While in New Orleans at the Plain Talk About Literacy and Learning conference, Susan sat down with keynoter Zaretta Hammond. Zaretta shared her thoughts on the importance of scaffolding in literacy education. In this episode, Susan and Zaretta also look back on Zaretta’s impactful book Culturally Responsive Teaching and the Brain: Promoting Authentic Engagement and Rigor for Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Students and talk about scaffolding, mastery, and the importance of learning how to learn.
Show notes:
Quotes:
“What I have come to believe is the obstacle is the way. So what worries me becomes my research project. What worries me becomes my new mission.” —Zaretta Hammond
“For me, justice is the mastery. I'm a movie fan and so I, in this case, think of Master Yoda all the time. You know, he said there's no try or not try. You're just doing it. Either you're teaching them to read or not.” —Zaretta Hammond
“When that scaffold stays [up] too long, it becomes a crutch and the child actually believes they cannot learn without it.” —Zaretta Hammond
“So this idea of somehow we get overprotective and we don't want them to fall. We don't want them to fail. We don't want them, you know, their self, self-esteem, to be bruised. We are actually doing that when we delay this because the only way we learn is through error. And we have not reframed errors as information.” —Zaretta Hammond
“Number one, you assign yourself, and number two, you always go for mastery. Not a grade. No one will ever ask you about your grades four years after college, ever. Go for mastery. They will ask you what you know how to do.” —Zaretta Hammond
While in New Orleans at the Plain Talk About Literacy and Learning conference, Susan sat down with keynoter Zaretta Hammond. Zaretta shared her thoughts on the importance of scaffolding in literacy education. In this episode, Susan and Zaretta also look back on Zaretta’s impactful book Culturally Responsive Teaching and the Brain: Promoting Authentic Engagement and Rigor for Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Students and talk about scaffolding, mastery, and the importance of learning how to learn.
Show notes:
Quotes:
“What I have come to believe is the obstacle is the way. So what worries me becomes my research project. What worries me becomes my new mission.” —Zaretta Hammond
“For me, justice is the mastery. I'm a movie fan and so I, in this case, think of Master Yoda all the time. You know, he said there's no try or not try. You're just doing it. Either you're teaching them to read or not.” —Zaretta Hammond
“When that scaffold stays [up] too long, it becomes a crutch and the child actually believes they cannot learn without it.” —Zaretta Hammond
“So this idea of somehow we get overprotective and we don't want them to fall. We don't want them to fail. We don't want them, you know, their self, self-esteem, to be bruised. We are actually doing that when we delay this because the only way we learn is through error. And we have not reframed errors as information.” —Zaretta Hammond
“Number one, you assign yourself, and number two, you always go for mastery. Not a grade. No one will ever ask you about your grades four years after college, ever. Go for mastery. They will ask you what you know how to do.” —Zaretta Hammond
Learning how to learn is a turbo-charger. It is the accelerant.
Susan Lambert:This is Susan Lambert. Welcome to Science of Reading: The Podcast, from Amplify, where the Science of Reading lives. Last time on the show, we brought you our first-ever episode recorded in front of a live audience from the Plain Talk Conference in New Orleans. Well , at Plain Talk, I also had the chance to sit down with one of the conference's keynote speakers, someone we've long wanted to have on the show: Zaretta Hammond, teacher educator, national consultant, and author of the book Culturally Responsive Teaching and the Brain: Promoting Authentic Engagement and Rigor for Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Students. Just a couple hours after Zaretta delivered her excellent keynote in front of the packed ballroom , she and I spoke more about a hard but critical topic: weaving together both justice and joy in literacy instruction. Please enjoy my conversation with Zaretta Hammond. Zaretta Hammond, we are at Plain Talk right now, and we are talking to you just a few hours after your amazing keynote session. How are you feeling about that, and the vibe that's happening here at Plain Talk?
Zaretta Hammond:I am really energized. You know, one of the things — this is my first Plain Talk conference.
Susan Lambert:Congratulations.
Zaretta Hammond:And you know, I do a fair amount of keynoting. One of the things that I noted was very different about this conference was the practitioner vibe. You know what it's like when teachers get together, and we're kind of workshopping a problem, or we're coming together around something or a PLC that's really humming and working well. Yeah. That's what it felt like. That was the vibe, and I love that. And it's not often I get to be in community with educators in this way where we're talking shop .
Susan Lambert:That's great. Any feedback? Did people give you any feedback on your keynote session this morning?
