rigor framework, that all these things have to work together in a compound way to actually get the student to pay attention to their own learning.

So it builds on each other, right? Chapter four is really talking about your stance as a warm demander. Chapter five of that book is asking the teacher to think about, how do I create a learning partnership with the student? But too many teachers I encounter, their professional development just handed them little pieces of it. “Oh, I read chapter five,” because they read that in a PD. So there were very few that were reading the whole thing and understanding that it was a system.

Particularly true was when it came time to give students the reins of their own learning. So there was chapter eight, like, how do you stand with them to do that? So I took really chapters six, seven, and eight from Culturally Responsive Teaching and the Brain and expanded it with the nuts and bolts of how you do that, right? And so this is why the newest book is more of a how-to manual.

But I still see teachers doing the strategy strip. “Oh, we’re going to teach them learn-to-learn.” Well, you haven’t set up any kind of cognitive apprenticeship. You haven’t let students who have been socialized around compliance understand that you’re going to slowly and with support give them the cognitive load back and coach them on how to struggle productively.

Like, I hear teachers using a lot of jargon, but I don’t know what you’re doing in your classroom. It’s a whole lot of jargon. I see a lot of facilitators in so-called PLCs, same thing. Like, they’re saying words, they’re using concepts, but I don’t think anyone’s taking the time to really help change happen at the classroom level.

That’s why in the newest book, Rebuilding Students’ Learning Power, “How Change Happens” is chapter four, before we even get into that. I thought about putting it at the end, but I’m like, no, you need to know how change happens because that’s not a matter of covering your content, right? Or zhuzhing it up so it’ll be culturally responsive. Like, I don’t even know what that is. Folks are out there doing a lot of things in the name of the Ready for Rigor framework, and this new book is a check on that.

Catlin Tucker

Yeah. Well, and I did have that wondering when I was reading it, not wanting people to jump to the five learn-to-learn skills, even though they’re so important, because there was so much about the lead-up to and then how you set the stage for it. Your whole conversation around the contrast of this pedagogy of compliance with this pedagogy of possibility, right? And you describe compliance as favoring order over productive struggle. So often in classrooms, I think that productive struggle, the messiness of it, all of it, just makes students and teachers a little uncomfortable sometimes.

Zaretta Hammond

Yeah. And I think the biggest reason is because they don’t set up a cognitive apprenticeship in their classroom. So this is what chapter five of the newest book, Rebuilding Students’ Learning Power, is all about. How do you help students know that part of what we’re going to do is get messy in here, and that learning starts with confusion?

Imagine if you helped students, after you did the first few weeks of school and you got belonging up and a sense of community, and the social community in the classroom was thriving, then you were able to bridge to a cognitive apprenticeship. And to me, that’s the next step after belonging. But that isn’t me just throwing strategies at you. That’s me inviting you into this little journey, this learning journey in which we really understand the craftsmanship of learning, and that as your guide, I’m going to let you know it’s going to be challenging. We’re going to get messy. You’re going to feel confused. And those are all appropriate.

And the analogy I make is, this is what athletes do, right? This is what musicians do as they’re learning. Folks don’t just start spouting “productive struggle” to a musician. They actually say, get your scales or that note or your finger movements. Why don’t you practice that little thing? And then people are coming together. That’s what carpenters do. But somehow we’ve forgotten that in the classroom. And that’s really the thing I wanted to do, just to bring back that sense of part of our work is to help teachers become the type of coach, right, personal trainer of students’ cognition.

Catlin Tucker

And early in the book, you wrote that we need to reorient ourselves around the student as the primary actor in teaching and learning. And I kept coming back to that sentence the entire time I was reading this book, this idea of student at the center. But you also say that we use “student-centered learning” all the time, but what is that? What does that actually mean? What should that mean in practice, right? What would it look like to truly treat students as these kind of apprentices of learning and coach them in these cognition skills?

Zaretta Hammond

Well, number one, we have to let go of the jargon because I don’t know what student-centered learning is. It shows up everywhere, kind of like gluten. You know, the minute we said we understood gluten and that gluten-free was a way of selling things, we slapped that on everything, right? “Hey, meat, it’s gluten-free.” Well, it’s always been gluten-free. What are you doing, right?

