Zaretta Hammond | PBL World 2020 Keynote (Day 2)

good morning here we are here i am thank you gina it is great to be here good morning good afternoon whatever the time is in the zone you're in i know we are all around the world and i'm really really honored and privileged to be here today with you all and talk about a subject that's near and dear to my heart which is uh student learning and giving students the best possible chance to level up and accelerate their learning so what i want to do today is bring to you a little food for thought particularly we start to think about equity and infusing equity into project-based learning i've got a couple of slides that i'm going to share with you so let me share my screen and we will start the show there we go so i talk about it in relationship to um kind of the work that i've been doing through culturally responsive teaching in the brain um this book i wrote was you know very much um uh in affinity with project-based learning even though i don't mention it as um the driving force there is a lot of compatibility and overlap because we are talking about how do we help students expand their capacity and their confidence as learners and so being able to kind of leverage that is what i have been doing for the past 20 plus years um but i want to tell a little story first i began my um awareness of project-based learning and kind of the late 1990s probably around 1999 2000 at castlemount high school in oakland california and it was interesting because i remember coming into a meeting and it was a meeting of all of the school improvement providers and instructional coaches that were there to support the school that is in largely african american and latinx community in east oakland and i remember coming into that meeting and listening to someone talk about this thing called project based learning and i kept saying yes that's the brain science and i just became more intrigued and there clearly was affinity and it was called the buck institute at that time and i'm like what is this buck institute and someone explained to me and ever since then which has been a long time now i've kind of kept my eye on that work and kept my um connections with some of those folks so it was always um pleasing to me to see that there was a sharper focus on equity and that the buck institute began to uh a transition and as it transitioned to pbl works really lifting up this statement in a way that really makes it um clear that equity is at the center our vision is that all students no matter where they live or what their background will have access to high quality project-based learning so they deepen their learning and achieve success in college career and life that is what we all want and so being able to think about that through equity lenses becomes really important so here's a a really cute graphic that i came across as i was doing a little more research and preparation for this um gathering this morning from the the uh organization and i love this idea of really keeping an eye on the students who are furthest away from opportunity because i think the goal in equity is to get those students closer to opportunity to give them access and the two lenses we see here one is interrupt but also to support and that is very much in line with a quote that i focus on a lot when i am introducing culturally responsive teaching to uh educators and teachers and and this quote comes from john dewey to prepare a student for the future life means to give him command of himself means to train him so that he will have the full and ready use of all his capacities that's really what we want we want to be able to do that and we understand though that there are reasons why that hasn't happened and i think this is a really important part of understanding why we have the disparities that we have why some students are further away from opportunity and we know just by events recently that these things have come to the surface so the the lenses we carry have to be around not only being anti-racist but also building a bicultural lens it's not either or it's about that so the question is how do we do that through project-based learning the evolution has been to start to include equity lens and and now how do we sharpen that lens and that's what i want to talk about as we're moving through this and give you you know some some ideas of how to get started with uh continuing that evolution of focusing on equity so we have to attend to both things and i think on the the anti-racist social political context side we are continually looking at how do we recognize structural racialization or structural racism how are we becoming literate about kind of the ways that this plays out in society and impacts students and we're thinking about what are the counter narratives we have to lift up in order to negate the negative narratives about what certain kids can and can't do particularly when it comes to something like project-based learning because there's a whole school of thought that certain kids aren't ready and part of what we have to be able to do is to lift up how that actually is part of the inequity by design but we also know that that's not enough we also have to be thinking about what are the culturally grounded ways that we build trust and connection how do we leverage the brain schema the funds come in what are the collectivist learning principles that we employ and integrate into project-based learning because collectivism or culture for a lot of black and brown children doesn't stop and start with group work and it is a matter of um importance to build our capacity to have a deeper understanding of that collectivist set of collectivist learning practices and here's what we do know just color blindness like all kids will you know grow their brains if they engage in project-based learning that is a type of color blindness that we have to um be aware