Zaretta Hammond:No. <laugh>. And here's why I pause. I typically don't ask for anything. I have learned through cognitive neuroscience and my own personality that my amygdala is overactive at that time. You know, every brain has negativity bias, and if a hundred people said it was great, and one or two people said, "Mmm," you know, I'm worrying about those one or two people. So I just don't ask. I let the message fall where it needs to land. And I did get a lot of people kind of coming up to me in the hallway saying, "That resonated. This piece really got me thinking." And I always like to be provocative. Not provocative in an in-your-face kind of way, but provocative in, "Can we start to think about this differently?"
Susan Lambert:So you did get feedback. People said it resonated. So there you go .
Zaretta Hammond:That's right.
Susan Lambert:Well, you know, in 2015 you wrote this book, Culturally Responsive Teaching and the Brain, and I just looked at the copyright date on it. I can't believe it's been since 2015.
Zaretta Hammond:I cannot believe it. That book literally was published November 2014. And it really kind of hit the market and people started noticing it in 2015. And it will soon be eight years old. And I'm already thinking about the second edition, updating it. Because when I wrote the book, no one was really talking about culturally responsive teaching. People certainly weren't intersecting it with social and cognitive neuroscience. Since then, the science of learning has come out. The Science of Reading has reemerged. And so I'm really excited to update it. There are folks who have adopted it at school districts and are using it in interesting ways . So it's gonna expand. It's growing. It's no longer a toddler. It is moving—
Susan Lambert:That's a good way to say it. <laugh>
Zaretta Hammond:— into its early years. And yeah, I am very proud that it continues to provide something for teachers, principals and other school leaders and instructional coaches, you know, were coming up to me today — and I hear this a lot — "This is how it has revitalized my sense of excitement about teaching." I went to my room afterwards and checked messages and whatnot, and a really sweet message from a principal who said, "I feel hopeful." And to me, that is the best thing, if this book makes you feel hopeful. Because we've got some big work to do. And if there's anything that allows us to stay in the game and know it's doable — 'cause it is; there are lots of schools doing it; we just need to have that happen on scale.
Susan Lambert:I love that you said that the field has grown. We've matured, where you call this a toddler. So now ... are we going to get into adolescence next? Is that the next exciting stage? <laugh>
Zaretta Hammond:We are — I think we are right before adolescence, right? I think we are in those years of ... you know, I had two children and I always remember the sweetest years were between like five and eight. Maybe nine from a girl. And then the tides turned <laugh> . I think it's in the sweet spot where people are really using it. We're now in the tough time. We're now turning the corner. We're not full-blown adolescents, but the biggest challenge for a lot of educators is closing the knowing-doing gap. So they know how to repeat the words. A lot of the lingo is on their lips. A lot of the jargon — dependent learning, learning partnerships — I hear more of that, but what does it mean to actually make the changes? What does it take to actually change at that classroom level? So, you know, that's the part we need to actually handle. Just like children moving into those double digits have to start taking on more responsibility, but they wanna be like, "No, Mom, are you still gonna do my laundry?" <laugh> No. <Laugh>
Susan Lambert:Time to learn how to do your own laundry. Right? <Laugh>
Zaretta Hammond:So it's time for us to learn to close the knowing-doing gap. And there's so much good research. You know, I was trying to channel in those that have come before me that have talked about this work in a way that people don't necessarily associate with culturally responsive teaching. You know , Richard DuFour, and talks about learning by doing, and what we can do in a collaborative environment with PLCs when done right ... because right now, what we're calling PLCs are not hitting the mark. And a lot of people know that. And [John] Hattie's written about that. And other folks — Richard Elmore, you know, he has passed away, a few years ago, but his work always struck me around the instructional core, that that's where change has to happen. Not kind of top-down. It has to be a bottom-up and then top-down to buffer and support the kinds of pedagogies that need to be in the classroom. And that is teacher work. That is teacher-leader work. That is instructional coach work. Working arm-in-arm, side-by-side, and instructional leadership work.
Susan Lambert:And I love that you sort of highlight that going from one stage to another is in our own growth and development process. But in the work that we do, we have to work through the hard stuff to get to the other side. Do you ever worry that we're not gonna work through that hard stuff and we're gonna give up?