So we do that with, again, back to my point about jargon. But here’s what actually should be going on, and this is where we were just having this bit of a conversation about the cognitive apprenticeship. So the teacher’s preparing the environment. Montessori does this, right? Reggio Emilia does this. Waldorf does that. Every other tradition sets the student up into the craftsmanship of learning, teaches them how it works, moves them through the elements of it. There is a discussion about learning.

And in our current system, this idea of student-centered still seems to mean, “Oh, I’m going to put you in groups. We’ll do projects.” The teacher is still the lead orchestrator, right? And just because we’re doing groups or we’re doing project-based learning or whatever the newfangled thing is, we call that student-centered, versus students actually being the ones who are paying attention to where they’re getting stuck, right, where their pitfalls are, and then having spaces and places that the teacher has set up as routines in the classroom to talk to each other about, “Well, how did you get yourself unstuck? What did you come to understand about your learning?”

So a truly student-centered classroom, they are talking about their learning, not because someone’s given them an assessment, but because at a certain point, they’re stepping back from the content and actually saying, “How did I navigate that content? Where do I keep getting tripped up?” This is why in the book I said one of the essential things for a teacher to do is create a culture of errors. So if you don’t teach students that mistakes give you information and how to extract that information, they become afraid of getting the wrong answer. So now it’s all about the right and the wrong answer. And this can be reinforced by teachers’ pacing guides: you’ve got to cover the content, we’re going to take a little assessment, you’ve got to keep going, you know. And now students are just caught up in that frenzy.

A cognitive apprenticeship doesn’t ignore the content, but it uses the content, right? They’re processing the content to build these learning muscles. It’s a both/and, but the teacher has to be transparent so that the student is the one actually building muscles. You know, I use the personal trainer analogy because when you go to a personal trainer and you’re trying to get your wellness up and your fitness up, and they ask you to do five push-ups, and you jump down there and you can do two and ask for a bucket, they don’t jump down there and do the other three for you.

They have taught you form. They’ve taught you how to manage yourself. They’ve taught you, okay, you need a sip of water. What do you need to regulate yourself? Now let’s go ahead and finish those three, right? There is support for you learning to do it on your own, knowing there’s a little wobble that’s going to be in there. The productive struggle is simply the little wobble, and the teacher teaches you to not freak out from that wobble.

Catlin Tucker

Well, and you mentioned metacognition. You mentioned being metastrategic in the book. And I think one of the things, because I talk with teachers a lot about how we’re helping students develop those metacognitive muscles, how we’re creating space for them to think about their thinking, identify these moments, to your point, where, okay, I’m stuck or what I’m doing isn’t working. And why is that? And what might I try that’s different? And I feel like so often there’s no time and space dedicated for that in classrooms.

And you describe teachers as coaching learning power through these instructional conversations. And so what I would love is, could you take us through or into a moment where a student is stuck? And I’m sure you see this all the time because you’re actually getting in there shoulder to shoulder with teachers in classrooms. What might the teacher ask or say to help that student make a learning move without doing what I think is really typical, and you talk about a little bit in the book, too, this temptation to want to take over or solve it or answer it for the student?

Zaretta Hammond

So this is a really good insight because before a teacher can get in there and have that just-in-time, in-the-moment conversation, we have to back up to that cognitive apprenticeship, okay? If the teacher has not helped the student pay attention to when they’re getting stuck and has provided the class with, “Here are tools that you can use to get yourself unstuck,” right? Those have been introduced. The students have used them. Now there comes this moment when the teacher’s instructional conversations can happen two ways.

There can be a planned one. I remember as a writing teacher, we have conferences, writing conferences. So we’re checking in all the time on a piece of writing, and what are the things that you’re trying to get better at? And so we’re looking at progress. So that’s one type of instructional conversation.

The one you’re describing is in the moment. The student is just frustrated. And so now, because we have covered the language of the learning, because we have set up and practiced a culture of errors, because I provided the student with a series of what I call cognitive job tools, which the student can use at any time because they know this will help them make sense of the content, what I’m now doing in that conversation is to say, “What, of all the things you have at your disposal, would be the right tool?”

