Sometimes, things just kind of have a way of popping back up after a while, and that
definitely happened to me recently with culturally responsive teaching in the brain, and it kind
of made connections for me to building thinking classrooms, and I'm wondering if anybody else
has thought about this too.
Hello and welcome to Making Number Sense Make Sense.
A podcast for elementary teachers, specifically early elementary teachers, looking to really
make an impact in the number sense of their students.
I'm going to have to take you guys back a little bit to kind of get the full picture
of my culturally responsive teaching journey.
So my assistant principal at the time had asked me if I wanted to go to an equity symposium,
and I was like, sure, I've never been to one before.
Why not?
I didn't realize that going to that equity symposium would put me on the equity team
the coming school year and have us creating and giving professional development to the
entire staff.
And one of the resources that I really kind of took to was a book by Zaretta Hammond called
Culturally Responsive Teaching in the Brain.
I read the whole book cover to cover, and it was really a different way to look at the
way that we teach in education and what we can do.
If you are looking to make your teaching practice more culturally responsive, I highly recommend
that book.
She talks about different types of culture.
She talks about the way that the brain works and kind of strategies and things that we
as teachers can do to be more culturally responsive and inclusive for our students so that they
can have the best outcomes possible.
A lot of times when people think of culturally responsive teaching or culture, they think
of surface culture like music, food, language.
And in the book, Zaretta Hammond talks about deep culture, which is like the way that you
communicate and how you interact with the world being something that can be tapped into
to support learners.
And I have to say, it's one of those things where like I was into it, I read it and then
life happened and I was looking for this book.
I couldn't find it anywhere.
This was years ago, mind you.
Years ago, I could not find this book anywhere.
I was like, it has to be here somewhere, but I couldn't find it.
And in my new role, we were talking about or we had to read about culturally responsive
education.
And I was like, oh, I already know about culturally responsive education.
It's just going to be a little bit of a refresher.
And I kind of came at it with a new lens because I was reading through it, had a lot of resources,
not just didn't just talk about Zaretta Hammond's book, but I was like, huh.
And it was kind of like connecting for me with the building thinking classrooms framework
because as a lot of you know, I had tried it with my kindergartners and it was an amazing
success.
The kids loved it.
And I kind of had to wonder like, why is it working?
And when you're in it, you don't necessarily need to know why it works.
You just know that it does.
Like, I don't know how my cell phone works, but I know that it does.
So like, I don't know the mechanisms inside of it, but it works.
And that's all you really need to know.
But when I was rereading the parts of the culturally responsive teaching in the brain
book, I was like, you know what?
I think that maybe Peter Liljadal and like Zaretta Hammond were on the same wavelength
and they didn't even know it.
Like I think that these two need to get together and chat because I think that they could really
build off of each other's work.
You know, I feel like it just kind of, it's like a collab that needs to happen, you know,
like Cardi and Megan or Jay-Z and Beyonce or Shakira and anybody, it needs to happen.
So the more I thought about it and I was like, you know what?
I think that he might have unintentionally tapped into that deep culture with his research.
And that's why, or one of the reasons why, his methodology works so well.
When you think about culturally responsive teaching or culturally responsive education,
a lot of times they talk about, you know, PBL and bringing in kids real live into the
classroom to help with engagement, to help activate prior knowledge, all of that.
But a lot of times when you think about that, it seems like it's a more, I don't want to
say easy, but it's a more natural flow to talk about culturally responsive education
through the lens of language arts or social studies because it can connect seemingly more
easily to our students than math, which I feel can be really removed, can feel very
removed for a lot of students.
So when I was thinking about culture and math, I was thinking about the book, like I said,
and the Building Thinking Classrooms book.
And I was thinking that what ended up happening is this framework kind of delves into deep
culture that makes math more meaningful.
From the content, they are learning how to learn.
And a lot of students come to us with a rich history of oral tradition, storytelling, talking
to learn.
So in the Building Thinking Classroom frameworks, where all of the students are talking and
learning together, they're kind of building their understanding in a very collectivist
way, which is how a lot of our students come to us with that history and their brains are
primed to learn that way.
