247. Leading Change for Cognitive Justice with Zaretta Hammond

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In this episode, we have a compelling discussion with Zaretta Hammond about transformational change in leadership. Zaretta recently authored "Rebuilding Students' Learning Power,” which emphasizes the core idea of cognitive justice and offers practical steps for educators to follow. 

Our conversation highlights how educators can transition from a pedagogy of compliance to a pedagogy of possibility by understanding and applying the principles of equitable teaching and cognitive justice. We delve into the importance of disrupting existing mental models and exploring instructional strategies that genuinely meet students' needs.


The Big Dream 
Zaretta’s big dream for education is cognitive justice, the idea that every student becomes a powerful learner. She emphasizes rethinking the systems entrenched in educational inequities—rooted in colonization across the globe—that underdevelop the cognitive capacity of marginalized populations. To achieve this cognitive justice,  Zaretta encourages educators to recognize and counterbalance these systems to foster a more equitable learning environment.

Mindset Shifts Required

Zaretta recognizes a tendency amongst educators to “treat the symptoms” or look for the newest teaching and learning strategies without digging a little deeper. But to achieve cognitive justice, a big mindset shift is required. 

Educators can address the mental models that underlie educational practices by first listening to and collecting the stories that are being told in their context. From there, educators can examine and interrogate those narratives, rewriting them in a way that allows for increased cognitive justice. 

Action Steps  

For educators who want to prioritize cognitive justice—helping every student become a powerful learner—and are willing to dig deeper into their own mental models of leadership and change, Zaretta suggests the following key action steps:

Step 1: Collect and interrogate the stories and narratives present in educational settings. This involves listening to the assumptions and complaints within school communities to identify the underlying stories influencing learning.

Step 2: Decolonize the classroom and repatriate the classroom. This is about giving students space for talking and giving space for productive struggle. It’s a cognitive apprenticeship, bringing students up as a novice through to higher levels of mastery. 

Step 3: Reimagine pacing guides and professional learning calendars to include productive struggle and learning targets, integrating them into curriculum pacing and addressing both content and skill development.

Step 4: Develop a culture of continuous improvement and collaborative inquiry to promote meaningful discussions about instruction and instructional decision-making.

Note that Zaretta also outlines five specific action steps in her book, which is a great starting point for educators who want to join the movement toward greater cognitive justice. They are broken down into more detail, exploring themes, for example, of how to spot poor proxies for learning and what to focus on instead. 


Challenges?

One of the significant challenges highlighted is moving beyond poor proxies for learning—observable behaviors that are mistaken for learning without assessing genuine understanding and progress. Leaders must also resist the allure of compliance and quick fixes, instead committing to instructional transformations that empower students. It involves continually disrupting ourselves—challenging but necessary.

One Step to Get Started 

For educators looking to begin this transformative journey, Zaretta suggests starting with a commitment to understanding students' learning processes deeply. This involves working as a cognitive apprentice and focusing on how students learn to learn, supporting them in becoming independent, confident learners.

Stay Connected

You can find out more about Zaretta and stay in touch via her website and LinkedIn.

To help you implement today’s takeaways, our guest is inviting you to join their free newsletter on their website linked above. And, if you’re looking for more details on the ideas in this blog post, listen to episode 247 of the Time for Teachership podcast. If you’re unable to listen or you prefer to read the full episode, you can find the transcript below.

​Quotes: 

• 00:55 “ I think people will have a tendency to be listening for strategy and actionable things … versus, ‘How do I actually change? How do I make a change? How do I stop doing what's not helpful and start doing the thing that is going to be the most high leverage.’”
• 7:45 “ Mental models don't shift just because you are exposed to something, they shift because you rewrite an internal narrative and explanatory story as to why that happens.”
• 24:22 “ Those dependent learners are the ones we have a tendency to forget about because it becomes a little more sexy to actually focus on, well, let's talk about students that are learning. The ones that actually can engage us in that conversation don't necessarily need our support. 
• 31:54 “ Everything else is gonna change and shift. But we know this is still the process, right? Because change is hard and when you're changing, you're in a liminal space—you're not who you used to be, but you're not yet fully who you are trying to become. And that liminal space is where instructional leaders really have to shine.”