So it’s too broad for some students, particularly younger ones, but I then say, “Listen, we covered four learning tools or cognitive tools or routines. You’ve got three of these practices. Let’s have a conversation about which one do you think is going to help you bust through this confusion?” So we’re not trying to actually get the answer. We’re trying to help you figure out better decision-making about the tool that I think is going to actually get me out of that.

And a lot of teachers are so focused on their content and helping the student get the right answer that they’re not using the instructional conversation as an opportunity to help the student be more metacognitive and metastrategic. That is the goal of that conversation. And here’s the thing. Then you can say, “Try it out.” So letting students understand the iteration, right? Like, okay, the student might say, “I think these two might help.” Well, let’s try them out, see how they work. And now the student is actually into their thinking.

So this is where we have to push past the kind of trite definition of metacognition as thinking about your thinking because, you know what? If you’ve got low-level thinking and you think about your thinking, you know what? You’ve still got low-level thinking. Just my reflection doesn’t improve it, but I have to get sensitive to noticing and naming. That’s what that instructional conversation does. “Do you notice that? Can you name what that is?” Once you name it, I can get the right tool for it.

This is what a plumber does when they’re in apprenticeship to become a plumber. Somebody is over their shoulder saying, “Would you use that? Which wrench do you think we need?” Now, this is what a doctor does when the surgeon is training a resident, and he’s narrating, “This is why we use this scalpel versus this. This is why we use this suture-size needle.” Like, which one? And there’s a moment. Now the doctor is not putting the lives of the patient in that resident’s hands, but he’s using it as a teachable moment to have this kind of conversation, even if it’s a small slice, right?

So we learned this from instructional rounds, with Doctor Richard Elmore leading that work back in the day. But even that has suffered a lethal mutation, right? Now everybody’s got a five-minute walkthrough tool. I don’t know what the hell you’re seeing in five minutes, right? Because if you were watching a chess player who is doing a lot of cognitive work, you’re not going to see much. You’re going to see somebody with their head bowed, staring at a game board. They’re just staring at some pieces. It doesn’t look like cognition.

So what’s happening is we want to make it observable in a way that it isn’t. That instructional conversation allows you to help the student externalize their decision-making. That’s the metastrategic part.

Catlin Tucker

Yeah. But they need to know what’s available to them if they’re going to notice and do that naming, right? So they can start to play with these different things. No, that’s such an…

Zaretta Hammond

I think you cannot just think, in the moment, because I’m asking these good questions, “Instructional conversation.” It’s not about just these good questions to get students unstuck. That’s bastardizing and reducing it to its lowest common denominator. And you’ve taught the student nothing about noticing and naming. You’ve given them no new tools. You’ve not helped them try those tools out with some feedback and guidance.

And this is what I see. So I name that in the book up front: strategy stripping. So now I’m going to do an instructional conversation. Well, you’ve not created the conditions for the students. That’s what chapter five is all about. How do you decolonize your classroom around these things that are only going to get the student further behind, versus creating talk structures that allow the student the time and the space, right, opportunities for students to be with other students, opportunities for the students to track their learning journey? All these other things that give a little more agency to the student. But you can’t just jump in there and think, “I’m going to have an instructional conversation,” and you’ve laid no groundwork.

Catlin Tucker

Right. And you write that some students are explicitly taught how to learn, while others are kind of left to figure it out on their own. So this is kind of two parts, because it’ll bring us into the learn-to-learn strategies. But just for people listening, why is it, and we’re touching on it now because you can’t notice, name, experiment, and do all these things without some of this language, but why is it so important to teach learn-to-learn skills if we are really trying to strive for that deeper learning and make it available to all students? And then I’d love for you to give listeners a sense of these five learn-to-learn skills that you really break down and talk about.

Zaretta Hammond

Yeah. And here’s the thing about it. These five skills are not strategies, right? So I just want to let people know that for me, when I work with my teachers, I say, “S-word,” because I do not use that word. Because what we do when we are using strategies, teachers’ mental model is this is something I can do to the student. And what they don’t do is set it up where they’re going to give a tool to the student and help the student learn how to learn it.

It’s an externalized cognitive routine, and we want the student over time to internalize it, right? So that you don’t need to have these explicitly named for you. You don’t have to have them on an anchor chart. This should be what a good information processor does. This is what we know a student who’s an independent, cognitively independent learner already does. And this goes back to what’s happening within a cognitive apprenticeship.

