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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Bildung
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015
One of the most influential teaching guides ever--updated! Teach Like a Champion 2.0 is a complete update to the international bestseller. This teaching guide is a must-have for new and experienced teachers alike. Over 700,000 teachers around the world already know how the techniques in this book turn educators into classroom champions. With ideas for everything from classroom management to inspiring student engagement, you will be able to perfect your teaching practice right away. The first edition of Teach Like a Champion influenced thousands of educators because author Doug Lemov's teaching strategies are simple and powerful. Now, updated techniques and tools make it even easier to put students on the path to college readiness. Here are just a few of the brand new resources available in the 2.0 edition: * Over 70 new video clips of real teachers modeling the techniques in the classroom (note: for online access of this content, please visit my.teachlikeachampion.com) * A selection of never before seen techniques inspired by top teachers around the world * Brand new structure emphasizing the most important techniques and step by step teaching guidelines * Updated content reflecting the latest best practices from outstanding educators With the sample lesson plans, videos, and teachlikeachampion.com online community, you will be teaching like a champion in no time. The classroom techniques you'll learn in this book can be adapted to suit any context. Find out why Teach Like a Champion is a "teaching Bible" for so many educators worldwide.
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Table of Contents
Title Page
How to Access Additional Videos
Copyright
Video Contents
Dedication
Foreword
Acknowledgments
The Author
About Uncommon Schools
Introduction: The Art of Teaching and Its Tools
What Is 2.0?
On Teachers and the Advice They Get
Specific, Concrete, Actionable Techniques
The Irony of What Works
The Art of Using the Techniques
Who Are the Champions?
Defining What Works
How to Use This Book: Chapter Organization
How to Use This Book: Additional Features
Beyond the Book
Notes
Part 1: Check for Understanding
Chapter 1: Gathering Data on Student Mastery
Technique 1: Reject Self-Report
Technique 2: Targeted Questioning
Technique 3: Standardize the Format
Technique 4: Tracking, Not Watching
Technique 5: Show Me
Technique 6: Affirmative Checking
Conclusion
Chapter 2: Acting on the Data and the Culture of Error
Technique 7: Plan for Error
Technique 8: Culture of Error
Technique 9: Excavate Error
Technique 10: Own and Track
Conclusion
Notes
Part 2: Academic Ethos
Chapter 3: Setting High Academic Expectations
Technique 11: No Opt Out
Technique 12: Right Is Right
Technique 13: Stretch It
Technique 14: Format Matters
Technique 15: Without Apology
Conclusion
Notes
Chapter 4: Planning for Success
Technique 16: Begin with the End
Technique 17: 4 Ms
Technique 18: Post It
Technique 19: Double Plan
Conclusion
Chapter 5: Lesson Structure
Technique 20: Do Now
Technique 21: Name the Steps
Technique 22: Board = Paper
Technique 23: Control the Game
Technique 24: Circulate
Technique 25: At Bats
Technique 26: Exit Ticket
Conclusion
Chapter 6: Pacing
Technique 27: Change the Pace
Technique 28: Brighten Lines
Technique 29: All Hands
Technique 30: Work the Clock
Technique 31: Every Minute Matters
Conclusion
Part 3: Ratio
Chapter 7: Building Ratio Through Questioning
Technique 32: Wait Time
Technique 33: Cold Call
Technique 34: Call and Response
Technique 35: Break It Down
Technique 36: Pepper
Conclusion
Notes
Chapter 8: Building Ratio Through Writing
Technique 37: Everybody Writes
Technique 38: Art of the Sentence
Technique 39: Show Call
Technique 40: Build Stamina
Technique 41: Front the Writing
Conclusion
Chapter 9: Building Ratio Through Discussion
Technique 42: Habits of Discussion
Technique 43: Turn and Talk
Technique 44: Batch Process
Conclusion
Part 4: Five Principles of Classroom Culture
Chapter 10: Systems and Routines
Technique 45: Threshold
Technique 46: Strong Start
Technique 47: STAR/SLANT
Technique 48: Engineer Efficiency
Technique 49: Strategic Investment: From Procedure to Routine
Technique 50: Do It Again
Conclusion
Chapter 11: High Behavioral Expectations
Technique 51: Radar/Be Seen Looking
Technique 52: Make Compliance Visible
Technique 53: Least Invasive Intervention
Technique 54: Firm Calm Finesse
Technique 55: Art of the Consequence
Technique 56: Strong Voice
Technique 57: What to Do
Conclusion
Chapter 12: Building Character and Trust
Technique 58: Positive Framing
Technique 59: Precise Praise
Technique 60: Warm/Strict
Technique 61: Emotional Constancy
Technique 62: Joy Factor
Conclusion: The Synergy of the Five Principles
Notes
Conclusion: The End Is Still the Beginning
Index
More Ways to Engage and Learn with Teach Like a Champion
Companion Website
Train-the-Trainer Workshops
Plug and Plays
End User License Agreement
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Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Begin Reading
List of Illustrations
Figure I.1
Figure 1.1
Figure 1.2
Figure 3.1
Figure 4.1
Figure 4.2
Figure 5.1
Figure 5.2
Figure 5.3
Figure 7.1
Figure 9.1
Figure 11.1
Figure 11.2
Figure 11.3
How to Access Additional Videos
To access the video clips not included in this e-book, please go to www.teachlikeachampion.com/yourlibrary and click on the link to answer a few verification questions and register your book. (To access Your Library from the main Teach Like a Champion web page, click on Resources.)