So if you can bring in that way of processing to the classroom, it's taking advantage of
neural pathways that are already there and making them stronger.
So instead of being held up by content, they look at everything as something they can solve
because they've had practice solving it and looking at things in different ways and understanding
that knowledge comes from everybody in the room, not just the teacher.
Now I'm going to read you this quote, and you're going to have to see if you can figure
out which book it's from.
We want them to have the ability to size up any task, map out a strategy for completing
it and execute the plan.
Now if you've read the Building Thinking Classroom's book, it could have come right out of there.
But the sentence before says, our ultimate goal as culturally responsive teachers is
to help dependent learners learn how to learn.
And then we want them to have the ability to size up any task, map out a strategy for
completing it, and then execute the plan.
I was like, those two things could have come from the same book.
They're on the same wavelength.
So what are the similarities between these two books that might be a reason why the Building
Thinking Classroom's framework works so well?
Just a caveat before I dig into this, being a culturally responsive educator isn't just
about using the right strategy.
It's really about understanding yourself, understanding the way that you communicate
and how that might differ from your students, and also what implicit bias you might have.
And implicit in nature means that you don't realize that you have it.
But it's really about examining yourself as a person to know how to best interact with
your students so that they can be successful no matter what they're doing.
The strategies she discusses don't come until the very end of the book because she spends
so much time talking about what culture is, what you can do before you go to this.
This is like, do the work on yourself first and then these strategies will make more sense.
Zaretta Hammond outlines in her book four strategies to lead students through the stages
of information processing, which are ignite, chunk, chew, and review.
So in ignite, you're getting the brain's attention.
In chunking, you're making information digestible.
In chewing, you're actively processing new information.
And review is having a chance to apply new learning.
Now if you're familiar with the building thinking classrooms framework, it falls into those
categories really well.
The ignite, getting the brain's attention.
When you're introducing a math task, you want a story, you want to puzzle something to get
kids like, oh, I kind of want to figure that out or I want to solve that problem.
It's a mystery.
And then chunking, you're starting with a low floor, high ceiling task that is accessible
to all of your students.
And then they start to build on that information.
They might get a task that's a little more challenging after that and a little more challenging
and a little more challenging.
And the kids can use the strategies that they worked on for the first task and kind of roll
it out into the second and third.
And while they're doing that, they're actively processing this new information.
They're processing from their partner, they're processing from the other people in the room,
seeing everybody's work on the boards really helps them kind of understand lots of different
viewpoints at the same time and kind of make it make sense for them.
Creating visuals and non-linguistic representations is a really powerful way for students to process
information.
So the idea of drawing your problem solving and everybody seeing all these different examples
can really help with their own information processing and help them understand the problems
that they're working on.
And after that with the reviewing or having a chance to apply the new learning, that's
kind of the consolidation or check your understanding part of the problem solving session where
they see if they really did kind of understand what they were doing on the boards and be
able to use that information or use those strategies to new problems in kind of a different
setting or a different way by choosing their own question or questions to solve that are
similar to the one that they just worked on.
And both frameworks just kind of fit so well like a puzzle, like they were part of the
same puzzle kind of hitting on the same idea and seeing similar positive results, hopefully
seeing similar positive results.
I'm wondering if anybody else has kind of put their pulse on this and what your thoughts
are.
I'm really curious, am I just making this up or does it seem like it makes sense to
you too?
Please send me a message and let me know your thoughts.
And before I go, I do want to share a little something that just warmed my heart.
I'm in touch with the teacher that has my students from last year and she was also a
teacher who was like, oh, I'd like to try building thinking classrooms.
So she tried last year, she was continuing this year and she said that when my students
saw like the building thinking classrooms, like little cards I use and everything that
they were so excited, they're like, oh, we did this last year, I loved it, we get to
do it again.
They were so excited and that just, I can't even tell you how exciting that is for me
to hear, to hear these kids be so excited about doing math, especially because, you
know, there's a lot of people who just don't like math, they didn't get it, they're like,
oh, I don't want to do it ever.
So to hear all of them be so excited about it just warms my heart that hopefully they
can carry that attitude about math throughout their education career and it's something
that they don't feel intimidated by, but they feel empowered to do.