of and really avoid i love this graphic as we start to talk about project-based learning right the the idea that project-based learning is more than just kind of the desert doing a project that is kind of the one-off thing that's fun and exciting but we move on to regular instruction instead the orientation is around uh project-based learning as the main course the integration uh and the process of moving through the unit is project oriented it is contextualized it is real world and it's grounded there for students and i just took the liberty to kind of hijack the graphic because i love the metaphor to actually think about equity in the same way there are ways in which we can do equity light right we speak sprinkling a little little social justice or anti-racist talk in there and then we move on to uh having it appear to be very neutral instead we need to be thinking about how is equity at the core how are we maintaining that um lens and sharpening it so that we are continually helping the student who is furthest away from opportunity get closer so one of the ways that i help people think about this is really thinking about the distinctions between multicultural education social justice education and culturally responsive education so what's really important about multicultural education is that really focuses on celebrating diversity and this is where we can fall into the trap of equity light we just do the kind of the kumbaya thing and everybody is included and we mention a little bit of everybody's culture and background and then we really are all coming together that's focuses on social harmony and what's important to lift up is this element is an important aspect of the kind of learning environments we want but it is not enough to accelerate learning so students that are furthest away from opportunity need acceleration in their learning so social justice education does it offer us that opportunity well we want students to be reflective about kind of what's going on around them we want them to build that capacity so part of what we need to be able to do is help students really start to think about that critical consciousness but here's the thing i want to point out these first two things multicultural education and social justice education don't focus on learning it is culturally responsive education that really has that focus on accelerating learning so that students have independent agency and this is more than just choice this is really that i have the cognitive capacity to take in information and learn at the highest levels so i use culturally responsive teaching as the vehicle for promoting that equity and i think it's very you know resonant with project-based learning because here's what we know we know that the way in equity was hardwired into our schools in our school system our public schools private charter wherever you are is that the schools have methodically and historically underdevelop the cognitive information processing skills of diverse students and consequently undermine their confidence as learners so it becomes really an important piece for us to not lose sight of it's not just making kids feel good about themselves or seeing their identity reflected in the curriculum it's understanding that we need to make sure that the most powerful learning gets to the neediest students and i think that is really an important piece that is at the heart of project-based learning but here's the thing i want us to to keep an eye on if we want to get students closer to opportunity then we have to think about the learning gaps learning gaps turn into opportunity gaps which then show up as achievement gaps so while we're talking about opportunity gaps we cannot reduce them if we cannot help the learner learn at a higher level so as we sharpen our equity lens as project-based teachers uh there are three things i really want to highlight that i think are really important that start to up in inequity by design that's focused on developing students cognitive capacity and that first one is get students ready for rigor this is essential it's essential because choice or integrated projects alone don't get students ready to carry more of the cognitive load we have to actually deliberately plan for ways in which students cognition is going to be expanded for example one of those learning gaps often shows up as students reading below grade level this learning gap is not going to magically close because they engage in project-based learning we have to be deliberate about creating the opportunities for those types of gaps that are going to build student capacity to actually do more robust project based learning it's not an either or this is a oh we need to stop and do small discrete you know drill and kill no we need to think about how we leverage project-based learning to close these really really critical gaps here's another thing i think is really important we have to offer students counter narratives about their capacity as learners alongside engaging projects because we have to be explicit with students just because they have engaged in a project doesn't mean that these narratives that are in the dominant culture are not forces that are shaping their understanding or their belief about who they are i love this idea of the learning pit this comes from james nottingham's work and i've really adapted it as a way to talk about um uh culturally responsive practice or information processing that grows student capacity and this idea of academic mindset and counter narratives becomes a critical component not as an add-on but because it is another really important piece of the puzzle so think of it this way learning is going on and we all know at some point learning gets hard and how the student is able to self-regulate emotionally is really going to be dependent on what they believe about themselves as a learner i don't understand this is getting