Culturally Responsive Teaching & the Brain: Promoting Authentic Engagement and Rigor Among Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Students by Zaretta Hammond.

3/5 rating. 154 pages.

Book #62 of 2021. Read October 23, 2021.

This book has some great ideas for how to be the most effective teacher possible for all students – especially those from different cultural and linguistic backgrounds.

Zaretta focuses on relationships as the key contributor to engaging teaching. Along with this, the ability to see where we are as a teacher and our blind-spots might be, then working to build up our skills and understanding in those areas. This includes realizing that the disparities that make it much harder for students from different backgrounds to succeed.

Finally, Zaretta focuses on a growth mindset and believing that each student has the capacity to succeed. It is the teacher’s role to show them this, then scaffold instruction to help the students grow their skills and knowledge to become the best they can be.

There were a bunch of great quotes in here:

– “One of the goals of education is not simply to fill students with facts and information but to help them learn how to learn.”

– “The brain needs to be part of a caring social community to maximize its sense of well-being. Marginalized students need to feel affirmed and included as valued members of a learning community.”

– “Our goal is to help culturally and linguistically diverse students easily reach a state of relaxed alertness – that combination of excitement and anticipation we call engagement – every day.”

– “relationships are as important as the curriculum.”

– “we can build trust by being more authentic, vulnerable, and in sync with our students.”

– “Every child deserves a champion: an adult who will never give up on them, who understands the power of connection and insists they become the best they can possibly be.” – Rita Pierson

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