Zaretta Hammond:I do worry. But what I have come to believe is the obstacle is the way. So what worries me becomes my research project. What worries me becomes my new mission. My new mission now is to help teachers close this knowing-doing gap to really build and expand their capacity for change. And I think — and it's what I'm writing a lot about, change management for equity. B ecause what a lot of people don't understand is things that don't seem related to culturally responsive practice or equity, like time — you know, if you don't reorder time, nothing is going to change. But a lot of people think it's talking about racial politics or diversifying their curriculum and they never get to these more mundane things like, "How are we reordering time in the classroom? Is there space for students to have conversations about the content with each other, without the teacher being the orchestrator of that?" So that's one of those examples. So I am hopeful, in the sense that I continue to try to pilot things, put it in front of teachers, ask teachers to come on the journey with me. < laugh> D uring the pandemic, I started a online PLC and I had 1200 teachers raise their hand and j oin me on this online platform that I developed.
Susan Lambert:That's amazing.
Zaretta Hammond:It was amazing. Now some leaned hard in, they really — they were in it. Some were just looking for strategies, and they don't get the results. And you know, depending on how you're positioned, there's no shame or blame when , like Maya Angelou says, when you know better, you do better. And so I think being able to continue to prototype and refine and iterate on tools that then we can bring to teachers, so that they can do that hard work — because it is hard. And it's not getting done, because of how we've structured our systems . So leaders are going to have their own hard choices to make, because their current systems aren't necessarily gonna support the kinds of things that need to change in that instructional core . But I'm talking about habit formation, getting kids to start to carry more of that cognitive load. How do you, on a day-to-day basis, over a course of weeks and months, get students to take that on? That's a gradual thing.
Susan Lambert:Now I'm gonna ask you ... it's gonna sound like a really basic question, but I have a real issue with lingo. So we throw words out all the time. I suppose all fields do it too, but in education we feel like, I feel like, we do it too much. And people don't often understand the concept behind the word that we're actually using. So you talk a lot about equity and reading development. When you hear "equity" and "reading development" together, what does that mean to you?
Zaretta Hammond:So it's something I shared in the keynote this morning, which was the definition of equity. And it's an older version that comes from the National Equity Project. I had the privilege of growing up and working with them for eight years. You know, as I got into this work many, many moons ago. And an early version of equity was reducing the predictability of who succeeds and who doesn't, interrupting reproductive practices, and being able to cultivate the unique gifts and talents of every child. So I try to speak in appositives, right? I'm a writing teacher, so, you know, an appositive is: I use a word, then there's a comma , I explain it, another comma to close it out, and then I continue what I'm saying. <laugh> So I think in education we have to do that, 'cause shared language matters. And one of the things I say is "information is not transformation." So the degree to which people just start repeating things, because that makes them feel knowledgeable, it makes it feel like they are shared in their understanding. I am writing my current book, and I'm trying to lean into the notion of praxis. And it's one of the things that I think is implied in Culturally Responsive Teaching and the Brain. And Ferrari talks about practices, conceptual understanding, informed action, and critical analysis and reflection. So I think of Culturally Responsive Teaching and the Brain as the conceptual understanding. It's not gonna tell you all the how-tos. But if you don't understand these core concepts, there's no way that you actually can do the practices. And you know, the growing up is "Here's more of our informed action . This is gonna allow us to close that knowing-doing gap." So I think I'm right there with you when it comes to language. 'Cause people are saying like, "Oh yeah, we're doing culturally responsive." I'm like, "I don't know what that means; <laugh> I don't know what you're doing. You're scaring me now." <laugh> And this is why I talk a lot about, you know, "What are the kinds of equity walks you're doing or rigor walks?" And like, everybody's walking! And what are you seeing?
Susan Lambert:You mentioned that in the keynote this morning.
Zaretta Hammond:It's such a popular thing, equity audits. And I'm like, "Hold it. Have you not seen that data? What are you seeing that that's such a disconnect between going through these performative actions and you seen in front of you, the children are not learning, particularly reading development?" And that's why I think literacy is so important. I do think writing is important as well. I'm a writing instructor, writing teacher. But I do think if you have not learned decoding, you cannot learn encoding . Right? And that's what writing really calls us to do. And so I, I do think we have a lot of performative actions in the name of equity or the science of learning or the Science of Reading. More terms, more lingos.
Susan Lambert:Do you think it's distracting, then? Do you think it's actually taking our focus away from the students sitting in front of us in the classroom?
Zaretta Hammond:I do. I think it's a way for us to make the stark reality a bit more palatable. We have to get up and go to school every day . We see these children that are not reading. We see teachers in distress And I don't think anyone is doing any of this out of malice. Or we just want to mess up the system. You know, these are things that we inherited and inequities that were hardwired into our system from the beginning. So that when we know that we can move that beyond blame. But if once we are aware of it, we don't begin to interrupt, or dismantle, reimagine ... then it can be overwhelming. And I do think emotionally, being busy around these performative things, all the grade-level meetings and we're doing data walls and we are doing data walks and we're doing street data. You know, whatever kind of data right now. Data love. There's a lot of that. And again , still, the children are still not reading. There's a disconnect in there somewhere.