Customer Care
If you have any issues accessing the video and downloadable content, please contact us at [email protected]
TeachLike aChampion2.0
62 Techniques that Put Studentson the Path to College
DOUG LEMOV
Foreword by Norman Atkins
Cover Design: Wiley
Cover Photographs: Jacob Krupnick
Author photo: Timothy Raab & Northern Photo
Copyright © 2015 by Doug Lemov. All rights reserved.
Published by Jossey-Bass
A Wiley Brand
One Montgomery Street, Suite 1200, San Francisco, CA 94104-4594 www.josseybass.com
Video clips copyright © 2015 by Uncommon Schools except for Clip 19, Clip 23, and Clip 64, which are copyright © 2015 Relay Graduate School of Education. All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning, or otherwise, except as permitted under Section 107 or 108 of the 1976 United States Copyright Act, without either the prior written permission of the publisher, or authorization through payment of the appropriate per-copy fee to the Copyright Clearance Center, Inc., 222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, MA 01923, 978-750-8400, fax 978-646-8600, or on the Web at www.copyright.com. Requests to the publisher for permission should be addressed to the Permissions Department, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 111 River Street, Hoboken, NJ 07030, 201-748-6011, fax 201-748-6008, or online at www.wiley.com/go/permissions.
Certain pages from this book and materials on the accompanying video content are designed for use in a group setting and may be used for educational/training purposes.
This free permission is restricted to limited use of the video content for your organization and the paper reproduction of book materials for educational/training events. It does not allow for systematic or large-scale reproduction, distribution (more than 100 copies per page, per year), transmission, electronic reproduction or inclusion in any publications offered for sale or used for commercial purposes---none of which may be done without prior written permission of the Publisher.
Permission is given for individual classroom teachers to reproduce the pages and illustrations for classroom use. Reproduction of these materials for an entire school system is strictly forbidden.
Limit of Liability/Disclaimer of Warranty: While the publisher and author have used their best efforts in preparing this book, they make no representations or warranties with respect to the accuracy or completeness of the contents of this book and specifically disclaim any implied warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. No warranty may be created or extended by sales representatives or written sales materials. The advice and strategies contained herein may not be suitable for your situation. You should consult with a professional where appropriate. Neither the publisher nor author shall be liable for any loss of profit or any other commercial damages, including but not limited to special, incidental, consequential, or other damages. Readers should be aware that Internet Web sites offered as citations and/or sources for further information may have changed or disappeared between the time this was written and when it is read.
Jossey-Bass books and products are available through most bookstores. To contact Jossey-Bass directly call our Customer Care Department within the U.S. at 800-956-7739, outside the U.S. at 317-572-3986, or fax 317-572-4002.
For more information about Wiley products, visit www.wiley.com.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file.
ISBN 978-1-118-90185-4 (pbk.)
ISBN 978-1-118-89879-6 (ebk.)
ISBN 978-1-118-89862-8 (ebk.)
ISBN 978-1-118-95803-2 (ebk.)
978-1-119-14496-0 (ebk.)
Video Contents
For information on accessing the video clips, see How to Access Additional Videos.
Introduction
Clip
Technique
Description
48
Strategic Investment: From Procedure to Routine
Paper Passing (Back in Ten)
:
Doug McCurry encourages students to pass in their papers faster and faster with Positive Framing.
Gathering Data on Student Mastery (Chapter 1)
Clip
Primary Technique
Additional Techniques
Description
1
Reject Self-Report
Culture of Error
Spelling Words
:
Amy Youngman collects data on student mastery by quickly scanning each student's answer to see whether it is correct.
2
Standardize the Format
Culture of Error, Tracking, Not Watching
Disposition
:
Meaghan Reuler immediately identifies student misunderstandings thanks to materials that make mistakes easy to find—and to some careful looking.
3
Show Me
Excavate Error
Good Morning, Williams
:
Bryan Belanger uses hand signals to gauge student mastery. He responds quickly in consideration of the extent of the errors.
4
Show Me
Culture of Error
Go to IP
:
Jon Bogard uses Show Me to identify and correct common errors. Some students review; some earn independent practice.
5
Affirmative Checking
Culture of Error, Name the Steps, 100% Cycle
Here's the Deal
:
Bob Zimmerli sets “checkpoints” where students must check their answers with him before proceeding to more difficult problems.
6
Affirmative Checking
Do It Again, Positive Framing
Green Sticky Note
:
Hilary Lewis uses a “ticket” system to check students' work before they move on to independent practice.
Acting on the Data and the Culture of Error (Chapter 2)
Clip
Primary Technique
Additional Techniques
Description
7
Culture of Error
Show Me
Who Changed Their Mind
:
Katie Bellucci normalizes error by encouraging students who corrected their work to raise their hands and “be proud!”
8
Culture of Error
Intros
:
Jason Armstrong tells students he “expects some disagreement” and doesn't care for now what the right answer is.
Setting High Academic Expectations (Chapter 3)
Clip
Primary Technique
Additional Techniques
Description
9
No Opt Out
Emotional Constancy
Immigrant
:
David Javsicas stays steady at the helm and sticks with a student who declines to answer a question.
10
No Opt Out
Negative Five Halves
:
Derek Pollak solicits help from the class when a student is very near to a correct answer.
11
No Opt Out
Cold Call, Do It Again
Little Brown Insects
:
Jamie Davidson gets a student to improve her expression in reading after another student models what it means to “snap.”
12
No Opt Out
Targeted Questioning, Culture of Error
Clever Fox
:
Shadell Purefoy (Noel) asks a student to repeat a correct answer after she's unable to answer the first time.
13
Right Is Right
Fabric
:
Grace Ghazzawi holds out for an all-the-way-right answer.