hard we all say that to ourselves but what we don't want our students to fall into i can't do this or what we know older students say is this is stupid uh i want to quit is what they're saying what's really critical is we need to get them into the pit that is where productive struggle happens we're grappling taking things apart taking the inquiry stance kind of that is at the heart of what project-based learning is and we know what fogotsky said is that's the zone of proximal development the more students can engage in that the more their brains are going to grow so being able to get them into the pit whether they are calm and ready to take on this productive struggle is really important now their ability to process information is how they get up out of that pit so it becomes equally important that we teach them the skills of information processing we help them sharpen those as a way to move their work forward so i've got two more that i want to talk about and let's talk about this next one offered active demanding this alongside high expectations you know it's not enough just to say we have high expectations right we could be standing on the side yelling at the student i've got high expectations so what is that helping me do anything better well the counter to high expectations it's not even the counter the partner to high expectations is what we know to be called active demandingness it's the other component that a warm demander has and the way i like to talk about it is we have to become the personal trainer of students cognitive development right think about a personal trainer personal trainer doesn't jump down and do your push-ups for you right they coach you so that you actually can start to take on a new mindset about health and wellness that you have new skills to actually challenge your your body and your muscles so that they get more efficient and more effective and they grow this is an important part of being able to have that uh high expectation the high expectation coupled with that active demandingness that that coach stance that you're going to ask the student to level up and that means coaching them around the learning how to learn processes being explicit having space for you all to talk about that giving them timely corrective actionable feedback becomes really really important and this has to be embedded in a meta strategic conversation about learning moves and that word comes from ron rickhardt he's the author of make making thinking visible out of harvard's project zero and i love this term so much because this is not just metacognitive this is meta strategic it's almost like chest at a certain point you want to just pause and say huh okay let's analyze that task you've learned six new strategies what do you think is the right strategy to tackle that task what two would you combine this is the strategic conversation you want to be able to have with students so just doing the project is not enough where will you make time and space to step back and say huh how did our first pancake go right because this is the idea of iteration things will go wrong how do you get the student to be reflective not just of what went wrong but their ability to change their learning modes really really important part of the equity equation and the last i want to talk about is really being able to leverage diverse students funds of knowledge and this is where we need to know a little bit about kind of the science of learning because equity focused project-based learning understands and uses the science of learning and schema theory right and here's a reality schema theory isn't a theory it's what we know about how we hold information in our head it's where background knowledge comes in and background knowledge is just another word for schema right this is the knowledge tree we all have in our head and the way we hook that knowledge together we string it together becomes important why because culture's a software to the brain's hardware and culture lives in the schema so when we talk about students having funds of knowledge is they come in knowing things and this becomes important because as you know the science of learning what you know is all new learning must be coupled with old learning so if you don't know what their current schema is the current funds of knowledge how will you help them integrate that so you have to understand where the cognitive hooks are right so being able to chunk information is not so much taking it apart making little bits that's a inequity move it is actually understanding the funds of knowledge and being able to create cognitive hooks the term chunk actually comes from brain science cognitive neuroscience and it is how we organize information in our head and how we hold on to it this is true wherever i go i go to alaska a lot and i see place-based learning that is project-based as well but it also leverages the funds of knowledge that the students bring in and it builds on those pieces of knowledge the piece i think is where we have room to grow is in helping students chew on that content information processing how do we help students really begin the process of chewing on the content meaning they have to take the old knowledge they have their current funds of knowledge background knowledge and that new knowledge has to be mixed together we know this again from the science of learning i love the analogy of coal stone ice creamery or you know wherever you go get your your your ice cream that most places have some uh a thing where they'll mix in candy or cookie crumbs or whatever your pleasure is with your ice cream and they do that because they don't just sprinkle it on the top but they take it to a cold stone or an area where for a minute or two they're actually going to mix it up in cognitive neuroscience this is what we think about is chewing where are students getting the opportunity to chew but to