So any teacher who’s out there who says, “Oh, yeah, I’m going to bring these learn-to-learn skills to my students,” but hasn’t set up a cognitive apprenticeship is going to find they’re not sticky, because the students don’t understand they’re for me. They just think you’re doing something. A lot of teachers will hold on to them at the front of the class, so the student’s not paying any attention to the idea that, “Oh, I should internalize this.”

Catlin Tucker

Right.

Zaretta Hammond

When I’m stuck, I can actually go back and go through this routine to get myself clear on what I should do next, right? And so this is the context. They don’t exist outside of what happens in a cognitive apprenticeship that has been set up, that we are talking about the craftsmanship of learning.

And they are the first type of cognitive routine that you can give a student. They don’t have to be used in order, but students should know they are like a tool in their toolkit, right? I should be able to say, “I need a little hammer right now,” or “I need a little wrench. I need a screwdriver.” These are the basic tools, and you go in and you start to try your basic tools.

So the first one is basic task analysis: break it down and size it up, right? Or size it up and break it down, whichever way you want to come at it. It’s the fact that too often students don’t pay attention to the instructions, and teachers don’t pay attention. They read it, but they expect the students to just start getting in there and doing it versus having a conversation. So you’re actually having the students, as they learn to use this, to actually say, “What is this asking me to do?”

The second is scan the hard drive, right? So this is activating schema. Rule number one for learning is all new learning must be coupled with existing knowledge and capacity and experience. So if the student hasn’t activated their synapses, which actually bring up the schema, all the things they know about that, no matter how tangential, they won’t have a place to actually take the new learning, right?

And then the next that they have to do is start to chew and remix, right? This idea that they’re going to chew the content, and I talk about this, bringing that idea over from Culturally Responsive Teaching and the Brain. But this is where productive struggle lives. But rather than calling it productive struggle, what are the connections students are making? What are the complexities that they’re understanding? How do they see the conflict? So now this is where students are actually in their working memory. And in the book, I talk about the DSP, right? These are the four mental operations. So what are they doing during this remix?

They’re looking for distinctions. How are things similar or different? They are looking for relationships. Is this cause and effect? What is it? They’re looking at systems, that whole-to-part. What do these parts equal in terms of a whole? You can run that through any subject, the parts of the American Revolution, you could say anything. You could look at that with math. So students start to understand that no matter what, I am going to do this kind of processing, right?

And then being able to practice deliberately, skillful practice is another one they have to do, knowing that you don’t do them in order. Again, if a teacher uses that as a one-off strategy, then she’s going to think, “Oh, we’ve got to do these in steps,” versus, “Pick the one you want to do right now.” Or imagine this: a student picks the one that this week, “I’m the weakest doing this. So for this week or these two weeks, because we are in a cognitive apprenticeship, I am learning the craftsmanship of learning, I’m going to pick this one. I don’t practice deliberately, so every time we’re doing something, I’m going to watch myself and improve my ability to practice deliberately.”

But do you see how now you have common language with the student? There’s something the student can do any time they can practice. It is not all on the teacher, right? I’ve already seen teachers, like I said, a lethal mutation of a good idea. Like, “Now I’m going to give the students five learn-to-learn moves.” It’s a strategy. Strip it.

Catlin Tucker

Well, and I think the thing that’s so interesting, as you’re pushing my thinking about how I’ve talked about metacognitive skill building in the past, what I love about this suggestion, and I assume you’d want to expose students to each skill, teach them, what does this mean? How do we do it? The modeling, all that. But I also love this idea of, we all struggle with different things. So maybe I set a goal for these next two weeks. This is the skill I really want to dive into, and I really want to shine light on, and here are things I’m going to try to do as a learner to develop my ability to use this particular learn-to-learn skill, and then reflecting.

So I talk about goal setting and reflection, but I think building it all around really being thoughtful about these moves kids are making and how they feel they’re developing with them is a really exciting way to think about giving them agency in this process, to focus on the thing they think will be most valuable and continue to build that confidence and capacity.