14
Right Is Right
Aunt Alexandra
:
Maggie Johnson pushes students to use precise language to describe a particular scene.
15
Right Is Right
Positive Framing
Volume
:
Jason Armstrong holds out for a thorough definition of volume after students present formulas and partial definitions.
16
Stretch It
Well Said
:
Art Worrell stretches the original student and then begins stretching other students to build a rigorous classroom culture.
17
Format Matters
“Gots to Be?”
:
Darryl Williams actively reinforces the language of opportunity by correcting informal phrases.
18
Format Matters
Hither
:
Beth Verrilli asks a student for more collegiate language.
Lesson Structure (Chapter 5)
Clip
Primary Technique
Additional Techniques
Description
19
Control the Game
Control the Game
:
Jessica Bracey keeps durations short and unpredictable, moving the reading around the room to involve lots of students.
20
Control the Game
Eyes In
:
Eric Snider balances student reading with his own modeling to build a culture of expressive reading.
21
Circulate
Read and Annotate
:
Domari Dickinson and Rue Ratray demonstrate the fundamentals of Circulate.
Pacing (Chapter 6)
Clip
Primary Technique
Additional Techniques
Description
22
Change the Pace
Show Me
Talk to Me
:
Erin Michels quickens classroom pace by shifting deftly among different styles of participation.
23
Change the Pace
Everybody Writes, Habits of Discussion
Listen, Things Have Changed
:
Jessica Bracey maintains a steady pace in her reading class by varying activities.
24
Brighten Lines
Clean Start/Clean Finish Montage
:
Seven teachers show examples of Brighten Lines by cleanly beginning and ending exercises.
25
All Hands
Bright Hands
:
Colleen Driggs shows her students how to raise their hands for a new question and lower them when someone else is called on.
26
Work the Clock
You're My Brain
:
Deena Bernett uses a stopwatch projection to allot specific amounts of time for certain activities.
27
Change the Pace
Brighten Lines
Pencils Up:
Ashley Hinton puts together a number of pacing techniques to keep her class moving.
Building Ratio Through Questioning (Chapter 7)
Clip
Primary Technique
Additional Techniques
Description
28
Cold Call
I Saw a Lot of Thought
:
Gary Lauderdale's consistent Cold Calling keeps his students focused on the math.
29
Wait Time
Wait Time Montage:
Maggie Johnson gives students think time, encouraging more reluctant scholars to participate.
30
Wait Time
Continental Congress:
Boris Zarkhi narrates hands, and tells his students to put their hands down to make full use of the Wait Time he gives them
31
Wait Time
Think Time
:
Colleen Driggs encourages students to go back and look at their notes during think time.
32
Cold Call
What Word:
Hannah Lofthus establishes a brisk rhythm with the way that she Cold Calls.
33
Cold Call
Hot Call
:
Colleen Driggs explains how she will “Hot Call,” as an opportunity for students to show they are “on fire.”
34
Cold Call
In Your Mind:
Jon Bogard makes his Cold Calls predictable and positive, including calling on one student whose “hand was up in [her] mind.”
35
Call and Response
Birthdays
:
Janelle Austin keeps her students' responses sharp.
36
Call and Response
Read to Us:
Jennifer Trapp uses Call and Response to reinforce note-taking skills, grammar rules, and difficult pronunciations.
37
Pepper
Cold Call
Amendments
:
Art Worrell Peppers his classroom with questions about constitutional amendments.
Building Ratio Through Writing (Chapter 8)
Clip
Primary Technique
Additional Techniques
Description
38
Everybody Writes
Troy
:
Gillian Cartwright sets up rigorous student-driven discussions with eighteen minutes of pre-thinking in writing. Yes, eighteen minutes!
39
Everybody Writes
Sophisticate It:
Rachel Coffin ups the ratio in her classroom by challenging students to complete a sentence that begins with a complex starter.
40
Everybody Writes
Romeo and Juliet:
Lauren Latto teaches her students to sustain their focus in writing for longer periods.
41
Show Call
Beautiful Formula:
Paul Powell normalizes the process of “good to great” and sends a very clear message about accountability for written work by Show Calling exemplary work.
42
Show Call
Culture of Error
Boxes
:
Katie McNickle Show Calls a number of different students' work to show different approaches to solving the same problem.
Building Ratio Through Discussion (Chapter 9)
Clip
Primary Technique
Additional Techniques
Description
43
Habits of Discussion
Master of the House
:
Yasmin Vargas uses a series of questions and nonverbals to encourage productive discussion.
44
Turn and Talk
Little Guy:
Rue Ratray uses a variety of methods to keep his Turn and Talks engaging for his students.
45
Turn and Talk
Turn and Talk Montage
:
Eric Snider uses a series of efficient prompts and follow-ups to keep his Turn and Talks accountable and efficient.
46
Turn and Talk
Show Not Tell:
Laura Fern uses a number of different techniques to ensure efficiency, consistency, and rigor in her Turn and Talks.
Systems and Routines (Chapter 10)
Clip
Primary Technique
Additional Techniques
Description
47
Strategic Investment: From Procedure to Routine
Thank You for Knowing What to Do:
Stephen Chiger delegates roles to create a culture of autonomy in his classroom.
48
Strategic Investment: From Procedure to Routine
Paper Passing (Back in Ten)
:
Doug McCurry encourages students to pass in their papers faster and faster with Positive Framing.
49
Strategic Investment: From Procedure to Routine
Before and After: “Group A” and “Stand Up”:
Nikki Bowen works through procedures with her students until they become second nature and support student autonomy.