integrate that with their current funds of knowledge project-based learning and project-based teaching is ripe for this it is like designed and made for this but if we don't have our eye on that equity lens if we're not actually understanding the funds of knowledge that students come in we're not using a culture in the right way and we're just summing that up in a kind of equity light kind of way that it's not going to be effective because here's what we know processing that does not proceed to the elaboration stage that's that mixing together stage fails to make the connections that build understanding so you can have students go through the motions of a project and still not come out on the other side being able to do deeper learning they might have fun but we actually have to make sure being the personal trainers of their cognitive development that they are actually growing their brain prayer as they do it so i want to pause there um there's so much to say about this uh i do want to continue the conversation so i'm just going to you know invite you to stay connected and to um you know let me uh know kind of what you're doing in the area of connecting equity and project-based learning and i know we have time for some questions and i definitely want to take those so i'm going to invite gina back in i'm going to stop sharing my screen there we are and let's see if we've got because i see that chat box lighten up now you know i know enough not to look in it but uh i'm i'm really uh excited to hear how people are processing and connections they're making yeah thank you so much for all of that serena um we do have uh many many questions we won't be able to get to all of them but i wanted to lift up a few uh with you right now so the the first question i would like to pose to you is um and this seems to be top of mind for a lot of educators right now is what practical advice do you have for supporting and scaffolding student cognition in the context of this emergency remote learning that we are likely to be doing um for an extended period of time teachers have limited access to students what what practical advice do you have yeah i actually did a couple of webinars on this very topic and um really helping people think about how do they move beyond the the uh packet right and this is this remote learning situation is really revealing have we prepared our students to be cognitively independent learners so my advice is that is the thing you actually have to help them do so being able to help them have projects that will last a couple of weeks at home but you know you have to do a hide the vegetable kind of thing right you have to embed these capacity building uh um efforts right these gap closing learning gap closing efforts in there so one thing i suggest to folks is word study right building word wealth helping kids really start to think about word consciousness word play not in a sense of a list but literally helping them start to understand better how words work so they can move more of those in there we know that the students become better readers and writers when they are able to do that the other thing is continue to help students build background knowledge and this means helping them not only read but read nonfiction or watch listen to podcasts or watch videos about something and being able to ask them to share that information out this is so in line with what project-based learning is but if you have if you see that oh i don't have access to my students and you think you need to have access to your students then you have not adequately prepared them to be independent learners you should be the personal trainer again the personal trainer doesn't need to be there they don't need to get on the floor and do the push-ups you need to prepare the students so when the student is not with you they are continuing to learn because that's the only way acceleration happens so that those learning gaps close so i think being able to to help students build word wealth um continue to build background knowledge and and do that linking the those cognitive hooks becomes really really an important piece great thank you um another question that i came up teachers are wondering about a little bit of specificity around what the alliance looks like between students and how to be able to give wise feedback as a warm demander could you uh shed a little bit more light on that i i think you know that's a that's a deep one because it is not a quick answer and it means that you number one have set time and space so that you are able to have these conversations it's one thing to do the in the moment kind of thing but you also should be setting up time for conferencing i was a writing teacher when i was in the classroom and it was so important for me to be able to have these meta strategic conversations with my students so i needed time so one of the the core things i tell anybody who wants to build that alliances you need to rethink time that becomes an equity issue how are you organizing so you can confer with students so that by the end of the month you've rotated through all your students secondly how are you having meta strategic conversations with them are you giving them timely feedback what are the formative assessments look like there's a way in which we keep thinking the alliances i just need to be your friend or be in relationship or tell you i'm down with you but you know what competence is a trust builder when students see that you're helping them get better they will actually trust you more so set up the systems so that you can help them see that they are growing and that you are helping to support that that's the core of alliance wonderful um related um people are wondering how do we effectively engage parents as co-trainers well i think that parents aren't co-trainers they are the first teachers so you you know as a kid say you better recognize um they