Culturally Responsive Teaching and The Brain Quotes

“One of the goals of education is not simply to fill students with facts and information but to help them learn how to learn.”
― Zaretta L. Hammond, Culturally Responsive Teaching and The Brain: Promoting Authentic Engagement and Rigor Among Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Students

“Culture, it turns out, is the way that every brain makes sense of the world. That is why everyone, regardless of race or ethnicity, has a culture. Think of culture as software for the brain’s hardware. The brain uses cultural information to turn everyday happenings into meaningful events. If we want to help dependent learners do more higher order thinking and problem solving, then we have to access their brain’s cognitive structures to deliver culturally responsive instruction.”
― Zaretta L. Hammond, Culturally Responsive Teaching and The Brain: Promoting Authentic Engagement and Rigor Among Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Students

“We routinely put the less experienced teachers with the neediest students. No other profession does this. A challenging medical case gets the attention of top specialists and skilled surgeons. It would be considered malpractice to put someone unskilled or new to the profession on a complicated medical case. Yet, in education, we subject our neediest dependent learners to inadequate instruction given their needs, or we allow them to lose valuable instructional time because of questionable discipline practices.”
― Zaretta L. Hammond, Culturally Responsive Teaching and The Brain: Promoting Authentic Engagement and Rigor Among Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Students

“The old adage we usually hear is that “practice makes perfect.” Based on what we know about neuroplasticity and deliberate practice, we should rephrase that to read, “practice makes permanent.” As you organize yourself for this self-reflective prep work, remember that it is not about being perfect but about creating new neural pathways that shift your default cultural programming as you grow in awareness and skill.”
― Zaretta L. Hammond, Culturally Responsive Teaching and The Brain: Promoting Authentic Engagement and Rigor Among Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Students

“Attention drives learning. Neuroscience reminds us that before we can be motivated to learn what is in front of us, we must pay attention to it.”
― Zaretta Lynn Hammond, Culturally Responsive Teaching and The Brain: Promoting Authentic Engagement and Rigor Among Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Students

“ Microassaults involve misusing power and privilege in subtle ways to marginalize students and create different outcomes based on race or class. In the classroom, a microassault might look like giving a more severe punishment to a student of color than his White classmate who was engaged in the same behavior. Or it might look like overemphasizing military-like behavior management strategies for students of color. With younger children, it looks like excluding them from fun activities as punishment for minor infractions.
Microinsults involve being insensitive to culturally and linguistically diverse students and trivializing their racial and cultural identity such as not learning to pronounce a student’s name or giving the student an anglicized name to make it easier on the teacher. Continually confusing two students of the same race and casually brushing it off as “they all look alike.”
Microinvalidations involve actions that negate or nullify a person of color’s experiences or realities such as ignoring each student’s rich funds of knowledge. They are also expressed when we don’t want to acknowledge the realities of structural racialization or implicit bias. It takes the form of trivializing and dismissing students’ experiences, telling them they are being too sensitive or accusing them of “playing the race card.” ”
― Zaretta L. Hammond, Culturally Responsive Teaching and The Brain: Promoting Authentic Engagement and Rigor Among Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Students

“In culturally responsive teaching, rapport is connected to the idea of affirmation. Affirmation simply means that we acknowledge the personhood of our students through words and actions that say to them, “I care about you.” Too often, we confuse affirmation with building up a student’s self-esteem. As educators, we think it’s our job to make students of color, English learners, or poor students feel good about themselves. That’s a deficit view of affirmation. In reality, most parents of culturally and linguistically diverse students do a good job of helping their children develop positive self-esteem. It is when they come to school that many students of color begin to feel marginalized, unseen, and silenced.”
― Zaretta L. Hammond, Culturally Responsive Teaching and The Brain: Promoting Authentic Engagement and Rigor Among Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Students

