Culturally Responsive Teaching & The Brain by Zaretta Hammond
Last week I finished this awesome book which you can find on Amazon here. Usually I only read nonfiction if it is an assignment from a class I am taking. But this past summer I actually started to read another nonfiction book (post coming soonish once I finish it) and then I found out this was one of the books assigned for a class I am teaching this fall and decided to get a jump start on it. Now usually when anyone reads/consumes anything we tend to take what we need and leave the rest. This book is so jam packed and relevant for any educator that I would say most if not all of it you can take with you into your classroom and educational careers.
Now I am not going to go into detail about it because you can get the book here and do that yourself but I am going to share with you some bullet points of why I thoroughly enjoyed this read:
There are some amazing infographics to snap a pic of, print, and laminate for your own resources. I absolutely LOVE infographics and I definitely marked almost all of them to add to my overflowing binder clip of resources. This makes it easy to have on hand when lesson planning and to refer to without having to dive into the book to find.
This read was ridiculously relevant. I feel like at times as a special education teacher most reads don’t really fit my population of students but this is for ALL students. From 2 years old to 50 years old a teacher can take parts of this and apply it to their student population with ease.
It tied it back to the brain and was very well research based. While I am still learning and will probably always be learning about the brain, this book did a great job of talking about the brain components and processes as they related and connected to each topic that was discussed.
The end of each chapter has key points to help the reader check in with themselves! I know I can get to the end of a chapter and ask myself, “Do I remember anything I just read?” Well Hammond created bullet points for the reader to reflect and remind them of the chapters key elements and to deepen your knowledge.
Soooo many resources. As someone who loves research I love that at the end of this book the author then told us of other relevant research we could look up to deepen our understanding of the topic being discussed.
All in all, I highly recommend this book for any educator to add this to your collection of research based books and until next time,
Happy Learning :)