may not know the word pedagogy but if you've taught a human to be potty trained you know pedagogy and so the fact is we have to give respect to parents and not act like we need to help them be co-trainers they are first teachers always have been always will be so give respect first off secondly how do you actually again the more you understand the funds of knowledge that are coming out of a community coming out of a home rather than assuming there's nothing then you can actually start to leverage parents and again make it gamified parents love to play games right make it intergenerational so one things that i talk about on the webinar i did is this idea of taboo or word study right have kids do research on on on words that have transitioned through the generations right the kids say sweet and used to be tight and back in my day it was groovy yes um that far back in the day um where that was really the word you know my my dad uses a hip cat and i'm like dude what are you talking about and it generates such interesting conversation so the things that we need to do is to understand parents know things just because they don't know in kind of education jargon doesn't mean that they can't be powerful partners so think about just the way we want learning partnerships with our students we need to have dual capacity partnerships with our parents not learning partnerships you're not teaching parents nothing they should be teaching you and we should put ourselves in the mode of hearing from the first teachers thank you um i have a blend of two questions here um educators were asking about um how what are some examples of projects that would address counter narratives um and then also related how do we honor students concerns around the black lives matter movement that's happening right now so let's take the first part of that um so here's the thing about counter narratives counter narratives happen in multiple ways so you can make it a project but sometimes when you make it a project it feels impersonal so counter narratives are also about bringing the narratives back that have been taken out for example a lot of people are just now learning of the tulsa massacre right so the idea is wow there are ways in which the narrative has been uh people of african descent in this country have always just been poor and downtrodden well that story was the black wall street so oh wow that's a different narrative folks were self-sufficient they have a thriving business there is community so the narratives of who black and brown people are in the dominant culture have to be counter so what does that mean for who you are so being able to actually think about you know the black lives matter i love to say black brains matter and if you understand inequity by design the founding fathers that actually created inequitable practices because here's a reality we are a country born of apartheid they use the science of learning to ensure that certain children coming from certain racial and linguistic groups would be undereducated that's just our hard truth and the remnants of that are still deeply embedded those racial narratives of difference that's why we see the police behaving in a particular way so racial literary literacy becomes really important this is not just performance allyship i need to say this to my black and brown kids and let them know i'm down with them the counter narrative comes in small off-handed unexpected ways where the student knows this is not a performance you're not making an announcement it's like i see you a really good book i think around just how to say things in a way that students can hear them as choice words it doesn't specifically talk about black lives matter but it does talk about how in kind of everyday ways can we lift students up so that they can start to rewrite their narratives internally and i usually use a couple of strategies letters to my future self have students write those letters so start to change the narratives have students actually track their narratives right what is that little inner critic telling me about what i can and can't do write those out how do i counter balance what will i say to myself so there's work that i usually lead teachers through that is about how do you do that over a six to eight week period where it looks like again hide the vegetables sometimes we want things to be too on display and kids particularly the older they get they look at you with a little side eye like i don't really believe you because if that has not been their experience right you have to kind of put it in there right hide the vegetables my kids didn't always want to eat the broccoli so i you know put it in the chicken and rice and then like oh this is so yummy yeah you want more of that i'm happy you're happy hide those vegetables right but the idea is students will know when they hear those those words they they integrate those narratives and and let that be kind of the dojo of the classroom where project-based learning comes comes in doesn't mean you have to turn everything into a project just means how you show up is important um i'd like to take it back to the um section where you were showing us the chart around multicultural education social justice and culturally responsive um could you give a few examples to um further illustrate the difference between social justice education and crt what would that look like in the classroom for teachers who are new to this yeah i think social justice uh um when we think of it in kind of the current form is you would see topics this is where the topics in the curriculum would be changed to integrate some aspects of the student's lived experience maybe it's place based and it comes from the community or maybe they're talking about protests and black lives matter but your students are still reading two great levels behind when you start to move into the realm of culturally responsive