“According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, the school-to-prison pipeline is a set of seemingly unconnected school policies and teacher instructional decisions that over time result in students of color not receiving adequate literacy and content instruction while being disproportionately disciplined for nonspecific, subjective offenses such as “defiance.” Students of color, especially African American and Latino boys, end up spending valuable instructional time in the office rather than in the classroom. Consequently, they fall further and further behind in reading achievement just as reading is becoming the primary tool they will need for taking in new content. Student frustration and shame at being labeled “a slow reader” and having low comprehension lead to more off-task behavior, which the teacher responds to by sending the student out of the classroom. Over time, many students of color are pushed out of school because they cannot keep up academically because of poor reading skills and a lack of social-emotional support to deal with their increasing frustration.”
― Zaretta L. Hammond, Culturally Responsive Teaching and The Brain: Promoting Authentic Engagement and Rigor Among Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Students

“educators, we have to recognize that we help maintain the achievement gap when we don’t teach advance cognitive skills to students we label as “disadvantaged” because of their language, gender, race, or socioeconomic status. Many children start school with small learning gaps, but as they progress through school, the gap between African American and Latino and White students grows because we don’t teach them how to be independent learners. Based on these labels, we usually do the following (Mean & Knapp, 1991): Underestimate what disadvantaged students are intellectually capable of doing As a result, we postpone more challenging and interesting work until we believe they have mastered “the basics” By focusing only on low-level basics, we deprive students of a meaningful or motivating context for learning and practicing higher order thinking processes”
― Zaretta L. Hammond, Culturally Responsive Teaching and The Brain: Promoting Authentic Engagement and Rigor Among Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Students

“As educators, we think it’s our job to make students of color, English learners, or poor students feel good about themselves. That’s a deficit view of affirmation. In reality, most parents of culturally and linguistically diverse students do a good job of helping their children develop positive self-esteem. It is when they come to school that many students of color begin to feel marginalized, unseen, and silenced. Affirmation and rapport are really about building trust, not self-esteem.”
― Zaretta Lynn Hammond, Culturally Responsive Teaching and The Brain: Promoting Authentic Engagement and Rigor Among Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Students

“Culture guides how we process information. Cultures with a strong oral tradition rely heavily on the brain’s memory and social engagement systems to process new learning. Learning will be more effective if processed using the common cultural learning aids—stories, music, and repetition.”
― Zaretta Lynn Hammond, Culturally Responsive Teaching and The Brain: Promoting Authentic Engagement and Rigor Among Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Students

“Positive relationships keep our safety-threat detection system in check. There is a reason that collectivist cultures focus on relationships. The brain is wired to scan continuously for social and physical threats, except when we are in positive relationships. The oxytocin positive relationships trigger helps the amygdala stay calm so the prefrontal cortex can focus on higher order thinking and learning. Just as you want to identify and remove things that create an emotionally unsafe environment, you have to also focus on building positive relationships that students recognize based on their cultural schema.”
― Zaretta Lynn Hammond, Culturally Responsive Teaching and The Brain: Promoting Authentic Engagement and Rigor Among Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Students

“Cultural responsiveness is not a practice; it’s what informs our practice so we can make better teaching choices for eliciting, engaging, motivating, supporting, and expanding the intellectual capacity of ALL our students.”
― Zaretta L. Hammond, Culturally Responsive Teaching and The Brain: Promoting Authentic Engagement and Rigor Among Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Students

“instructional conversation, the kind of talk that acts like a mental blender, mixing together new material with existing knowledge in a student’s schema. Using discussion protocols like World Café, Four on a Pencil, and Give One Get One help create variety in the ways students talk to each other in the classroom, offering a chance to both work collaboratively and have their individual voices heard.”
― Zaretta L. Hammond, Culturally Responsive Teaching and The Brain: Promoting Authentic Engagement and Rigor Among Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Students