Susan Lambert:We'll be right back. Hey listeners, I know you love hearing about the latest research on early literacy for even more insights and best practices from education experts. Check out Amplify's two other podcasts, Math Teacher Lounge and Science Connections. Math Teacher Lounge is in the middle of a new season exploring all the fascinating research about math anxiety.
Speaker:It's not just the case that people who are bad at math are anxious about it. It's actually that the anxiety itself can cause you to do worse in math.
Speaker 2:One of the teachers that I worked with had done her student teaching with a teacher who had math anxiety and who never taught math. And so she entered her teaching career, never having taught math before or seen it taught.
Susan Lambert:Meanwhile, Science Connections has been investigating science's status as the underdog.
Speaker 3:If you were to work it out, how many minutes of science an elementary teacher teaches per day — it's like 18 minutes for the lower elementary grades.
Susan Lambert:And exploring the benefits that come with changing that.
Speaker 4:We started to see this trend of students communicating more in English because they were excited about the science that they had been learning.
Susan Lambert:That's what's happening right now on the current seasons of Math Teacher Lounge and Science Connections. Subscribe to both wherever you listen to this show. Now, back to Science of Reading: The Podcast. So when you were talking about reading this morning, or you know, what needs to happen, you used two terms. Which I love. Justice and joy. Can we start with justice first?
Zaretta Hammond:Yes, indeed.
Susan Lambert:Let's unpack a little bit. So when, when you're using the term justice in this context ... we'll start with the shared language <laugh>. What does that mean to you?
Zaretta Hammond:Yes. Justice means, and I bring that from a model of the work that's been done around mastery and deliberate practice. Right? So this idea that as you ... one of the terms I use when I'm working with my teachers is "The classroom is a dojo." Right? If we think of the analogy or the metaphor of a dojo is you're going in there to get mastery. And sometimes that is, if we're in karate, then you're gonna get black belt, you're gonna get a white belt and a yellow belt, and you're gonna progress, because you have mastered these things. So in the case of reading, the justice is not just us restating the problem. I see a lot of that. Restatement of the problem. Let's get outraged. But I don't see as much focus on mastery. Meaning we know that we have an alphabetic code, we know sound-spelling correspondences, we know English is funny like that, and we didn't double up letters to now become symbols, and we've taken from French and Saxon in it. We know this. But somehow we're not mastering the things we know. And instead what we'd like to do back in a very performative way is just keep problem-restating. And that that's, for a lot of people, what justice is. For me, justice is the mastery. And you know, I'm a movie fan and so I, in this case, think of Master Yoda all the time. You know, he said, "There's no try or not try. Just doing it." Either you're teaching them to read or not. Either they're internalizing to automaticity or they're not . And if they're not, then let's get together as a adult community and figure out what's happening. Where's the disconnect? So that is my idea of justice, getting the job done because that their life depends — their liberation, their ability to have agency in the world depends — on us mastering that ability to get them to understand, internalize and, move through this idea of reading. In my talk this morning, I talked about the codebreaker, meaning-maker, text user and text critic. That comes from Frey and Fisher . And it comes from one of the really early books, you know, Building Background Knowledge. And it's good book. You know, I've highlighted it up. I love their work. <Laugh> But that ... and I reread that chapter every couple of years. Because if we don't master those four things Yeah. We can't just say we want comprehension. Well, if I'm not a meaning-maker, and I don't understand how to make knowledge usable, then nothing else is gonna happen. So back to the original question. That, for me, is justice.
Susan Lambert:You know, I'm gonna ask you something else, too, because I loved the example that you used on scaffolding, that we as educators, of course we wanna scaffold students if they're not quite there. We wanna make sure we put the appropriate scaffold. There's another word, too, that's now education lingo, right?
Zaretta Hammond:Yes. It is <laugh> . Absolutely.
Susan Lambert:So talk to me a little bit about the danger of scaffolding. Because I think that's what you were getting at today. You were talking a little bit about scaffolding.
