Rebuilding Students’ Learning Power: Teaching for Instructional Equity and Cognitive Justice
By Zaretta Hammond
(Corwin, 2025 – Learn more)
Reviewed by Melinda Stewart
Zaretta Hammond is an active equity advocate and blogger, but is not a prolific writer of books. That being said, when Zaretta Hammond does publish a book, as educators we should take notice.
Rebuilding Students’ Learning Power is a manifesto and a playbook for teachers – and a guide for instructional coaches. It is a bold, research-based guide for educators ready to move beyond surface-level equity work and into the deep redesign of how students learn.
Building on her influential Culturally Responsive Teaching and the Brain, Hammond shifts the conversation from awareness and relationship-building to the cultivation of “cognitive justice”: ensuring that every student, especially those from historically marginalized groups, experiences the full rigor, challenge and coaching necessary to develop as an independent, powerful learner.
Going beyond access and affirmation
At its core, Rebuilding Students’ Learning Power argues that equity is not just about access, inclusion, or affirmation. Instructional equity is also about the quality of thinking opportunities we give students.
Too often, classrooms mistake engagement for rigor and compliance for learning. Hammond urges educators to recognize how instructional practices, however well-intentioned, can create “cognitive redlining,” systematically under-developing students’ learning capacity by over-scaffolding, lowering cognitive demand, or valuing completion over comprehension.
True instructional equity, she argues, demands that we teach students how to learn, not just what to learn.
Hammond argues that the “learn-to-learn skills” are the hidden curriculum of school, yet are rarely taught explicitly. By making metacognition a visible and intentional part of instruction, teachers help students build the habits of reflection, planning, and self-regulation that define true academic independence.
Hammond reframes the teacher’s role from deliverer of content to coach of thinking. Through this lens of cognitive apprenticeship, she describes learning dojos – classrooms where students actively construct meaning, strategize, reflect, and problem-solve, rather than passively receive information.
Through this “dojo” experience, their learner identities are nurtured and they begin to see themselves as capable thinkers rather than compliant performers. “Only the learner learns,” she reminds us, and learning power cannot develop in environments that value control over curiosity.
As already suggested, the most urgent message in Rebuilding Students’ Learning Power is Hammond’s reframing of instructional equity as cognitive justice. She challenges educators to confront uncomfortable truths: Are we providing some students with deep cognitive challenges while offering others only simplified tasks? Have we confused cultural responsiveness with cultural affirmation without pairing it with cognitive rigor? Equity, she insists, means distributing intellectual power fairly and ensuring that all students engage in high-level reasoning, problem-solving, and meaning-making.
Rethinking entrenched practices
This argument demands a rethinking of entrenched practices. Hammond critiques what she calls the “pedagogy of compliance,” where learning is reduced to doing what is asked, when it is asked. She calls instead for a pedagogy of possibility, one where students are invited to take intellectual risks and understand how to grapple with complexity. Classrooms shift from being collections of students to communities of learners engaged in shared inquiry.
While Hammond provides abundant classroom strategies, she also recognizes that teachers cannot sustain these shifts alone. She extends her focus to organizational structures and professional learning systems, calling for leaders to “level up” their processes so that instructional coaching, reflection, and inquiry cycles are embedded at every level of a school. Changing what we teach is not enough; we must also change how we have socialized students to learn, and that requires parallel changes in how teachers themselves learn and grow.
Changing what we teach is not enough; we must also change how we have socialized students to learn, and that requires parallel changes in how teachers themselves learn and grow.
Through frameworks drawn from cognitive science, cultural neuroscience, and behavioral design, Hammond connects the dots between mental models, feedback loops, and the stages of change that educators and systems must navigate to move from compliance to cognitive empowerment. Her emphasis on collecting data around compliance-oriented practices and redesigning professional learning to mirror the same cognitive apprenticeship we want for students is both provocative and practical.
From recognition to integration of culture
Although Rebuilding Students’ Learning Power builds upon Hammond’s earlier work in culturally responsive pedagogy, it goes further, moving from recognition of culture to integration of cultural learning tools and instructional conversations that affirm identity while stretching cognitive capacity.
Hammond reminds us that language devices, communication norms, and reasoning patterns differ across cultures, and that truly responsive teaching honors these differences while expanding students’ repertoire of academic and analytical skills. Her insistence that belonging and intellectual safety are preconditions for cognitive rigor, not optional add-ons, gives the book a humane center. After all, as any warm demander knows, students learn best when they feel both seen and challenged.
She holds up a mirror
Rebuilding Students’ Learning Power is an invitation to reimagine teaching as the art and science of building learners. It is a call to action for cognitive justice, a guide for classroom transformation, and a playbook for professional growth.
Hammond’s tone is warm yet uncompromising; she refuses to let educators settle for polite engagement or ritual compliance when intellectual empowerment is possible. She holds up a mirror to our profession, asking us to question long-standing habits that equate control with effectiveness.
Yet through it all, Hammond remains deeply hopeful: if we are willing to examine our own mental models, to coach rather than rescue, to let students wrestle with complexity, then we can truly rebuild their learning power.
Melinda Stewart has been an educator for 30 years. She has an MA in Teaching, Education and Learning and has done graduate work in the areas of English as a Second Language, Reading, Spanish, and most recently English Language Arts. She is currently working as a Spanish teacher at Fairmont Junior Senior High School. Melinda is an MEA and AFT professional development facilitator and trainer who has a deep passion for learning and equity.