“This type of anxiety attack can also be a form of internalized oppression, whereby the student internalizes the negative social messages about his racial group, begins to believe them, and loses confidence. In the classroom, anxiety interferes with his academic performance by releasing the stress hormone cortisol, which in turns reduces the amount of working memory available to him to do complex cognitive work. It also inhibits the growth of the student’s intellective capacity.”
― Zaretta Lynn Hammond, Culturally Responsive Teaching and The Brain: Promoting Authentic Engagement and Rigor Among Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Students

“It is instructive rather than evaluative. The feedback is focused on correcting some aspect of the student’s performance—a step in a procedure, a misconception, or information to be memorized. It isn’t advice or a grade but some actionable information that will help the student improve. It is important to know the difference between the three types of feedback because not all feedback is actionable. It is specific and in the right dose. Your feedback should focus on only one or two points. Don’t point out everything that needs adjusting. That’s overwhelming for a dependent learner and may actually confirm her belief that she is not capable. It is timely. Feedback needs to come while students are still mindful of the topic, assignment, or performance in question. It needs to come while they still think of the learning goal as a learning goal—that is, something they are still striving for, not something they already did. It is delivered in a low stress, supportive environment. The feedback has to be given in a way that doesn’t trigger anxiety for the student. This means building a classroom culture that celebrates the opportunity to get feedback and reframes errors as information. Making Feedback Culturally Responsive: Giving “Wise” Feedback For feedback to be effective, students must act on it.”
― Zaretta Lynn Hammond, Culturally Responsive Teaching and The Brain: Promoting Authentic Engagement and Rigor Among Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Students

“First, we acknowledge the realities of inequity that impact students in and out of school. It could be acknowledging that students of color have historically been treated differently at school. Or it can mean that their culturally different ways of learning are often mistaken for intellectual deficits. Often in an effort to be color-blind, some teachers downplay or trivialize subtle but persistent microaggressions directed at culturally and linguistically diverse students on a daily basis. For students, these situations cause stress and emotional pain. As an ally, we have to let them know they are not crazy. Inequity is real.”
― Zaretta Lynn Hammond, Culturally Responsive Teaching and The Brain: Promoting Authentic Engagement and Rigor Among Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Students

“In culturally responsive teaching, relationships are as important as the curriculum. Geneva Gay, pioneer of culturally responsive pedagogy (2010) says positive relationships exemplified as “caring” are one of the major pillars of culturally responsive teaching.”
― Zaretta Lynn Hammond, Culturally Responsive Teaching and The Brain: Promoting Authentic Engagement and Rigor Among Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Students

“Stop. This first step simply asks you to stop and pause rather than react in habitual ways. When you enter an interaction that feels challenging, work hard to stay open-minded. Open-mindedness means being open to other points of view, other ways of doing things, and staying open to changing your own view point. This might mean not allowing a certain cultural display such as a student’s animated verbal exchange trigger you. Observe. In the second step, check yourself. Don’t react to what is going on. Instead, take a breath. Use the 10-second rule. When the brain gets triggered, it takes stress hormones approximately 10 seconds to move through the body to the prefrontal cortex. In the pre-hijack stage, the biochemicals cortisol and adrenaline are just beginning to kick in. There is still some “wiggle room” to listen to your wiser self and begin using stress management techniques to interrupt the amygdala takeover effectively. Try to describe to yourself what is happening in neutral terms. It is during this step that you can recognize that what was originally perceived as a threat isn’t really. Detach. Sometimes when we get triggered, we get personally invested in being right or exercising our power over others. Deliberately shift your consciousness to more pleasant or inspirational images. If those techniques fail, go get a drink of water, literally take a few steps back to shake yourself up a bit. When we can detach from the goal of being right or defending ourselves, we can redirect our energy toward being more responsive rather than reactive. Awaken. When our amygdala reacts, it’s because we are trying to protect ourselves. Shifting focus from yourself to the other person in front of you helps you “wake up” or become present in the moment. Try to see the other person as someone with his own feelings. He might be scared and reacting out of fear. Ask yourself a few questions about the other person. What are they thinking? How are they feeling in this moment? Shifting over to their perspective will get you out of your own reactive mode and will put you in a better position to have a positive interaction.”
― Zaretta Lynn Hammond, Culturally Responsive Teaching and The Brain: Promoting Authentic Engagement and Rigor Among Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Students