education what you then reorient yourself is that your social justice mission is to help those students actually close that reading gap so they become proficient and advanced readers and writers so now you have to get into the technical aspects of teaching those students those things i never may mention the word social justice i may never change the curriculum but my social justice process and goal is embedded in leveraging students cultural uh funds of knowledge as a scaffold to help them accelerate so that's the to me where those two things come in and again none of these are either or but i can tell you multicultural education will never get you to close reading gaps just talking about black lives matter even though we want to talk about black lives matter then that's not going to close those reading gaps because if you're serious about black lives matter then black lives black brains need to read because if you don't you cannot live up to the promise that students will go on to college and career and life ready that is how inequity by design when in the birth of our nation through segregation and enslavement of african people insured we had anti-literacy laws this is not new where are we reclaiming it and that's just one example we can say the same thing with math we can say the same thing with writing being able to be a proficient expository writer but the fact is students need to be able to have all of these intellectual capacities at their fingertips at their ready so that they can map their life they have a real agency not just oh didn't we do a project last week that was fun um speaking of we did a project last week and it was fun um you spoke um earlier in the talk about collectivist work isn't just doesn't begin and end with group work could you um as teachers are you know at this conference and they are building projects out to go back and implement with students what does collective collectivist work look like beyond you know what that honestly gina i'm not even an attempt to do that because here's one of the things that i found particularly with white educators there is not the effort made to actually learn about collectivist culture and to experience it so what ends up happening is we listen to a podcast we say it's like oh someone said it was that so i don't want to venture into that i told you know let folks know how they can stay in touch because this is what we have to do collectively and if you're a white educator you have to get out of your own zone you have to actually experience that you actually have to start to understand that's the bi-cultural lens so what i try to do is help educators say how do i actually i'm not abandoning my own culture my own learning principles that come with that right the the cultured tree that i talk about but i'm expanding my aperture to include most people of color are already bi and tricultural we're moving back and forth across these most white educators do not do that they don't learn it they don't spend their leisure time on it this is what people are protesting about when we talk about the awareness around white supremacy culture and it's not just oh we have to do anti-racist work is you actually have to understand the rules the hidden rules of interaction that go with a collectivist way of thinking what are the deep values because the actions are the deep values personified right if you don't understand the collectivist culture so i don't want to give a quick here's a checklist and then people are going to go and say oh well zaretta said it's this right you have to commit to doing your work and that's really what it means to be in a a culturally responsive educator a anti-racist educator is that you commit to doing the work not just around your racial literacy but building that bicultural lens thank you and you've set us up perfectly for the last question we wanted to create space for any um resources or next steps that you would hope educators take um now that they have they've gotten to hear your wisdom and what might be a good next step what are some resources that would be good for them to explore i um but here's the thing here's my hesitancy this is not and i'm going to go back to what i just said where do you start but recognize it's a long journey yes and i would really recommend not going alone squad up with some folks um but i would say you have to be able to you know start with culturally responsive teaching in the brain um i think in addition to that think about well what is it around brain science i need to know right how do i actually help students kind of level up their learning um i think the more we can read about building background knowledge it is really an important piece um yeah i i don't want to say here you know check out my webinars where i break those down right because i'm aware we don't have a lot of time here and again it is a more complicated thing than oh just go read that book and here's the thing i want to tell you a book study is not going to lead you to equity right right information is not experienced because you read it doesn't mean you can do it so there's a way in which you have to continue to be in your own dojo to close the knowing doing get well i hope that people do continue to seek you out and uh and learn more about how to do this work um and not just know about it but be about it so um zaretta hammond thank you so much for giving us the gift of your time and wisdom um i hope we continue to learn with and from you and just thank you for all you've done to help change practice for for teachers and the lived experience of students absolutely thank you for having me and continue to have a wonderful conference and again i look forward to being more connected to the project-based world

Channel: PBLWorks

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Length: 42min 12sec (2532 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 10 2020