This is Jennifer Gonzalez, welcoming you to episode 263 of the Cult of Pedagogy podcast.

In this episode, we'll sit down with Zoretta Hammond to explore how we can help students take more ownership of their learning with learn-to-learn skills. One of the primary functions of school is supposed to be to give students the tools to learn on their own, to not have to depend on their teachers forever.

If we're doing our jobs right as educators, students will gradually become

independent, self-directed learners capable of monitoring, directing, and actively participating

in building their own learning. But what if that's not happening? What if year after year,

students continue to lean heavily on their teachers for step-by-step

instructions on every task, never really taking the learning process into their own hands,

and as a result, limiting their growth to only what their teachers happen to spoon-feed them.

According to my guest today, this is a problem that's happening in far too many schools,

resulting in far too many students who struggle academically, and she's working to solve it.

I first became aware of Zeretta Hammond's work in 2015 when I read her book,

Culturally Responsive Teaching and the Brain.

She appeared on episode 78 of this podcast and her name comes up

all the time in conversations about how we can close opportunity gaps by building students' cognitive

capacity. This year she has taken that idea of coaching students to become better learners

and expanded on it in a new book, Rebuilding

Students Learning Power, Teaching for Instructional Equity and Cognitive Justice. Here's a quote

from the book's introduction, where she frames the motivation for her book through the lens

of the COVID-19 pandemic. Our response to the pandemic has only complicated and exacerbated the

chronic achievement gaps we've been struggling with for decades. Millions of children lost at least

a full year or more of schooling because they weren't equipped to be independent learners.

We hadn't taught them how to learn in the wild outside the confines of

...