“Leverage technology and watch positive movies or television series that will allow you to virtually step into another cultural experience. Ask for recommendations.”
― Zaretta Lynn Hammond, Culturally Responsive Teaching and The Brain: Promoting Authentic Engagement and Rigor Among Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Students

“Check your explanations. Share your alternative explanations with other culturally responsive teachers in your professional learning community or those in your own personal learning circle.”
― Zaretta Lynn Hammond, Culturally Responsive Teaching and The Brain: Promoting Authentic Engagement and Rigor Among Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Students

“Try on alternative explanations. Select one or two student reactions or interactions (what he said or did) and try to offer alternative explanations for the student’s behavior based on what you are learning about his deep cultural beliefs, norms, or practices.”
― Zaretta Lynn Hammond, Culturally Responsive Teaching and The Brain: Promoting Authentic Engagement and Rigor Among Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Students

“Make a list of your assumptions, reactions, and interpretations of behaviors as the scenario replays. What specific thing did you react to? How did you interpret it? Based on what belief or assumption?”
― Zaretta Lynn Hammond, Culturally Responsive Teaching and The Brain: Promoting Authentic Engagement and Rigor Among Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Students

“Spend some time viewing the replay in your mind. Try to review what happened without judgment. Describe it almost like stage directions.”
― Zaretta Lynn Hammond, Culturally Responsive Teaching and The Brain: Promoting Authentic Engagement and Rigor Among Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Students

“It’s afraid that you will have to talk about sensitive issues such as race, racism, classism, sexism, or any other kind of “-ism.” It is afraid that this conversation will make you vulnerable and open to some type of emotional or physical attack. But this fear is not real. It is just your amygdala’s ploy to get you to stay in your comfort zone.”
― Zaretta Lynn Hammond, Culturally Responsive Teaching and The Brain: Promoting Authentic Engagement and Rigor Among Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Students

“6. The brain physically grows through challenge and stretch, expanding its ability to do more complex thinking and learning. The brain’s main purpose is to get smarter at surviving and thriving in life.”
― Zaretta Lynn Hammond, Culturally Responsive Teaching and The Brain: Promoting Authentic Engagement and Rigor Among Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Students

“5. All new information must be coupled with existing funds of knowledge in order to be learned.”
― Zaretta Lynn Hammond, Culturally Responsive Teaching and The Brain: Promoting Authentic Engagement and Rigor Among Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Students

“Culture guides how we process information. Cultures with a strong oral tradition rely heavily on the brain’s memory and social engagement systems to process new learning. Learning will be more effective if processed using the common cultural learning aids—stories, music, and repetition. These elements help build neural pathways and activate myelination. They help neurons fire and wire together in ways that make learning “sticky.” Collectivist cultures use social interactions such as conversation and storytelling as learning aids. Because of society’s history of segregation and unequal educational opportunities, many communities of color continue to use the natural learning modalities in the home and community. As a result, their neural pathways are primed to learn using story, art, movement, and music.”
― Zaretta Lynn Hammond, Culturally Responsive Teaching and The Brain: Promoting Authentic Engagement and Rigor Among Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Students

“Microaggressions are the subtle, everyday verbal and nonverbal slights, snubs, or insults which communicate hostile, derogatory, or negative messages to people of color based solely on their marginalized group membership.”
― Zaretta Lynn Hammond, Culturally Responsive Teaching and The Brain: Promoting Authentic Engagement and Rigor Among Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Students

“The brain seeks to minimize social threats and maximize opportunities to connect with others in community.”
― Zaretta Lynn Hammond, Culturally Responsive Teaching and The Brain: Promoting Authentic Engagement and Rigor Among Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Students