​​If you enjoyed this episode, check out my YouTube channel where you can learn about more tips and resources like this one below:

TRANSCRIPT
Lindsay Lyons: Soreta Hammond, welcome to the time for teachership podcast.
Zaretta Hammond: Thank you for having me.
Lindsay Lyons: I am really excited about this conversation. Really excited about your latest book. Um, I was just saying I've been telling everyone about it. Definitely people should read it. And today I'm really excited to talk to you specifically about change leadership In connection with the book.
There are so many rich ideas. There are so many great ideas for teachers, and I think there are so many important implications for leaders that I'm really, really jazzed about the conversation today. And I also wanted to just invite you to share. Like, what do you want us to, to keep in our minds for myself, for the audience as we jump in today?
Zaretta Hammond: No, just what we're gonna talk about. Just those things that you talked about. You know, just the idea that change is hard and the more that we can come together to better understand, um, how we make change. I think people will have a tendency to be listening for strategy and, you know, actionable things and Oh, interesting ideas for teachers to do.
Versus how do I actually change? How do I make a change? How do I stop doing what's not helpful and start doing the thing that is going to be the most high leverage? And so I think that's what I want people to really keep at the forefront.
Lindsay Lyons: Awesome. Thank you for naming that. And that comes through really clearly in your book too.
I'm glad we got that, that at the top. And so I, I really like to start conversations with, um, Dr. Bettina loves quote on freedom dreaming, so she describes them as dreams grounded in the critique of injustice. So I think your, your book and your, your larger collection of work speaks to that. But I'd love to just hear your thoughts today.
What's, what's the big dream you hold for education?
Zaretta Hammond: I, I think I, the big dream I hold is the thread that runs both through my first book, culturally Responsive Teaching the Brain and this new book Re Rebuilding Students' Learning Power, teaching for Instructional Equity and Cognitive Justice. So that big dream is cognitive justice.
The idea that, um, part of what we want for every student is for them to be a powerful learner. And the way that we do that is by looking at the systems that have been constructed, particularly in America. But it's true wherever colonization has its footprint all over the world. Right? Australia has the same issue with Aboriginal and Tores Strait.
Um. Uh, people. And, uh, you have the same thing in New Zealand with Maori people. You have, uh, there are folks reading my book in India. Why? Because the caste system does the same type of marginalization, even more so when Britain came in and start to colonize. So everywhere we turn. The, the aftermath of colonization means we have to really put cognitive justice at the forefront because the mechanism it used was to, first and foremost, to under develop the cognitive capacity.
Uh, marginalized populations. A lot of people, you know, wanna protest in the streets and think it's about other things, but there are mechanisms that are quite invisible once they're put in place that do this kind of invisible sorting. And, you know, people can say, well, I'm not actively doing anything.
Well, the system is set up and designed to do that. So I really think that the way we get to that. Dream is to recognize the mechanisms that are in place and what's the counterbalance, what's the medicine, if you will.
Lindsay Lyons: I, I love that. And I, I think that for a lot of folks, there's a big mindset shifting that has to occur here, um, because we have like done education this particular way, right?
In teacher school, it's like. Compliance. Compliance. Right. And it's not, um, the pedagogy of possibility that you describe in your book. Um, it's don't smile until December or whatever weird stuff, you know, that we got in teacher school. And so, uh, one of the things I think about from a change leadership perspective is that you talk about how it's important to reset our mental models to disrupt cognitive redlining.
And I love that you had mentioned, um, kind of two pieces I'd love for you to elaborate on if you want. One is kind of like identifying the narratives and how we discuss problems. Like how are we attributing the root causes? Where, where did the belief come from, is a question from your book that I really appreciated.
Um, and you also talk about, you know, this idea of trying on alternate perspectives, um, which makes me think of like merose disorienting dilemma or like, um, John Morgan talks about like. Uh, leaders can kind of create a constructive disorientation, whether through mindfulness, through art, or, you know, otherwise.
Um, and so I'm just curious if you could talk a little bit about the, that process of resetting the mental models and, and what that entails for leaders to consider.
