It is so interesting for me to read this book, because while I definitely can reflect on connections to my current job, I have LOTS of connections to my prior one. My past position was completely different from where I am at now. As a first-year teacher, I was hired to teach 27 second graders at a Title I school on the West Side of Chicago. Honestly, I was so excited just to teach that I took the job without fully considering all of the personal growth I would need to do to be successful. I was challenged every minute of every day, and I learned firsthand about the social inequities in our country's education system and their effects. Once I was established in the position as one of the few white people at a nearly 100 percent African American school, I quickly noticed the cultural changes, and how much things were different from my own upper middle-class upbringing. The author Zaretta Hammond discusses that to become culturally responsive, teachers need to first consider their own cultural backgrounds, or "reference points", and then consider how their past experiences affect how they interpret things that happen in the classroom or how they need to communicate to be successful. I remember learning one example of this very quickly, when a fellow teacher in my grade level overheard me asking students to do things like take their seats, line up, stop talking, etc. She told me, "Stop asking them to do things and TELL them to do it!". In the book, Hammond provided an anecdote about a student who was sent to the principal's office because his teacher asked him "would you like to take your seat?" and he said "no". In my own upbringing, teachers always communicated this way with their students. There were boundaries, but students were trained to self-advocate and become independent thinkers, so that teachers more or less trusted us to make the right decisions. At my school, however, nearly all of my students were dependent learners, and I had to adjust how I communicated with them to be much more direct and specific. Especially at the beginning of the school year, they needed to ask permission to leave their seats because if I wasn't explicit about every movement certain students would pick fights with others, which meant that I would spend a large portion of the day breaking up physical altercations between 7 year olds. When I would hear their parents communicating with them, however, this all made sense. Most of their parents were very strict, authoritative and very adamant that their children would listen to them explicitly over everyone else. My students were only motivated by fear of their parents, grandparents, or whoever was taking care of them, or by extrinsic rewards. Almost every teacher at my school had some sort of treasure box filled with items from the Target Dollar Spot or found on Oriental Trading. Again, this was how most parents motivated their children to do things, so we adjusted.
Academically, I loved that Hammond pointed out the importance of connecting learning to songs, chants, dance, and movements because of their strong cultural roots. Every procedure in our school was accompanied by some form of chanting or poem. We used a poem to line up, a poem to go into the hallway, and we recited math facts or practiced phonics with Heggerty during bathroom breaks. We took advantage of every moment to fill it with a song or verse that students would remember. One of the first things that my principal in Chicago did was send me to a three day training for a program called Reading in Motion - a remediation program that was based on repetition, chants, and songs. I loved the program and saw TONS of growth in my students from it, because of how it allowed me to teach students to read in an incredibly structured way while also differentiating. The program also provided me with a teaching coach who came into my classroom every other week to help me. One of the most helpful things that she did for my own culturally responsive teaching was sit in the back of my room and take notes on everything that happened in my room for 30 minutes. After this, she sent me the transcript so that I could look over it and reflect. I was reminded of this specific experience when Hammond talked about the "description, interpretation, and evaluation" protocol. It was incredibly helpful for me to just read through an objective description of everything that was happening in my room. When I was more removed from the situation, I was able to reflect on which behaviors I was perceiving differently because of my own cultural background, and which behaviors I was addressing appropriately. This helped immensely with my classroom management early on. Overall, I find many of Hammond's ideas so far easy to connect to and relatable because of my prior experiences. In my current job, I can definitely think of several students who are "dependent" learners and I think that this book will help me to better identify them and find ways to help them connect with content. I also feel validated that at my current school we have so many teaching practices that are setting students up to be independent learners and thinkers, and that we do not "teach to the test" like Hammond talks so much about in her book. This definitely happens in low-income areas when funding is tied to standardized tests, which results in children never really gaining the depth of knowledge that they need to be successful. While I would not trade my experiences because of everything I learned very quickly, I am so thankful for the position I have now and all of the good things that we are doing at Lone Tree. I look forward to reading the rest of Hammond's book and finding some more specific ways to help the dependent learners in my current classroom.
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AuthorCourtney Hayes is currently a teacher at Lone Tree Elementary Magnet School in Colorado. She has teaching experience in both primary and intermediate grades, and is passionate about personalizing her instruction to meet the needs of all students. Archives
April 2021
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