50
Strategic Investment: From Procedure to Routine
Ben Franklin:
Lauren Moyle's class transitions from desks to the floor by singing a song about the continents.
51
Do It Again
Faster
:
Sarah Ott teaches her kindergarteners how to do classroom tasks such as coming together on her signal.
High Behavioral Expectations (Chapter 11)
Clip
Primary Technique
Additional Techniques
Description
52
This clip demonstrates what a culture of high behavioral expectations looks like at maturity.
Perimeter
:
Erin Michels demonstrates a number of high behavioral expectations in a lesson using “triangulous units.”
53
100%, Part 1: Radar/Be Seen Looking
Grab Bag
:
Rachel King moves to Pastore's Perch and scans the room at the moment she wants to monitor her class more closely.
54
100%, Part 1: Radar/Be Seen Looking
Crisp Sound of a Rip:
Patrick Pastore demonstrates effective use of Pastore's Perch.
55
100%, Part 1: Radar/Be Seen Looking
Pepper
As a Decimal:
Michael Rubino scans consistently and uses some “moves” to intimate that he is looking carefully.
56
100%, Part 2: Make Compliance Visible
Show Me
Show What You Know:
Amy Youngman makes compliance visible with visible commands like “pen caps on.”
57
100%, Part 2: Make Compliance Visible
Really Clever
:
Ashley Hinton scans the classroom even while she works with individual students. Her vigilance pays off with a happy classroom.
58
100%, Part 3: Least Invasive Intervention
Montage
:
Ashley Hinton demonstrates a series of subtle nonverbal interventions used to keep her class focused.
59
100%, Part 3: Least Invasive Intervention
I Need a Couple SLANTs
:
Alexandra Bronson subtly resets her whole class via a positive group correction.
60
100%, Part 3: Least Invasive Intervention
You Know Who You Are, and Puritans:
Bob Zimmerli and Laura Brandt demonstrate different takes on anonymous individual correction.
61
100%, Part 3: Least Invasive Intervention
Eyes on the Speaker:
Jaimie Brillante demonstrates private individual correction by whispering to a student.
62
100%, Part 3: Least Invasive Intervention
Don't Miss It:
Jason Armstrong uses a whisper correction to make public corrections feel private.
63
100%, Part 3: Least Invasive Intervention
Nonverbals Montage:
Lucy Boyd uses a variety of different nonverbal interventions to keep her students hard at work during discussion.
64
100%, Part 4: Firm Calm Finesse
Fix How You're Sitting
:
Channa Comer demonstrates Firm Calm Finesse as her class gets restless.
65
100%, Part 5: Art of the Consequence
Regular Polygon:
Ana O'Neil delivers two consequences with grace and calm, and encourages students to get back in the game.
66
100%, Part 5: Art of the Consequence
Culture of Error
Examine
:
Bridget McElduff demonstrates a number of techniques while giving a productive consequence.
67
Strong Voice
Inappropriate Time
:
Christy Lundy uses
do not engage
in a situation every teacher has seen some version of.
68
Strong Voice
Draw My Line:
Jessica Merrill-Brown uses the
self-interrupt
to keep the full attention of her class even while she's sitting down.
69
Strong Voice
Middle School:
Mike Taubman uses a series of
self-interrupts
to ensure student focus.
Building Character and Trust (Chapter 12)
Clip
Primary Technique
Additional Techniques
Description
70
Positive Framing
Positive Framing Montage:
Janelle Austin demonstrates nearly a dozen ways to narrate the positive.
71
Precise Praise
Symmetry
:
Hilary Lewis gives positive reinforcement that provides students a model for success.
72
Precise Praise
Looking Sharp:
David Javsicas privately and genuinely praises replicable student actions.
73
Precise Praise
Kudos:
Stephen Chiger doubles back to help a student better see how and why she was successful.
74
Joy Factor
Phantom of the Opera
:
Roberto de Leòn makes the act of reading joyful.
75
Joy Factor
Simón Bolívar:
Taylor Delhagen lightens the mood by getting in touch with the joyful side of Simón Bolívar.
For Mike and Penny Lemov, my first teachers
Foreword
In 1983, a landmark US education commission famously declared that our “nation [is] at risk,” that “a rising tide of mediocrity…threatens our very future,” and that we should consider our woeful K–12 performance a self-imposed “act of war.” With confidence in established educational institutions at an all-time low, various states invited teachers and fellow citizens to offer new ideas, new approaches, and new schools that might help rebuild a broken system. The charter schools that emerged, beginning in 1991, were to serve as a research-and-development arm of public education.
Over the past quarter century, a new generation of idealists has answered that trumpet blast for reform, mostly in cities where the country has ignored millions of children who live in poverty and attend ineffective, inhospitable, unhappy schools. To build schools and classrooms of their own making, these reformers scaled the walls of bureaucracy, and then struggled with the very challenges that plagued their forebears. But, as pragmatic idealists, they didn't chase educational equity in the abstract. They pursued it relentlessly as instructional problem-solvers in a mission-driven learning community.
Suddenly, classroom doors—for decades, sadly and oddly closed to outsiders and colleagues alike—flew open. Looking for models to learn from and copy, legions flocked to the classrooms of the most skillful teachers, whose students were joyfully engaged, academically focused, working together as teams, and generating jaw-dropping results.
Of those who studied outlier classrooms, one tall, unassuming teacher and leader—Doug Lemov—camped out longer than all the rest. He saw the significance of instructional brush strokes that most of us either missed or didn't appreciate: how teachers circulated, engaged all students, targeted their questions, framed the positive, worked the clock, waited strategically for, and then stretched out student answers. Lemov had eyes to see the details of the well-delivered lesson, and a heart to love and celebrate teachers for their impact on students' life trajectories. He filled volumes of black notebooks with enthusiastic, illegible scrawls that slowly transmogrified into sticky phrases and ideas. Then, before anyone else, he sent cameras into classrooms to capture exemplary practices on video.
