Rebuilding Students' Learning Power

Teaching for Instructional Equity and Cognitive Justice

"Zaretta Hammond has done it again. Rebuilding Students’ Learning Power is essential reading for anyone committed to justice in education. With clarity and urgency, Zaretta names hard truths with unflinching clarity and gives us a roadmap to radically transform education. This book is rooted in research, fueled by love, and full of tools educators can use right away. I’ll be sharing this book with every teacher and leader I work with."

"Zaretta Hammond's new book is a more-than-worthy successor to Culturally Responsive Teaching and the Brain. She lays out very practical steps any teacher can use to move from a "pedagogy of compliance" to a pedagogy that values the assets and possibilities of every student. In today's environment where equity and even learning is being attacked, we all need a guide like Rebuilding Students' Learning Power to provide the tools we need to fight for our students, their families, and our communities."

"The book is cogent, clear, and compelling with clarity about how we have relegated many learners to second rate educational experiences and what we must do to change. We have too long ignored our responsibility to be the teachers and leaders our children and youth need. With new language and guidance to change how adults should learn and teach, Hammond reframes what we know about learning and how that knowledge can and should translate to the classroom and the professional experiences that teachers and leaders should have. Through listening to the salient advice about how we learn, we can resurrect our commitment to the Dewey quote: 'What the best and wisest parent wants for his child, that must we want for all the children of the community. Anything less is unlovely, and left unchecked, destroys our democracy.'”

"In Rebuilding Students’ Learning Power, Zaretta Hammond offers us both a mirror and a map. It pushes us to confront the ways a pedagogy of compliance and dependence has become part of the unexamined grammar of schools while offering us a clear, research-informed pathway toward the development of classrooms where students do not just complete unchallenging work—they grow into powerful thinkers and learners. Hammond’s thoughtful, engaging writing couldn’t be timelier. What Hammond makes so clear is that cognitive justice is not separate from the work of teaching for understanding and the development of thinking dispositions—it is central to it. Her vision aligns powerfully with creation of cultures of thinking: learning environments where thinking is valued, visible, and actively promoted."

Drawing on the science of learning and development, Hammond brings to life the kind of teaching that can develop the skills currently required in a fast-changing knowledge-based society. This is a must-read for educators and policymakers who are seeking a path to effective teaching for all.

"Hammond doesn't just diagnose the problem; she provides a practical and actionable roadmap for change. For individual teachers, instructional coaches, and school leaders, Rebuilding Students' Learning Power serves as a user manual and playbook. It's not about adopting "silver bullet strategies" but about a fundamental reorientation around the student as the primary actor in their learning journey. This book is a must-read for anyone serious about dismantling systemic educational inequities and truly empowering all students to reach their full cognitive potential."

"While there's a push to ignore the historical racial and class-based context of educational inequity in American school systems, Zaretta Hammond's powerful Rebuilding Students’ Learning Power: Teaching for Instructional Equity and Cognitive Justice invites us to confront the issue head on, while simultaneously providing constructs to engage in agentic behaviors as educators. Zaretta highlights the realities of educational redlining and makes the case for new pedagogical approaches to repair the damage done by the underdevelopment of students’ cognitive development by creating Cognitive Apprenticeship Models in classrooms that will help build students’ meta-learning skills. A constricted mindset that contributed to undermine the achievement of both educators and students is the prevailing and maddening belief that the persistent achievement gap between Black, Latino, Indigenous students, and low-income students on one side and white and Asian American students is due to a lack of student motivation. Zaretta emphatically and effectively argues that because we too often take this narrative as the central problem, our equity efforts narrowly revolve around improving relationships through cultural affirmation and advocating grit rather than a focus on instruction that improves students’ cognitive abilities. The low expectations we as educators have for our own self-efficacy inevitably translates into even lower expectations for our students. The failure to educate students of color and poor students is not a bug in our education system but a key feature of the system. Raking a few geniuses from the rubbish wasn't just Thomas Jefferson's bent and vision on education systems, it was a characteristic of our school systems honed by years of policy and practice. Cognitive underdevelopment for deeper learning is at the root of our chronic achievement gaps for most historically marginalized student groups. The lack of motivation is simply a symptom, a response to an derisive and divisive approach that doesn't allow for full citizenship starting with our youngest citizens – our students. A transformative and necessary read, Rebuilding Students’ Learning Power exposes how systemic inequities—not student motivation—drive achievement gaps. Rejecting compliance-based pedagogy, Zaretta's book offers a compelling roadmap for using culturally responsive, research-driven instruction to rebuild students’ cognitive capacity, agency, and learning identity. In essence, Rebuilding Students’ Learning Power is a call to action for educators ready to teach for equity, intellect, and ultimately, educational justice."

"I was snapping my fingers and clapping my hands reading Zaretta Hammond’s Rebuilding Students’ Learning Power. This book is everything. Hammond tackles inequity from classrooms to entire systems, calling out history, bias, and gatekeeping with research and evidence. Her discussion on mathematics and its ripple effect in STEM is powerful. Equity is not simply opening the door. It is ensuring every student feels safe, valued, and challenged to grow. Hammond shows us how to move beyond compliance to create learning rooted in possibility and cognitive justice, giving every educator the why and the how to build the cognitive capacity all students need to thrive."