Zaretta Hammond

Yeah, a couple of things. Number one, they are not going to see it as exciting and valuable. It’ll feel like eating broccoli, right? So I think that’s our delusion. We’d love to say, “It’s going to give students agency. They’re going to love it.” Bullshit. It’s okay. We need to, but it’s not going to happen. So this is part of what gets us going down this lethal mutation, because teachers run into the rough part. How are you now helping students move through the choppy part of the learning pit? This is why you give it to them, but you’re not modeling it. Lord, we need to stop that. The only way a student learns something is to actually use it.

So before the teacher deconstructs that, students should, number one, have a learning journal. That’s what we do in apprenticeships. You’re going to, by the end of this six weeks, know how to do X, Y, and Z. If you want to be a musician, you’re going to learn how to do your scales, and there’s a point at which you need to know how to do that, right? And so they know what they’re driving toward. We don’t have to set artificial goals, right? And the student then is doing it at their own pace. Like, now, what do you notice about your ability to move toward that particular outcome or skill or capacity? So they should have a learning journal where they are actually reflecting on it.

And to your point, they should start not by you modeling it or talking about it, but just ask the student, “When you got good at something, how did you do that?” So now the students remember the learning they do outside of class, which they’re doing all the time because the brain is a learning machine, and they bring that into class. Because this is where we’re acting as if the students are blank slates. They are not. And the older our students are, the more they’re teaching themselves. Any student above third grade is teaching themselves a lot of stuff outside of the classroom, but we’re not leveraging that. So the whole, “I do, you do, we do,” you know, however we…

Catlin Tucker

Gradual.

Zaretta Hammond

Release, you know, and another lethal mutation. Gradual is right. But I think we start with just “Watch me,” versus activating a student’s schema. “When did you do that?” Right? If you go to the personal trainer, this is why they do assessment. “Show me how many. Can you touch your toes? What is your mobility like?”

Catlin Tucker

Right.

Zaretta Hammond

And then they start from there. Like, “Oh, how’s the flow of your day? When do you usually have the most energy?” We don’t engage the learner as the primary actor, and we just think because we modeled something. That ain’t how anybody learns anything. You’ve got to get your hands dirty. And we don’t want to start with the messiness of learning with students, but that’s the only thing that will actually help them have a catalytic moment. Then you can back into, “This is how we properly use that.”

Catlin Tucker

So getting them to think about, because that was when you said it’s like eating broccoli, and it’s true, I think, and this work is cognitively challenging, right? And so how do we get them to see and really appreciate the value of learning these skills so that they can approach any new learning with confidence?

Zaretta Hammond

I think we just need to stop that. I don’t think that they need to be enjoying themselves, and here’s why I say that. I’m not saying it should be drudgery, but if you don’t know how to elicit a dopamine hit, meaning our brains are actually geared to do hard things. So you have to know as the teacher, right, as the personal trainer of that cognitive development, how to make sure they get a dopamine hit so they want to do the hard things again. This soft-pedaling that they can enjoy it and it’s good for you, like, yeah, broccoli is all those things, but I don’t see anybody running to the broccoli. You know what I mean?

Catlin Tucker

I love it, but I get that it’s not for everybody.

Zaretta Hammond

Broccoli, I’m with you, right? We might be outliers. The sweetness. We’re talking about young people who have been socialized. You don’t just immediately make a 360-degree turn from a pedagogy of compliance to, “Oh, wow, now we’re going to have an apprenticeship.” How are you onboarding this, too? This is why in chapters six and seven, I talk about onboarding, that whole onboarding period where you’re saying, “Here are the tools,” knowing that the emotions that come up next to cognition, have you prepared yourself to help students regulate themselves?

I think there’s a whole lot, but just selling this cheerleader, “Oh, it’s going to be good for you, kumbaya,” is what’s going to keep everybody stuck. Good ideas are out there. I’m not even suggesting what I have in my book is new and so innovative. It’s the cognitive neuroscience that’s been around for a while. We just have an implementation gap. We are stripping it down to its most useless, like white rice. It’s taken all the bran off it. All the vitamin E is gone, and now it’s just devoid of the nutritional value that it originally had.

So my point is, understand that students being stretched is going to come with some pushback emotionally. The older they are, the more they’ve been socialized in this system, the more they’re going to push back. So you have to prepare for it. That’s why the cognitive apprenticeship is so important. And if the teacher doesn’t plan for that and just plans for this happy, “Oh, it’s all wonderful. You’re the center,” but kids aren’t buying it. If you understand how to leverage dopamine, they will be pulled forward by that desire to have that feeling again.