After watching the slow-motion replay of instructional moves, he converted his field notes into a taxonomy of effective teaching practices—initially for his private use, then for teachers across the network we founded, Uncommon Schools, and then as the basis for training thousands of teachers and principals nationwide. At a certain point—when he'd produced something like the 28th version—a bunch of us pressed him to publish; any hesitancy on Lemov's part was born of humility, a belief that his playbook was still in process.
So he was unprepared for what happened four years ago: hundreds of thousands of copies of his painstakingly assembled taxonomy, the first edition of this book, flew from bookstore warehouses with blazing speed, reaching about a quarter of America's teachers across all types of schools—public, independent, parochial, urban, suburban, rural. They found actionable, accessible guidance that they could use, not merely to set up their classrooms or plan their lessons, but during the act of teaching. Novice teachers adopted surefire routines to manage their classrooms, create a joyful culture, and build a productive platform for learning. More experienced teachers appreciated that Lemov “invented a new language of American teaching,” as Elizabeth Green explains in Building a Better Teacher. His was their language, full of memorable catchphrases, and supplemented by pictures and video of real teachers, that helped them go from “good to great.” In a subsequent volume, Practice Perfect, Lemov and his colleagues encouraged teachers to rehearse techniques and strategies before improvising in front of students.
Meanwhile, more than 18,000 principals and teachers have participated in Lemov's trainings through Uncommon Schools, and thousands more have learned his approach through Relay Graduate School of Education, which we founded, in part, to share elements of effective teaching that he codified. I've watched his work catch on in Brazil, India, and South Africa. The Queen of Jordan commissioned an Arabic translation, while teachers in China, Korea, Australia, Holland, England, and other countries have brought Teaching Like a Champion (TLAC) into their classrooms.
A funny thing happened on the way to TLAC becoming a global phenomenon. As teachers have learned from Lemov, he has learned from them. Over the past decade, he has probably visited 10,000 classrooms and watched 10,000 video clips. Since TLAC's publication, he's observed countless teachers improve, adapt, and reshape the techniques he'd described. One of my favorite techniques is what Lemov named “the culture of error,” in which teachers make it safe for students to show their mistakes, rather than hide them. By publishing the first edition when he did, Lemov gained four years of feedback that helped refine his thinking, his writing, and his taxonomy.
This culture, of course, leads ineluctably to a 2.0 edition, the one you now hold in your hands. Fans of the first edition will undoubtedly find in this one the same core techniques—in even sharper form. What's new, right at the start of the 2.0 version, is a much deeper, more specific treatment on how to “check for understanding.” There's also new material on students' writing life, as well as on shifting the ratio of cognitive work from the teacher to students. In keeping with Common Core State Standards—a promising development that has raised the instructional bar across the land—Lemov's work, more than ever before, pushes teachers to ask rigorous questions and engage students in more rigorous learning.
For all of these reasons, I suspect that a broader set of teachers, with a wider range of styles, voices, and approaches, will see themselves in this book. They will discover new techniques they can employ in their classrooms, and encounter new language that will call them to be better still. At the same time, many will practice, adapt, and invent the next set of techniques that will emerge in the decades ahead. May the circle of champion teachers grow wider, may the community of practice enlarge, and may you be part of the generation of teachers who use and develop tools that will—as we say at Uncommon Schools—change history.
Norman Atkins November, 2014Norman Atkins is Co-Founderand President of Relay GSE andFounder of Uncommon Schools
Acknowledgments
My first thank you has to be to teachers, starting with my own, of whom there were many excellent ones who guided and shaped my thinking from kindergarten through graduate school. Ms. Cosgrove (Wood Acres Elementary) unlocked the door of math for me in third grade. In seventh grade, Mr. Lewis (Western Junior High School) taught me to write a thesis paragraph “the right way”—he was unapologetic on this point. Once mastered, this skill pretty much got me through college. In twelfth grade, I wisely determined that reading Canterbury Tales in history was unnecessary until Mr. Gilhool (Walt Whitman High School) sent me scrambling through the text to find out whether people in the Middle Ages were really and actually all that funny.
There were teachers I loved then—Ms. Cosby, whom I returned to visit for years after—and teachers like straitlaced, exacting Mr. Simmons, who could be a bit starchy, maybe, and had the temerity to think that English class should be text intensive, and interpretations precise. He did not offer the sorts of high jinks Young Lemov required of his favorites, alas, so I don't recall seeing or speaking with him again, though I have thought of him perhaps a hundred times since realizing that it was he, in the end, who taught me to read a piece of literature with focus and rigor.
But which teacher was it who handed me The Old Man and the Sea? Hemingway's novel was the first book that ever truly spoke to me. There was the night when my parents announced we were going out to dinner. I remember in which chair I was sitting when I said, no, I thought I'd stay home and read. I might have been eleven or twelve years old; the book was a challenge for me, but there had been a teacher whose expectations were high, and the book found its way into my hands, though ironically and altogether fittingly as a reflection on the work of teachers, I do not recall what teacher it was who thought to give me that book.
My job now, of course, is to learn from teachers—or, more precisely, to continue learning from teachers. The topics have shifted, but the principle is the same, and there are again so many teachers who in allowing me to observe their work have taught me deep and durable things, some of which I recognized in the moment and some that struck me only later—sometimes much later. The lessons they offered are the substance of this book, though inevitably there are many who go unnamed, so I will take this opportunity to thank all of the teachers I've had the honor to observe and study as a colleague and as a sometimes bothersome outsider. Sharing the things I learned from them is a huge responsibility. I hope I got at least part of it right. In any case, thank you.