Zaretta Hammond:Yeah. I don't know if I would say the danger of scaffolding, because what we understand from the science of learning is all learning is scaffold. This is what Vygotsky says. When you get into the zone of proximal development, that you have to go in there with a more learned person. Someone with more expertise. That can be a peer, it could be a older sibling, or it could be your teacher. And that this is the learning zone. And that you have enough experience, but you are gonna have to stretch yourself. So think of that as the training wheels, right? We've all either had the experience or seen the experience in movies where the mom or the dad has got the kid on the training wheels and today is the day, and they've got their little helmet on, and—
Susan Lambert:Here we go!
Zaretta Hammond:—the bike is, like, rocking and they think mom and dad are still holding in the back. But mom and dad are running alongside them, but have let go. Now, they don't know it yet. And then they say, "I've let go." Now either the child's gonna plop over <laugh>. ...
Susan Lambert:Or keep going.
Zaretta Hammond:Or keep going. In the moment. But either way, life has then changed. Even the next time around that child will realize, "Oh, I was doing that <laugh> until I thought I couldn't." So the degree to which we understand the place scaffolding has to have in learning, this is not about scaffolding is bad. It is over-scaffolding. And what I see is people scaffold to get this child through the lesson, so they can say, "This lesson has been completed." And it's why we are getting this data: Children are not learning to read, so how are they getting all these assignments done? Because we are over-scaffolding and moving them through that. Now, what I learned as a writing teacher is there was not anything I could do to get that student to be a better writer, in the sense that <laugh> I could not take the pen, and scaffolding had to come in a different way. And when you look at what scaffolding is to help someone become a better writer, a better doctor — you see, because I want you to be a good surgeon! Well, I can't take that scalpel in my own hand <laugh> . So I have to coach you. And, the way I talk about it is I have to be the personal trainer of your development. You know, you go to the personal trainer to get ready for the summer, and he is not doing the pushups for you. You get down there and you do two pushups and he's asked for 10 and you just kind of fall over and whimper. <Laugh> He is not jumping down there. He's gonna motivate you to get up. Like, "OK, you ready to go? You need some water? You wanna walk it off? And now gimme the rest of those." That has to be the type of scaffolding. How are we having instructional conversation so I can help you get to that next very small measure? And maybe I'm holding on just a little bit, like with those training wheels, and at a certain point I'm gonna let go. You don't even know it. I cannot tell you the joy I felt as a writing teacher when my students would just see their comma splices. Because I'm like, "Oh, baby. I'm gonna stop circling this <laugh> in red pen." And what I started to do is — this is where I actually started using culturally responsive practices. I brought peer editing in. I brought a whole lot of other things. So it was the social component of them being a community of learners, all these other structures so that I could conference and have instructional conversation with students around particular things that they wanted to improve. Coherence. Well, for the next three weeks, we're gonna just work on coherence. They're gonna be some more problems in your essay, but I'm not gonna grade you on those. We're going to be looking at this, so that I could take their focus off "I just need to write a good paper and get a good grade." No. You need to master these conventions. And what I found out was peer editing was really helpful, 'cause they'd have to edit their peers' papers so they could see what was wrong in everybody else's paper. And it would happen like clockwork, two weeks in, after looking at a variety of other papers — 'cause they'd have to write it, they'd switch, they give feedback on the six conventions we were looking at — and then we'd conference and they'd say, "You know, I noticed that run-on sentence" or "that comma splice" and I'd just like , Hallelujah! <Laugh> You see it, you know, it's almost like the Field of Dreams. I told you I'm a movie nut. And the relatives don't see it, but the Kevin Costner guy and his wife and his child, they're all seeing these ghosts of baseball players and one day something happens and his brother-in-law looks over and like, "When did those baseball players <laugh> get into the field ?" He can see. So this is what scaffolding does. The training wheels can come off, because now I understand balance and I don't need them to help me. When that scaffold stays in too long, it becomes a crutch. And the child actually believes they cannot learn without it. It's like elephant taming. They put a chain on the elephant's leg when it is a baby and they are then able to take the chain off because the elephant does not believe that it actually has the strength to pull that little pin out of the ground. And it is now massive. But it is so the tug of that chain reminds it: "No, you can't do that." So this is more than mindset, that you have to give people the direct experience, gentle disequilibrium in the zone of proximal development, that actually opens up new thinking, but also builds the new neural pathways and dendrites that actually are mastery of skill .