Zaretta Hammond: Yeah, I think it is an important piece that's often overlooked. We have a tendency to treat the symptoms and like, what's the newest strategy to get, or, you know, oh, there's the newest thing from visible learning, or, oh, it's about teacher clarity.
But we don't go deep enough to actually examine the mental model, that explanatory story that drives our actions. And it's more than beliefs. It's the explanatory story, right? It's just like we understand how physics work. There are certain things we're not gonna do. Why? Because we understand how physics work.
Nobody's jumping off the the roof of their house. Why? We understand how physics works and you are gonna end up at the bottom. There's no floating that's going to happen. We don't even examine these things 'cause we just know that's what's gonna happen. Same thing in education. We have been doing certain things for so long that even most progressive educators.
Are complicit in maintaining cognitive redlining and sometimes are at the forefront. That would be something they would tell you, oh no, I'm not sure you are that poor baby syndrome, that sentimentalist that, oh, you know, they, they don't need to read because that's not in their culture. Like all the, these little things that I have heard, particularly from progressive educators and progressive leaders actually work against.
The kind of change they wanna see, that instructional equity, that cognitive justice. So I think that the examining the story one tells oneself even before you get to your beliefs, 'cause your beliefs are predicated on these stories. Um, that's a really critical piece for us to do. Uh, and again, I think for instructional leaders, they have to first.
Collect the stories. What story are people telling at your school? Right, and you have to just listen. You can go into the teacher's lounge and sometimes that's not being in front of people that's just listening. What? What are they complaining about? What are they just assuming that's the way it is, or that's how those parents are.
That's how those kids are. We hear it all the time, and so I think being able to collect the stories and then to do the work around is this interrogating. Those narratives, like, why would we be holding this narrative? Where did this come from? Right? And then looking for the roots of that, that mental models don't shift, but just because you are exposed to something, they shift because you rewrite an internal narrative and explanatory story as to why that happens.
Lindsay Lyons: Yes. Thank you for that. And, and I, I think about, um, uh. That quote that you shared, the, that, um, that information is now transformation that you share often. And I, I think about kinda a leader who is, uh, doing PD or pl right? Professional learning and how there's a lot of like, here's here is the strategy or here is the thing.
Um. But that what takes so much more work and what is so much more powerful is that examining of the story. And, and, and what it makes me think is of leaders who have their professional learning calendar, similar to how a, a teacher has a PD calendar or, or a, excuse me, a pacing guide. Mm-hmm. Right. And it's, I've heard you talk about pacing guides and, and, uh, I would love just kind of your thoughts and how that might translate to kind of leaders expectations of pacing through professional learning or otherwise.
Right. That. Yeah.
Zaretta Hammond: Well, yeah, I can dig into both of those first. You know, I do, I have strong feelings about pacing guides, right? That they are part of the pedagogy of compliance, but you don't throw the baby out with the bath water. Right? And a lot of schools, that was actually one of our first equity moves because teachers were just all over the map.
Right. Even with No Child Left Behind, right, young progressive teachers like, oh, that was, you know, from the Devil. And I'm like, first you need to understand, no one was disaggregating data before. No Child left behind. We didn't even know. What schools were hiding that their black and brown indigenous students, neurodivergent students weren't achieving.
They just were okay with it and just kept covering it up. Had we not had no child left behind, we would've never started disaggregating data. So this data diving that folks take for granted came about because some people said, no, no business as usual. No child will be left behind. Were there some missteps?
Yes. We overcorrected to maintain cognitive redlining through assessment. Right. And this wasn't the, the bill did that. It's those people that were, you know, wanting to maintain things the way they are in terms of schooling. So. And, and Joel Meta from Harvard, uh, school of Education talks about this as the grammar of schooling, right?
It's not just me ri, you know, getting riled up about it. It is, you know what? People have already recognized. Schooling hasn't shifted in much in 150 years. It looks pretty much the same. So. While we know there is always a challenge, a pacing guide can be reimagined. It's one of the things that I talk with the instructional leaders about.
Imagine adding productive struggle, um, uh, learning targets around learning how to learn so that now you are integrating those into what you need to be pacing. And the problem is we think it's a all or nothing either. It's I gotta cover all this content. Well, if you actually design the pacing guide where you are trying to do both.