When I talk about what “I've” learned, I am really talking about what “we've” learned, with the “we” referring to my colleagues on the Uncommon Schools Teach Like a Champion team: John Costello, Dan Cotton, Colleen Driggs, Joaquin Hernandez, Jen Kim, Tracey Koren, Rob Richard, and Erica Woolway. Their constant insights about teaching, not to mention their appreciation for and love of its craft, help me strive to do my job as well as they do theirs. Most of the better ideas are probably theirs, though you might not guess it—a merrier band there never was. A special shout-out for two members of the team in particular: Rob, who directs the Teach Like a Champion team's video work and who managed the preparation of the seventy-five videos in this book as a sort of side project amid the dizzying complexity of the rest of his work; and Joaquin “Jo Jo” Hernandez, who drafted and prepared materials for major portions of this book with wisdom and clarity. Rob and Joaquin have the inconceivable skill of being able to type in the car, so never, I am sure, has so much yeoman work been accomplished on the New York State Thruway.
Other colleagues at Uncommon Schools—our school leaders, my fellow managing directors, the organization's leadership from CEO Brett Peiser down, and the many folks who coordinate our work at the home office—have been an additional source of knowledge about teaching. This is true both in terms of their reflections on teaching and because they have built an organization that's full of great teaching and teachers, and this is so because, at its core, it's an organization about great teaching and teachers most of all. I'm proud to be a part of Uncommon, where my biggest anxiety is to make sure my work is worthy of my colleagues.
Writing can be a slow process, though I'm not sure that excuses just how slow I sometimes was with the manuscript for this book, so I'm grateful for the insight and patience of Kate Gagnon, my editor at Jossey-Bass, who first conceived of the book and unflappably saw it through to reality. She and the rest of the team at Wiley, including Debra Hunter and Lesley Iura, have been supportive of this book in a thousand ways and have constantly endeavored to see its potential to help teachers even if I didn't have time to put all of those ideas into action. I also note humbly that for all my excitement about the revised version of this book, there would be no volume in your hands without the constant guidance of development editor Nic Albert, whose support included the offering of nuanced insight about structure and phrasing as well as management of a dozen detailed tasks for which there was no space in my own brain.
It was only recently that I began to think of myself as a writer by profession, and this has come about thanks to the guiding influence of Rafe Sagalyn, who is more thought-partner than agent, and who helps me understand and contextualize my work and how to make it relevant and useful to people. I am grateful to have the guidance of someone so wise whose goal is to help me find my own vision of my writing and bring it to reality.
This book, and the larger teacher training project of which it is a part, would have been impossible without the generous support and guidance of the Carnegie Corporation of New York and the Kern Family Foundation.
Then there is Norman Atkins, who likes to start up audacious projects, founding Newark's North Star Academy, then Uncommon Schools, then Relay Graduate School of Education.
Norman wills projects into being when he believes they can help eliminate the gap between the achievement levels of poor and privileged students. And he got it into his head that one of those projects was the “taxonomy,” the impromptu list I was making of what great teachers did in their classrooms. It should be a book, Norm advised. I said no, but Norman nagged me. For every excuse, he had a solution, and in the end I knew it would be easier to write the thing than to battle Norman's will, so it is fitting that I offer my sincere thanks and gratitude to Norman for his tenacity, faith, and support.
My three beloved children remind me daily of the commitment teachers and schools make to all parents when they set out to educate their children. They provide me with intense motivation to do my best work in my day job. If I ever tire, I only have to think of how much I cherish and genuinely enjoy my children's company in every moment we are together. This, I am aware, is a rare and true gift brought about by the very funny, thoughtful, independent spirit in each of them. I am proud of them and who they are—especially in light of my many gaffes and miscalculations, some of which (readers who are teachers will surely commiserate here) have been spectacularly public and all of which they have borne with grace. When I'm traveling, there is no hardship I will not endure if it allows me, come evening, to find myself beside them at the dinner table or at the very least bidding them a most adoring goodnight.
Finally, my biggest debt of all is to my wife, Lisa, with whom I share the responsibility for and joy in the most important work I will ever do: raising those children. She has for several years now done much of my “half” of the parenting and such so that I could write. That said, thanking Lisa for her help with this book is a bit like thanking the sun. Sure, there would be no book without light to write by, but it's hard to feel as if the thank you doesn't trivialize a gift of such magnitude. Still, you gotta try. So, Lisa, thank you for the hours squeezed out of Sunday mornings and Tuesday nights and all the extra work this meant for you. Thank you for talking ideas through with me while handing snacks and drinks into the backseat. And most of all, thank you for the sunshine.
The Author
Doug Lemov is a managing director of Uncommon Schools and leads its Teach Like a Champion team, designing and implementing teacher training based on the study of high-performing teachers. He was formerly the managing director for Uncommon's upstate New York schools. Before that he was vice president for accountability at the State University of New York Charter Schools Institute and was a founder, teacher, and principal of the Academy of the Pacific Rim charter school in Boston. He has taught English and history at the university, high school, and middle school levels. He holds a BA from Hamilton College, an MA from Indiana University, and an MBA from the Harvard Business School. Visit him at www.teachlikeachampion.com.
