Culturally Responsive Teaching and The Brain: Promoting Authentic Engagement and Rigor Among Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Students

Zaretta Hammond is the author of Culturally Responsive Teaching and the Brain (2014). Hammond is a former high school and expository writing teacher who has worked for over 25 years as an educational consultant and curriculum developer. Hammond’s premise is that cognition and culture are linked in the classroom context, and that understanding this connection is vital for educators to understand their own role. Hammond also focuses on shifting paradigms about the educability of low-income Black and brown students. She argues that a robust approach to culturally responsive pedagogy can address not only individual learning gaps but systemic achievement gaps that characterize the American education system. Culturally Responsive Teaching and the Brain is Hammond’s first book.

Summary

Culturally Responsive Teaching and the Brain is divided into three parts and bookended by an Introduction and an Epilogue. In Part 1—“Building Awareness and Understanding”—Hammond contextualizes the systemic achievement gaps within American education and their fundamental connections to culture. Without understanding the cultural contexts of students, educators deprive themselves of the opportunity to maximize their own effectiveness while depriving students of the chance to learn in an environment contextualized by cultural awareness. Even in classrooms where multiculturalism shapes the learning environment, Hammond argues that educators must identify the predominant cultural archetype—individualism or collectivism. Along with identifying the archetype, educators must understand the nature of two powerful forces: implicit bias and structural racialization, both of which contribute to misconceptions about educating within the framework of urban poverty. Once educators have understood the effects of these phenomena, they have gained the theoretical knowledge by which they can become practitioners of culturally responsive teaching.

In Part 2—“Building Learning Partnerships”—Hammond emphasizes the power of relationships in optimizing student learning. According to Hammond, culturally responsive teaching can only occur when trust has been established between student and teacher, which increases the stakes for relationship building within the classroom. Rather than simply creating friendly ties with students, teachers must prioritize what Hammond calls “learning partnerships,” which consist of transforming passive learners into active, independent learners. This partnership is more successful when the educators become allies for the student. As allies, educators focus on specific skills to improve upon, entering into a mutual pact with students to value incremental progress. Thus, teachers must become skilled at navigating the balance between caring for the students and celebrating small victories while also “pushing” students on a continual basis. This balance requires teachers to offer counter-narratives to students who have often internalized negative messages about themselves and their capability to learn and develop academic skills. By helping students shift their self-image, educators encourage students to redefine their own expectations while holding them to a new, more rigorous standard.

In Part 3—“Building Intellective Capacity”—Hammond argues that developing information processing skills is rarely the focus of equity-based approaches to addressing the achievement gap. Teachers must learn how to build “intellective capacity.” To do this, teachers must become familiar with how the brain’s information processing cycle works. This processing cycle consists of three stages: input, elaboration, and application, which in turn allow teachers to use four key instructional strategies: ignite, chunk, chew, and review. These strategies allow teachers to guide students toward a higher level of understanding by making use of the brain’s internal mechanisms. Hammond cautions against using these strategies while only making surface-level cultural references, which ultimately do not promote opportunities for in-depth intellectual processing. Hammond refers to Lev Vygotsky’s social-cultural learning theory to argue that learning happens best when fundamentally linked to culture, arguing that cognitive development cannot happen in a vacuum. Rather than relying on the aesthetic elements of students’ culture, teachers have the opportunity to foster truly inclusive environments, which allow students to learn in a space that does not hinder their cognitive development.