Susan Lambert:And it's hard work. I mean—
Zaretta Hammond:It's real work! And I'm telling you , I will say this is the hardest sell. This is the hardest sell. I am sure there are consultants and other folks out there that are doing way better than I am, because they sell these quick fixes. "And we're gonna come in, we're gonna give you three strategies in, you know, five weeks!" And I tell people like, "I have to be honest with you. You are not going to see any real growth until 18 months. Now there will be indicators that we're on the right road. But if for somehow you can't be in it for the long haul — 'cause you know what, you're still gonna be here in 18 months and those children are still going to be in the same place — there are no quick fixes." So I would say the real work is a hard sell out there.
Susan Lambert:Yeah. And not only a hard sell, but I think as adults watching young children growing, we have a natural tendency to protect them from the hard work. And we think we're being loving and helpful when we're actually—
Zaretta Hammond:Well, I would say that's where there's a cultural difference. So in collectivist culture, there's a age grade system, meaning each age band, the youngest child has some duties and chores. We know you're not gonna do them to a high level. And when you move up to the next age band, you abandon those, and you now take on those. So whoever your brothers and sisters or cousins who used to do those things, now get to move to new things. And you then step into the one. And that the community depends on your ability to master and be responsible and have agency around those things you're now responsible for. So in African American culture, which is collectivist and the version that I grew up in, that was it. I was the oldest granddaughter. I had responsibilities I had to step into. I know this when I talked to Asian friends and colleagues when I lived in California. I know it's true in Middle Eastern communities: when there's a responsibility that's actually put on younger children, not as a punishment, but as we all pull our weight in our community, because one day we are going to depend on you. You are our weakest link, and as our youngest, we have to help you build your capacity.
Susan Lambert:That's beautiful.
Zaretta Hammond:So this idea of somehow we get overprotective, and we don't want them to fall, we don't want them to fail, we don't want their self-esteem to be bruised. We are actually doing that when we delay this, because the only way we learn is through error. And we have not reframed errors as information. We actually, in Western society, put a negative stigma on making mistakes. So then it actually frightens the student. I had at least a couple of teachers and principals come up and say this very thing: "How do I get the kids to not be afraid to make mistakes?" So when I'm doing work with groups of teachers, we take at least four to six weeks to re-culture their classrooms around errors as information. So this means you gotta start using them; you gotta talk about them in a new way. This is not a "posters on the wall." If I see somebody else putting out "I'm gonna put an anchor chart on the" —Ain't nobody looking at that chart! <Laugh> But if they're not actually doing it, why? Because the brain learns by doing.
Susan Lambert:I love that. And you know, I think that's a perfect segue to the other J-word that you talk about, which is Joy. Because — well, no, I'm not gonna say — I'm gonna let you say. When you talk about this joy element, what do you mean by that?
Zaretta Hammond:You know, the joy is not too far from the justice <laugh> .
Susan Lambert:<Laughs>
Zaretta Hammond:Because the reality is they have to be braided together. It was funny because someone came up to me after my breakout session, and what they said to me was very interesting. They said, "OK, you know, we've gotta get to the justice so we can get to the joy." I'm like, "Whoa, no, no, no, no, no."
Susan Lambert:Not one before the other.
Zaretta Hammond:That's right. That's right. These are simultaneous. And this is why I said in my talk this morning they have to be braided together. Just like Scarborough's reading rope is braided together. Not one or the other. We don't do comprehension, then code-breaking or meaning-making. We do all of those simultaneously, so that over time they are built up. In this case, getting folks to really, really understand that the brain is wired with dopamine to do hard things. It gets rewarded to do hard things. But we see kids doing this all the time. I lived in California, born and raised there, lived there until about two years ago. And my daughter went to Berkeley High and you know, I'd go to pick her up and get there early. And of course, you know, you're mom of a high schooler, you must park two blocks away, cannot be parking right up at the school. <Laugh> And I did, and there was a park where skateboarders, some of the kids who were kind of on the periphery of high school, they went to practice. And I would just sit there and watch them. They would practice their jumps, and they're falling on their butt. And they shake it off and they get back up there and they're laughing. And they're, "Oh, I'm gonna try that." And they're helping each other. And I'm like, "This is learning in the wild. Nobody is assigning them. They know they're gonna fall. But they're gonna keep trying and then they're gonna stretch themselves a little further, do more daring things. Not just be to be daring, but to know this is how skill is built over time." And what I saw them doing over and over as they were falling was joyful. Like, "Look, I stayed up a little longer, dude!" <Laugh> I'm like, "Right!" And I just would sit there, and one day, and they saw me like, "Lady, what you ... ?" You know? And I'm like, "I'm just, just ... the idea of how you all are learning!" And there was a point at which they were OK with me, like, getting a little phone out, <laugh> , you know, and I think in a presentation I put up there. Because it happens in a lot of ways. I see this with young people who are deep into hiphop. And they're writing rhymes and they're playing with words in these kind of complicated ways that nobody's acknowledging in schools. Not just because it's kind of cool, but I'm like, "Do you know the cognitive work it takes to actually do all that?" But they're assigning themselves. So the joy we know comes from learning hard things and moving toward mastery. So this is where justice and joy start to line up. When I overcome ... imagine what enslaved people must have gone through when somebody said , "No, you cannot learn to read." And they knew that , "I don't really know what this reading thing is, but that that must be some powerful stuff." And somebody steals something, like, " Ooh, I learned a letter or two." Or like Frederick Douglass said, "I tricked so-and-so into teaching me the letters." What? So now you know the joy that comes from, "Ooh, I can read that." My son, I taught him to read, and he was a math kid when he was — both my kids were Montessori kids, so they started school at three, because again, learning is about mastery and joy, and that is the center of Montessori. And he did not want to do reading. And so we let him do math, because that's what Montessori lets you do. And there was a point, though, he was coming up on six. And his teacher said, he does need to <laugh> learn to read .