About Uncommon Schools
At Uncommon Schools, our mission is to start and manage outstanding urban public schools that close the achievement gap and prepare low-income scholars to graduate from college. For nearly twenty years, through trial, error, and adjustment, we have learned countless lessons about what works in classrooms. Not surprisingly, we have found that success in the classroom is closely linked to our ability to hire, develop, and retain great teachers and leaders. That has prompted us to invest heavily in training educators and building systems that help leaders to lead, teachers to teach, and students to learn. We are passionate about finding new ways for our scholars to learn more today than they did yesterday, and to do so, we work hard to ensure that every minute matters.
We know that many educators, schools, and school systems are interested in the same things we are interested in—practical solutions for classrooms and schools that work, that can be performed at scale, and that are accessible to anyone. We are fortunate to have had the opportunity to observe and learn from outstanding educators—both within our schools and from across the United States—who help all students achieve at high levels. Watching these educators at work has allowed us to identify, codify, and film concrete and practical findings about great instruction. We have been excited to share these findings in such books as Teach Like a Champion (and the companion Field Guide), Practice Perfect, Driven by Data, Leverage Leadership, and Great Habits, Great Readers.
Since the release of the original Teach Like a Champion, Doug Lemov and Uncommon's Teach Like a Champion (TLAC) team have continued to study educators who are generating remarkable results across Uncommon, at partner organizations, and at schools throughout the country. Through countless hours of observation and analysis, Doug and the TLAC team have further refined and codified the tangible best practices that the most effective teachers have in common. Teach Like a Champion 2.0 builds off the groundbreaking work of the original Teach Like a Champion book and shares it with teachers and leaders who are committed to changing the trajectory of students' lives.
We thank Doug and the entire TLAC team for their tireless and insightful efforts to support teachers everywhere. We hope our efforts to share what we have learned will help you, your scholars, and our collective communities.
Brett Peiser Chief Executive Officer Uncommon Schools
Uncommon Schools is a nonprofit network of 42 urban public charter schools that prepare more than twelve thousand low-income K–12 students in New York, New Jersey, and Massachusetts to graduate from college. A 2013 CREDO study found that for low-income students who attend Uncommon Schools, Uncommon “completely cancel[s] out the negative effect associated with being a student in poverty.” Uncommon Schools was also named the winner of the national 2013 Broad Prize for Public Charter Schools for demonstrating “the most outstanding overall student performance and improvement in the nation in recent years while reducing achievement gaps for low-income students and students of color.” To learn more about Uncommon Schools, please visit our website at http://www.uncommonschools.org. You can also follow us on Facebook at www.facebook.com/uncommonschools, and on Twitter and Instagram at @uncommonschools.
Introduction
The Art of Teaching and Its Tools
Great teaching is an art. In the other arts—painting, sculpture, the writing of novels—great masters leverage a proficiency with basic tools to transform the rawest of materials (stone, paper, ink) into the most valued assets in society. This alchemy is all the more astounding because the tools often appear unremarkable to others. Who would look at a chisel, a mallet, and a file and imagine them producing Michelangelo's David?
Great art relies on the mastery and application of foundational skills, learned through diligent study—“craftsmanship,” if you will. You learn to strike a chisel with a mallet and refine the skill with time, learning at what angle to strike the chisel and how tightly to hold it. Someday, perhaps years later, observers may assess the philosophy expressed by what you create, but far more important than any theory is your proficiency with the lowly chisel. True, not everyone who learns to drive a chisel will create a David, but neither can anyone who fails to master the tool do much more than make marks on rocks.
Every artist—teachers included—is an artisan whose task is to study a set of tools and unlock the secrets of their use. A chisel appears mundane, but the more you understand it, the more it guides you to see what is possible. Rounding a contour with unexpected smoothness, the chisel causes you to realize, suddenly, that you could bring added subtlety to a facial expression, more tension to the muscles of the figure you are sculpting, and this changes your vision for it. Mastery of tools does not just allow creation; it informs it. The process is often far from glamorous; an artist's life is a tradesman's life, really, characterized by calluses and stone dust, requiring diligence and humility, but its rewards are immense. It is a worthy life's work.
Traveling abroad during my junior year in college, I saw Picasso's school notebooks on display at the Picasso Museum in Barcelona. What I remember best are the sketches filling the margins of his pages. These weren't sketchbooks, mind you. These were notebooks like those every student keeps of notes from lectures. The tiny sketches memorialized a teacher's face or Picasso's own hand grasping a pencil, with perfect perspective, line, and shading. I had always thought Picasso's work was about abstraction, about a way of thinking that rendered the ability to draw accurately and realistically irrelevant. His sketches told another story, bearing witness to his mastery of fundamentals and constant drive to refine his skills. Even in the stray moments of his schooling, he was honing the building blocks of his technique. He was an artisan first and then an artist, as the fact that he filled, by one count, 178 sketchbooks in his life further attests.
This book is about the tools of the teaching craft. More specifically, it's about the tools necessary for success in the most important part of the field: teaching in public schools, primarily those in the inner city, that serve students born to poverty and, too often, to a rapidly closing window of opportunity. The price of failure there is high and the challenges immense. Teachers there often work in a crucible where our society's failures are paramount and self-evident, and sometimes seem nearly overwhelming. Still, every day in every neighborhood on the near or the far edge of hope, there are teachers who without much fanfare take the students who others say “can't”—can't read great literature, can't do algebra or calculus, can't and don't want to learn—and turn them into scholars who can. Impossibly, we often don't know who those teachers are, but they are everywhere—generally laboring unnoticed down the hall from one of the 50 percent of new hires in urban districts who leave teaching within their first three years. Think about that: It turns out that for those struggling new teachers, solutions to the challenges that will ultimately drive them out of the profession flourish just a few yards away. It turns out that for students, walking into the right classroom can pry the doors of opportunity back open. The problem is that we aren't serious enough about learning from the teachers who can provide these answers.