Why? Because the only way the students are going to take in the content better is by improving their learning to learn skills, their information processing skills. And as long as we don't acknowledge that we are going to continue down the road. So from the perspective of leaders in their PD calendars or their PL calendars, the biggest challenge we have is.
Coming to a session, no matter how well it is designed for teacher voice and you know, engagement, there's usually crickets. Once the teacher leaves that session and goes back to the classroom, there's no guidance. So now, uh, what did I remember about that? So now I might be doing it kind of half-assed and like, oh, okay, I like that part, but this part seems so hard, so I'm gonna just leave that out.
'cause I don't really like that. Right? So now we're just all free styling out there because there's no focus on inquiry. And when we do, all we're doing is, you know, go try it and come back and report. We're gonna do A-P-D-S-A cycle, right? Let's go try it and study it, and then you just come and report all that is about the teacher.
And we have lost sight of the student as a primary actor, right? The thing I say is information that transformation. The other thing I say ad nauseum is only the learner learns. So both the guide, uh, a pacing guide and the for the classroom content coverage and the curriculum moving through the curriculum as well as what professional learning should look like, have to center on how do we get the student to level up their learning.
And I think that is often what we miss.
Lindsay Lyons: Absolutely. And I think, you know, I said we'll focus on the, the change leadership. I also would love to just give some space here for, if you wanna just talk about some of the key aspects of your book. There are so many things, like I took probably like 20 pages of notes.
It was ridiculous. There's so much in there. Um, but I, I wonder what you wanna highlight as kind of the most important, um, pieces as we then kind of transition to thinking about like what that instructional leadership can be to bring that to life in teachers' classrooms.
Zaretta Hammond: I think the biggest challenge is, um, let me start this way.
Someone on LinkedIn, I think it was, um, was sharing a reflection about the book and she said, this is a not a book you read. This is a book you use and I think that is why it's so rich in. Stuff to do, not as one off things, because what I say at the end of chapter three, which is about the pedagogy of compliance, but how do we shift from that pedagogy of compliance to a pedagogy of possibility?
Well, I outline the five steps that if instructional leaders. Instructional coaches and teachers get aligned. They can support the student to level up their learning and that I outline the five steps. The challenge I find is people like to strategy strip. So there are things to do that, you know, s Morgan's board, so I'm gonna do this and I'm gonna do that.
Well, there are steps. Nobody does a recipe like that. The recipe says, here's what you prep. You've gotta mix it. Do I fold the ingredients in, which is a technique in and of itself. Do I separate the dry and the wet ingredients? And then I mix. Them there are steps because when you don't follow those steps, you get something that is not appetizing to look at or actually to ingest, and then you, you know, shrug your shoulders.
I don't know how that happened. Well, hell, you weren't following the recipe. So I want people to think about this book. 'cause a recipe, this should be a book that they're gonna use for a year. It doesn't mean that, ugh, I won't see any results for a year. It's just gonna mean. The, the, the learning is so deep, you are gonna start to build this momentum in terms of starting to like step one.
You know, step one is, um, uh, decolonize the classroom and repatriate the classroom. Well, what does that mean? So now how do we take out the compliance? Repatriating means how are we giving students space for talking? How are we giving space for productive struggle? How are we setting up a cognitive apprenticeship?
Because that is kind of a cultural way of learning for a lot of students in their community. You learn by doing. You learn by having a. A person who's a little further down the road show you the ropes and give you feedback. It is a very active way of learning. This is what a carpenter does. This is what any craftsperson does.
When they joined a guild, they have joined an apprenticeship to move from novice to journeymen to master. We don't have that process when we talk about how do we get students to a level of mastery, how do we get teachers. To that level of mastery. So I think I really want people to think about it as a recipe, right?
This is something that I can use and I can do it in the chunks that I have the time and the bandwidth for. I don't have to look at all those steps and say, well, I'm gonna have to do all that in the next six weeks. No, there's no way. You can't, because you're gonna hit upon something that is like, oh. I really need to go deep.