Susan Lambert:Now's the time, huh?
Zaretta Hammond:Now's the time. Very intelligent boy. He was more than capable. And I told him, I said, "Listen, you're gonna have to stay in the summer. You know, Mama can help you with this, 'cause I know how to get this done." And so we focused on long vowels. And I said, "You just need to master those." And, you know, a few sight words — or what we called "sight words" back in the day. And you know, he kind of did it like he was eating broccoli. But we were in the car one day and he was in the backseat. And one of the things I would have them do — he and his little sister — is words all around us. Read the bulletin boards. Not the bulletin boards, but the , um, what are those? The advertising boards?
Susan Lambert:Yeah, the big signs on the side of the road . I can't think of the name of them either! But I know what you're ...
Zaretta Hammond:And I would say—
Susan Lambert:Billboards!
Zaretta Hammond:Billboards, billboards! And he would just like, "Ohhhh." And one day, we were at the stoplight, and very casually, he just, he just read it. And he stopped himself and said, "I just read that whole thing!"
Susan Lambert:Surprised himself.
Zaretta Hammond:He did! He was so just going through the — and this is how we master things! Deliberate practice. And now he's like a reading fool.
Susan Lambert:<laugh>
Zaretta Hammond:Like, "OK baby, I actually do have to drive now. <Laugh> So calm down back there." But the fact is, what was unlocked will never be taken from him, and will never be locked up again.
Susan Lambert:Yeah . Yeah .
Zaretta Hammond:And he was off to the races by then. So we don't understand the joy that gets released when the dopamine gets hit in the brain, because the mastery. Struggle has to be productive, but the brain must struggle. If you just give it something —
Susan Lambert:Yeah.
Zaretta Hammond:— it will not find joy, because you give it. And if it knows it's not competent or it's it's struggling and you want to have a party, it's not having none of that.
Susan Lambert:I don't know. I can just see your son in the backseat, and I can just imagine what his eyes looked like. Because we've all seen it happen for a kid, haven't we?
Zaretta Hammond:Absolutely. It could be math. <Gasp> "I just figured out how to carry!"
Susan Lambert:Right . Yeah .
Zaretta Hammond:But that is what a learning brain does. The subject doesn't matter. It will happen with everything. I used to sew when I was in middle school. And I wasn't in any kind of particular group, you know, I was friends with everyone, didn't really stand out. But I loved to sew. I loved to make things. And I took a sewing class, which was offered in high school. And I picked a really difficult material to work with. My best friend was in the class; she had the same pattern. And I'm like, "You copying me <laugh>." But she got a different, easier fabric to work with. I got a higher grade when it was done. Our clothing teacher, who was also our math teacher , looked at it. And I really didn't understand, why did I get a higher grade? She said, "Because look what you mastered. This was very difficult to work with. You didn't give up. It looks good" — because we were judged on did it look good on the outside, and if I open it up, does it look good on the inside? And she taught me a very valuable lesson about that mastery. And it was struggle, because it was unraveling, and I had to figure out, "Do I bind it? Do I have...". You know, all these things that I had to master in order to make it look presentable on the inside, which she required to give us a grade on it. So it's something I've also taught my children. Number one, you assign yourself, and number two, you always go for mastery, not a grade. No one will ever ask you about your grades four years after college. Ever <laugh> . Go for mastery.
Susan Lambert:Go for mastery.