Catlin Tucker

Yeah, absolutely. So I can imagine teachers are listening and they’re thinking, “I want students to do all these things. I want them taking risks. I want them to work through challenge and productively struggle, but I have standards to cover. I have pacing guides to follow. I’m using X, Y, or Z curriculum.” How can they begin making the shift within these constraints that they perceive, that they feel might be limiting what they can do?

Because when I hear you talk, I feel like what I’m picturing is a flexible classroom space where a teacher has the opportunity to have these instructional conversations, to allow students some space and control over their pace and how they approach a challenge, a problem, a task. And I don’t see a lot of that flexibility in classrooms.

Zaretta Hammond

The classrooms that I’m in are just regular classrooms. They are faced with pacing guides. Of course, leaders have to create the right conditions. What I find on the leadership end is this tension between wanting these equitable types of outcomes, the classrooms where deeper learning is happening, but now we have a pacing guide because you need to be… So the teacher is kind of caught in the middle.

Here’s the thing that I would say: learning these learn-to-learn skills is actually going to be the thing that gets the students to standard. So as long as teachers are thinking that these two things are in competition, either I’m covering my content or I am teaching these skills, you teach the skills to actually get the student to understand the content. You’re actually going to go further, faster.

And this is why I say it really is the same time that schools devote to building belonging. There are several school districts around the country where no instruction happens the first week or two. Why? Because they understand the science behind belonging and that research, that we really need to get to know our students, build time for our community. What I say is, the next two weeks have to be this onboarding into a cognitive apprenticeship. You do that for two to three weeks, but you’re practicing with the content. You don’t have to delay the content.

This idea that “I’m not teaching to the standards,” B.S. It’s the only thing that gets the student to the standard, a student’s ability to actually take the content and understand the concepts, transfer learning so that they now understand and then can add the next layer of the curriculum. For math, okay, I’ve got my number sense. Now we’re going to talk about fractions. Understanding those fractions, having some automaticity with my multiplication tables, is going to allow me to start to think about algebra and how algebra works. It builds on each other.

So this is a false dichotomy, that I have standards and a pacing guide. Now, in chapter five, I do invite teachers to do a time audit. What are you doing that you need to let go of so that you can find time for this? And it’s not all or nothing. I don’t have to have beanbag chairs. We don’t have to have that. So we don’t want to even put the idea out there that it has to be this total radical redesign. No, you can work with what you have. I’m working in a very traditional charter school network right now. I’ve got a very traditional high school, and it’s like, how do you use what you have, right?

Think of this as Chopped, that cooking show. They give you a basket. You’re like, “This is what you’ve got. Everybody got the same thing. What are you going to cook now?” It’s interesting because, in that instance, you have to go back to what you know about learning. Now your constraints actually can be helpful to you. But we keep acting as if these constraints need to go away, and therefore I can’t even do the effort. It’s a story we’re telling ourselves.

Catlin Tucker

Yeah. Well, and when I think about these, because I hear about constraints all the time, even though I agree with you, there is some actual benefit to working within some constraints, I see this as being a perfect opportunity for departments, PLCs, teaching teams to come together and say, “Okay, this is our curriculum. This is what we’re teaching. How do we make sure that these skills are things that students are practicing throughout this pathway?” Because I love the idea that they’re not conflicting. They should absolutely be working together once the cognitive apprenticeship is set up.

Zaretta Hammond

That’s the key, that everybody has to introduce these to the students. Now the teacher can actually focus on covering the content, using the tools and the practices to actually make sense of the content. That is actually the key thing. And you’re right, the constraints are always going to be there. This is why I talk about it as not an all-or-nothing kind of thing.

When I’m working with teachers, we just take a small bite. What are you going to do? What’s the one thing? Sometimes we start with talk structures, like, go do a time audit. Go just assess current reality for a week or two. Who’s talking? How is that set up? What time are you using for talking, right? What could you let go of? You can repurpose that time. When will you do it across your week? You don’t have to do it every day. Maybe it’s on Wednesdays and Fridays. Teachers actually just need to be thoughtful about when it will happen and then try one small thing.