This is where I might have resistance, or this might be something that I hadn't even understood before, that, you know, how do I actually coach this student? I'm used to presenting my content, not coaching students. Around their learning behavior. So there's so much you keep coming back around to it. You can go through it, all those steps first, you know, uh, pass at it and then you could take another pass at it.
Because as educators, we're never done.
Lindsay Lyons: Absolutely. I, I, there are so many things that you said we could dig into. Um, I am. Thinking about the leader who is trying to observe, not observe in like a gotcha sense, but like observe mm-hmm. As like a, I'm gonna do some quote unquote look for, although I hate that phrase I'm trying to look for I know,
Zaretta Hammond: I know.
I'm, I'm with you on that one.
Lindsay Lyons: And so I, I mean, you've talked about the poor, poor proxies of learning, right? And that you just, that really deeply resonated with me that you just can't. You can't see the five learn to learn skills in action by dipping into a class for five minutes. And so I'm curious to know how you would, um, reimagine that a little bit.
Like what can leaders shift in their approach to kind of checking in on a class or, or communicating with students or knowing what's going on in terms of the learning?
Zaretta Hammond: Well, I think two things. This is why taking an inquiry stance and having a culture of continuous improvement using collaborative inquiry con, collaborative analysis of student work, there are a variety of.
Approaches that are beyond simple, you know, PDSA, uh, approaches, right? There's nothing wrong with that or action research, but they don't create the culture of talking about instruction. So one of the things that I think leaders need to be able to do first is develop their capacity, uh, and to to talk about.
Instruction from a science of learning perspective, not brain-based, you know, as opposed to what the kidney based at learning. I thought, what are you talking about here? Um, but from the perspective of we understand how learning happens, we understand how that's facilitated. So now when I look at what's going on in a classroom, I actually have a lens that informs me.
Because without an informed lens, just having this list of look fors will land us back on that list of poor proxies. Poor proxies are, uh, the idea that certain observable behaviors equal learning students are busy and engaged, so that must mean they're learning. Well, that's a poor proxy. We know that's not true.
You can be very engaged, you know, digging into it, you can repeat. The learning target to any stranger walking to the room. But the reality is that student is still not progressing. We don't see their achievement going up, or their reading is not, um, grade level. Uh, and so we then just double down on more engagement.
So we know these are poor proxies, and that comes from Robert Cole's work where he really lists those. Another good piece of work around that called in, uh, uh, the, um, instructional illusions. A new book that's out, spin out probably, you know, four or five months. Another great one. He just says, here are 11 illusions now.
Instructional leaders need to know those because I think what we have a tendency to do is, oh, I should be looking for this, but you should also understand what you shouldn't be seeing and not to be fooled by the look for, because it actually might be a poor proxy, it might be an illusion of learning.
But without that, the leader then can't calibrate with the teacher. When it's time for people to be talking about instruction, I can tell you one of the biggest challenges I have is that we are not talking about instruction in our schools as part of our professional learning. And I don't mean that we have to all be doing a, you know, in depth book study or reading in depth articles, but we have taken the professionalism out of education.
And to the point that no doctor, you know, my brother-in-law is a doctor. He's always reading, he's always going to a conference to, to talk about the newest technique. So they're all, that's just part of it. My. Husband, late husband was a, um, a lawyer. They always had to do continuing education and they were always talking about newest precedents and how that was going to impact.
There was just a professional conversation that informed their lens, even as the law changes, even as medicine changed. We don't do that in education. We're looking for the strategy or the look for. To make it quick, we're gonna insert it. Nobody knows what they're doing. So now what we do is get hyped up on a jargon.
So now if I can, so the poor proxy for professional learn learning is the use of jargon. So the teacher has used productive struggle, but when you look in their classroom, or they actually able to coach students to engage in productive struggle.
Lindsay Lyons: Wow, this is so good. I, uh, I, I'm taking that in and I'm like, where do I even go next? Because I'm so deeply listening. Um, oh, that's, I wanted to just connect that I was reading your book at the same time that I was reading Pedagogies of Voice. And they were ​