Zaretta Hammond:They will ask you what you know how to do.
Susan Lambert:That's a great message. Oh, that's a great segue too. So like I said, we're here recording at Plain Talk, so obviously we know you're doing keynote things, but what else are you up to? What other things are you working on?
Zaretta Hammond:Um, keynote things! They're fun. I get to meet people. But I tell you, my greatest joy is getting close as I can to the classroom. I've been away from it for a while; I'm working on this next book. But what sparked joy for me was those folks that came together during the pandemic in the PLC. And I'd get these messages. I got one from a second-grade teacher who ... I appreciated him, because he understood that it is going to take time. He had second graders who were struggling, not reading — although it wasn't focused just on reading — but not learning, not accelerating their learning. And this was problem-solving. You picked your focal students and we were actually helping you help them learn how to be independent learners. Not just compliant learners, right ? "Do what I say." but to be cognitively independent. And sure enough , usually about maybe six, seven months down the road, I'll get these little emails. Like, "This is what happened. Look at this data. Look at how they're doing." And what's so beautiful is they understand that once that child is an independent, cognitively independent learner, they are liberated. They may not like school; they may not like the the grade or the teacher. But they will continue to learn, even outside on their own. And that's what we want for every child. So as close as I can get to the classroom is when I'm happiest. I'm trying to engineer to have more of that happen in the coming year.
Susan Lambert:Good for you.
Zaretta Hammond:First I've gotta give my editor the rest of this new book <laugh> .
Susan Lambert:Well, we'll have to invite you back on when you get that new book ready to come out.
Zaretta Hammond:Absolutely. And it's about a lot of what we've talked about today. I really want to help people understand how to move past over-scaffolding, how to develop the students' capacities to be a good information processor, and not get stuck in the lingo. Just say that! Like, there are six distinct things that need to be braided together and cultivated, and how do you do that, and still having to cover your content. But learning how to learn is a turbo-charger. It is the accelerant. So we are not gonna close any gaps, we're not gonna complete unfinished learning, or stem any learning loss, until we can get learners to be the leaders of their own learning. 'Cause only the learner learns.
Susan Lambert:That's almost lovely words to close with. But what I wanna do is offer up to you an opportunity to tell our listeners anything. Any final words of wisdom or encouragement, or anything.
Zaretta Hammond:I hope these words have been encouraging, just so that we're in it together. This is a village. I don't know any educator that gets up and like, "I'm gonna go to work today and make sure the children don't learn!" <Laugh> Said no one ever. So I wanna be there in community with them when they come up against this. The area I'm really most excited about is gathering coaches. 'Cause I really believe instructional coaches are the lynchpin . But what we're doing right now is, they're not equipped. Not because they're not knowledgeable in coaching methodologies, but the idea of the science of learning or how to reduce over-scaffolding. I talk to many of them, and they're just like, "I'm trying to get this teacher not to do that." And you know, you can't just tell them. How will you SHOW them? How you will you invite them in and create enough disequilibrium? Growing learning requires disequilibrium, and that's hard for a lot of educators to understand. You actually have to have discomfort. But when you're in community, that disequilibrium just feels like us learning. It could be joyful. It could be like the skateboarders who are falling down, but "hey, I stayed up five seconds longer than last time." And so I really believe they are a special group, and hope to do more things and offer more things to support them.
Susan Lambert:That's amazing. Well, Zaretta Hammond, thank you for joining us and for taking time off the floor here at Plain Talk to spend some time with us. And we'll link our listeners in the show notes to your book and any other resources you think might be helpful. So thank you again. We appreciate it.
Zaretta Hammond:Thank you for having me.
Susan Lambert:Thanks so much for listening to my conversation with Zaretta Hammond: teacher educator, national consultant, and author of the book Culturally Responsive Teaching and the Brain: Promoting Authentic Engagement and Rigor for Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Students. Please do us a favor and subscribe to Science of Reading: The Podcast, wherever you listen. We'd also be grateful if you rated us and left us a review. Science of Reading: The Podcast is brought to you by Amplify. For more information on how Amplify leverages the Science of Reading, go to Amplify.com/CLKA. For more information on all of Amplify's podcasts, go to Amplify.com/hub. On the next episode in our Season Seven series of Tackling the Hard Stuff, we're going to talk about the importance of mentorship.
Speaker:You know, good teachers with the right tools, the right knowledge, times the efficiency in using them, equals effective teaching.
Susan Lambert:That's next time on Science of Reading: The Podcast. Thank you so much for listening.