One of the things we do is introduce a thinking routine. And how do we introduce the thinking routine so that the students learn to use it as a cognitive routine? Then we also introduce protocols, which require more moving around, helping trios, doing a tuning protocol, the structure of that. How do kids learn that? You don’t have to use those every day, but it could be once a week, twice a week, every other week. But the fact is, you have to design it. And what I find is we’re just all trying to freestyle because we’re treating them like strategies.

I mean, integrate this, right? A system is built out, and then it is integrated. But strategies is what we want, to just pick one thing and we’re going to put it into our existing system. That’s not going to transform a pedagogy of compliance.

Catlin Tucker

Well, I love your distinction, and correct me if I’m misrepresenting it, but almost this idea of strategies are something that we just do to students. We push into a lesson. Whereas I think about these skills, it’s like maybe it’s a gift they don’t know they want, but these gifts we’re giving students that they internalize so they can use them whenever they’re learning anything.

Zaretta Hammond

Yeah, but here’s the trick to that. I think you’re spot on. They still have to be metacognitive to take the tool in, and it’s not going to go by osmosis, right? Because again, only the learner learns. What we know is you actively have to remix, give it purpose, put it in your working memory, work it through, integrate it into your long-term memory, then know when to come and get it, have some retrieval practice with that.

This is why the teacher has to guide the student through that in the course of teaching their content, right? But that now needs to be coached, narrated, and then the gradual release of responsibility, just like training wheels. And you want a little wobble in there. Training wheels, they’re just all three on the ground. It’s not that helpful. At a certain point, you get training wheels that are a little uneven. Both don’t touch the ground at the same time. Why? Because the student has to learn to use their abdomen to balance themselves on the bike. And one day you take them off, and it’s going to be even more wobble.

But without that, the student isn’t cognizant that, “Oh, now I need to pay attention to my shoulders or my back, or I’ve got to use my abs now.” And it looks a little crazy, but we’re there, right? And that is what learning is like, too. I think we want to oversimplify it so much. And the oversimplification is to give it all to the teacher to do to the student. The student doesn’t even know this is something I should pay attention to.

Catlin Tucker

Yeah.

Zaretta Hammond

Yeah.

Catlin Tucker

So before I close us out, one of the things I wanted to invite is if you had any, because I can see teachers picking this up and being so excited to read your new book, and if you could talk to leaders, instructional coaches, what advice or what would you tell them to support this shift so teachers aren’t just carrying it on their own and potentially, as a result, just pulling these skills and treating them more like strategies?

Zaretta Hammond

Yeah, I think it has to shift across several things for leaders. They have to develop systems that support this so teachers don’t feel bound by a pacing guide, right? And what I’m saying is, it’s not a matter of not having one, but have you revised your pacing guide to be inclusive of the evidence-based practices coming out of learning science? Like talk. The pacing guide should allow, you’re not going to be at this place if you find there’s confusion and the students need more time to talk and process, right? The pacing guide has taken out the actual instructional piece in favor of just, where are you in covering the content? So that’s what leaders could do. That’s a system support that you can think about.

New practices in their walkthrough tool. They should be looking at who’s doing the talking. And do you have talk structures that are more than a turn and talk? Turn and talk is okay, but that’s just sharing information, right? The problem is in the title, “Think, Pair, Share.” I can think, I’m sharing, and then I’m moving on because it’s not changing any of my thinking, versus discussion in which I either need to use evidence or I am making connections or I’m looking at complexities. That requires a different type of talk structure for students, and it’s not a Socratic seminar. Spoiler alert, right?

So that’s what leaders can do, right? Create those conditions, help teachers let go of some of these negative, ineffective mental models that they have. And in terms of coaches, this is where coaches want to push in a strategy because that’s usually the easiest way to be helpful to teachers, versus helping teachers think about setting up their cognitive apprenticeship. So both are reading this book, have shared language. They understand, okay, what’s your onboarding look like now? I give a whole rollout plan. Imagine if the coach says, “In the next six weeks, we’ll work together to get your rollout plan.”

