Join us for this opening episode of Season 5 as we dive into the instructional core with THE Zaretta Hammond, who needs no introduction! Get to know Zaretta as she enters her self-described “Maker Phase” of life. In this season, Alcine and Shane are exploring the question, What needs to be true—at various levels of the system—to awaken and center student voice and agency? Zaretta cracks open this conversation by challenging all of us to couple “equity work” with “instructional equity”, beginning with a deep focus on literacy to interrupt what she has deemed cognitive redlining. Listen as Zaretta unpacks a pedagogy of possibility in which educators leverage neuroscience to make learning “sticky” and help students get smarter and sharper about the core skills they need to thrive. Zaretta offers so many insights on where we need to pay attention as educators, starting with a reminder that curriculum is not a magic wand that will generate learning and belonging is a precondition for cognitive capacity-building, not the end goal. She grounds us in the truth that learning is messy, predicated on making and thinking strategically about mistakes, and that students need both care and push. And she gives us a powerful vision of classrooms rooted in the kinds of “studio habits” that artists have, in which students are cognitively apprenticed into the vital skills and habits of learning required for the global societies in which they live.

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