The main ideas of the book:
- When schools teach students primarily to comply instead of primarily to learn, students may never learn to learn independently. This harmful pattern especially impacts Black and Brown students.
- We must coach students to become independent learners by shifting our emphasis from the external (how teachers teach and how students behave) to the internal processes of learning. We must teach students to be aware of how they learn.
Why I chose this book:
Like most educators, I’m fascinated by learning. I read and think and teach about learning all the time. But this book, Rebuilding Students’ Learning Power, raised a question in my mind that I realized I couldn’t exactly answer: What does learning look like? The answer, which is both obvious and not-so-obvious is that learning is not something we can see.
We see the evidence of learning and things that we believe lead to learning (teachers teaching, students appearing to listen, students completing assignments). Often, we’re seeing what Zaretta Hammond calls “the pedagogy of compliance.” But for some students, often historically marginalized ones, going through the motions of school does NOT result in learning.
The good news is that although we cannot see the internal processes of learning, we can teach students what they are and how to engage the moves and tools of independent learners for themselves. We just have to shift our focus away from how teachers teach and how students externally behave to how students internally learn.