This is what a personal trainer does. You’re going to exercise at home. That one hour with the trainer is not going to transform your wellness, right? And he’s trying to set you up to know good form. Here’s what you do. Incorporate it into the lifestyle that you have. All of the same things. That’s what that coach does. The coaches are also there to be a support to the teacher when it gets hard, right? And the coach also is letting the teacher know that you don’t have to do everything. Let’s get a bite-size here and make that change. Oh, now we’ll get another bite-size and grow that piece.

And the coach lastly helps teachers not go down the wrong road, right? There are poor proxies for learning. Just students looking busy does not equate with learning. And so having someone where the teacher doesn’t feel like they have to do it alone. This is what a PLC, truly, when it’s done correctly, this is what it should be. I have schools, they call every meeting a PLC. Every meeting can’t be a PLC.

Catlin Tucker

Yeah. I think a well-done PLC program is an art, and I don’t see it all the time, I will tell you that. Oh my gosh. Okay, so at the end of every episode, I ask my guest, is there anything you do in your life, tip, strategy, routine, anything that, for you, helps you strive for a healthier work-life balance?

Zaretta Hammond

Yeah, I do. I make sure I start every morning with just quiet time, usually in the dark. Doesn’t matter if the sun’s up. I’m going to make sure that room is turned dark and just have some time. I can listen to some meditative music. I can read something inspiring. I can listen to inspiring podcasts. But I just really make that time, and that is non-negotiable for me.

The second thing is just to walk 15 minutes, 20 minutes, just to be in the sunshine. Even if I can’t, I’ll do it on the treadmill that’s sitting in my garage or get on the rower that’s sitting next to it. Why? Because even that physicality helps our thinking. That physicality allows us the stamina to withstand being in the liminal spaces when we’re changing, right? Because change is hard, and we have to be able to have the stamina and the right mindset. And just me walking shoulder to shoulder with teachers, it’s hard. It’s hard to watch them struggle. It’s emotional to do that. You want to shake some leaders, but you can’t. So this keeps me regulated.

Catlin Tucker

I love that. Well, I can’t thank you enough for joining me for this conversation, for your work, which is just incredibly inspiring. So thank you for being here.

Zaretta Hammond

You are so welcome. Thank you for having me. Of course.

Catlin Tucker

Wow. Well, my mind is totally blown. I feel like I am going to be mentally chewing on this conversation for a very long time. I wish you guys could all see my copy of Rebuilding Students’ Learning Power because it is covered in annotations and notes and questions and wonderings, and this conversation just added to all of that for me.

I think it is such a gift to be able to talk with people in this field who really challenge my own thinking in the way that I talk about and write about certain things. You know, I’ve worked with a lot of educators around metacognition and metacognitive skill building, but really, have we focused, or have I focused, enough on this idea of helping students notice and name, right? Notice when you encounter challenge or these moments of struggle, and naming, like, what are some of the learn-to-learn skills I can use in this moment to try to understand this thing or work my way through this moment of struggle?

And I love the distinction between a strategy and a skill. So like any other skill, really teaching students these learn-to-learn skills so that they can start to practice them and use them as they engage in that deeper learning with whatever the content curriculum actually is. Because that point that these are not something separate, but these are something that should actually, once students understand how to use them and get practice using them and can decide when to use one versus the other, these are things that will help them be more successful, whether they’re learning in our classrooms or they’re learning something out in life that they’re just curious about, interested in, whatever.

And I also just have to chuckle because learning is hard work. And there are a lot of students who come into classrooms and they expect a fairly passive, compliant experience. And so training them out of that, I talk a lot about this when I talk about letting students lead their learning, but this is positioning them to have the cognitive skills to truly do that. And I think that’s what’s so exciting. But also the emphasis that Zaretta Hammond put on this idea that these aren’t just something that you teach students. There really has to be this cognitive apprenticeship set up.

And so again, I feel like this was such a fascinating conversation, definitely something that I’m going to be thinking about for quite some time. And so I hope you guys enjoyed it. Of course, if you have any questions for me, I’m easy to find. I will make sure Ms. Hammond’s contact information is in the show notes, along with the links to her newest book and her original book, Culturally Responsive Teaching and the Brain. But I’ll include Rebuilding Students’ Learning Power in there as well.

And I hope you guys enjoyed this as much as me. I hope you have a wonderful week. Again, find me online if you have questions, comments, you need anything, before I see you all back here next Tuesday.