Zaretta Hammond
Collaborator
Zaretta Hammond is the principal of Transformative Learning Solutions, a professional development consultancy focused on educational equity, culturally responsive pedagogy, and literacy development based in the San Francisco Bay Area in California. She designs and facilitates learning experiences for teachers, administrators, and instructional coaches nationally. Zaretta is the author of Culturally Responsive Teaching and the Brain: Promoting Authentic Engagement and Rigor for Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Students (Corwin, 2014). Previously she has worked with the National Equity Project as a program and curriculum designer. In addition, she has done program evaluations focused on community partnerships for the Department of Justice’s Weed and Seed community policing initiative in West Oakland and the W.K. Kellogg Foundation’s Zero to Eight Early Childhood and Family Engagement Initiative through the Oakland Unified School District. As a consultant with InSites, Zaretta lends her expertise and analytical skills to qualitative evaluations of initiatives around school reform, teacher change, and comprehensive community change projects. She also contributes to evaluation framework designs that include culturally responsive evaluation methods. Zaretta began her work in education as a policy analyst and researcher. She then moved from policy work into classroom teaching to understand first hand the issues around the achievement gap. She taught composition at the high school level. She holds an M.A. in Curriculum and Instruction in secondary English Education from the University of Colorado at Boulder and a B.A. from New York University in English Literature. In her spare time, Zaretta enjoys hiking the regional parks in Northern California and considers herself an amateur neuroscientist. She is fascinated with both social and cognitive neuroscience.