Consider Zenaida Tan, whom Jason Felch of the Los Angeles Times profiled in 2010 after data culled from the Los Angeles Unified School District revealed that over a seven-year period, Tan had been one of the top handful of teachers in the city, her students making dramatically larger gains than those of the average teacher year after year. “By the LAUSD's measure,” Felch wrote, “Tan simply ‘meets standard performance,’ as virtually all district teachers do—evaluators' only other option is ‘below standard performance.’ On a recent evaluation, her principal . . . checked off all the appropriate boxes, Tan said—then noted that she had been late to pick up her students from recess three times. ‘I threw it away because I got upset,’ Tan said. ‘Why don't you focus on my teaching?! Why don't you focus on where my students are?’”1
My goal was to find as many such teachers as I could and honor them by focusing on, and studying, their teaching. To write this book, I spent a lot of time standing in the back of classrooms and watching videotape of great teachers in action. I used Jim Collins's observation from Built to Last and Good to Great that what separates great from good matters more than what describes mere competence. I wanted to know not what made a teacher pretty good but what made her exceptional, able to beat the odds, what made certain teachers able to achieve what a thousand well-intentioned social programs could not. Were there consistent ideas that allowed them to more reliably transform lives? Were there words and actions the rest of us could copy and adapt? Were there general trends to provide a road map, principles behind the excellence? Or was their excellence idiosyncratic and unmappable?
What I found was that while each great teacher is unique, as a group their teaching held elements in common. I started to see both theme and variation, so I began to make a list of the things they did. I gave those actions names so I could remember them, and over time my list grew in both the number of topics and the level of specificity. Ideas coalesced into techniques. Not every teacher I observed used every technique I described. Like Felch, I found that great teachers came in every stripe and style: “They were quiet and animated, smiling and stern. Some stuck to the basics, while others veered far from the district's often-rigid curriculum.” But in the aggregate, a story emerged. There is a tool box for closing achievement gaps, it turns out. The contents have been forged by ten thousand teachers working quietly and usually without recognition at the end of cracked-linoleum hallways. I am sure that some of my analysis of what they do is wrong. In fact, I have rewritten this book from the original to try to capture more of what they do with better accuracy. The pages that follow are my effort to describe and organize their tools and how they use them.
If you're a teacher near the beginning of your study of the craft of teaching, my aim is to help you become one of those teachers who, for a long and distinguished career, unlocks the latent talent and skill waiting in students, no matter how many previous efforts have been unsuccessful. If you commit yourself and your talents to this work, you deserve to be successful and to change lives. If you are successful, you will most likely be happy in the work, and when you are happy, in turn, you will do better work.
If you are a master teacher already, I hope a discussion of tools and their applications, the framing of a vocabulary for talking about the critical and sometimes overlooked moments of your day, will inspire you not only to refine your craft but also to love doing so and to feel the pleasure of committing (or recommitting) to the deepest possible mastery of the complex and worthy endeavor that is your life's work. I assume that in many cases this book may describe things you already know and do. That's great by me, and in that case, my goal is to help you get a little better at them, perhaps seeing useful applications and variations you haven't considered. Either way, your growth is at least as important as that of a novice teacher. Teaching is the best and most important work in our society. Those who do it deserve to experience constant growth and learning. That, after all, is what we wish for our students.
If you lead a school, I hope this book will help you in helping teachers do this challenging work as successfully as possible. In our field, the first obligation of an organization is to help its people succeed. When teachers end the day with a sense of accomplishment, when they feel they are both successful and growing more so, they stay in our schools for a long time, do outstanding work, work joyfully, and inspire others, and thus pay the organization back in spades.
Let me say, though, with a humility that is reinforced every time I observe a champion teacher at work, that I am no master. Far from it. My work has not been to invent the tools I describe here but to explain how others use them and what makes them effective. This has meant putting names on techniques in the interest of helping create a common vocabulary with which to analyze and discuss the classroom. The names may seem like a gimmick at first, but they are one of the most important parts. If there were no word democracy, it would be a thousand times harder to have and sustain a thing called “democracy.” We would forever be bogged down in inefficiency—“You know that thing we talked about where everyone gets a say . . .”—at exactly the moment we needed to take action. Teachers and administrators must be able to talk quickly and efficiently with colleagues about a clearly defined and shared set of ideas in order to sustain their work. They need a shared vocabulary thorough enough to allow a comprehensive analysis of events that happen in a classroom. I believe that names matter and are worth using. Ideally, they will allow you to talk about your own teaching and that of your peers in efficient, specific language.
But I want to be clear. Despite the names, what appears here is neither mine, especially, nor a theory. It is a set of field notes from observations of the work of masters, some of whom you will meet in this book, and many others whom you will not, but whose diligence and skill informed and inspired this work.
What Is 2.0?
What, you might ask, does the 2.0 in the title of this book signify? If you've read the original Teach Like a Champion, you might ask, why not just update the original and keep the name the same? The addition of the phrase 2.0 acknowledges that the book is so full of new ideas, within a different structure, that it is hard for me to think of it as the same book. Over the past four years, I have learned as much from watching great teachers in action as in the time it took me to write the original version of the book, if not more. In that time, I have been inspired by what talented and motivated teachers do with a useful idea when they find it.
True, they use it, of course, often to inspirational effect, but almost right away, great teachers start to adapt and adjust anything good; they make it fit their own unique style and approach, their setting and students. Most of all, it turns out, the best teachers find ways to take anything you give them and make it more rigorous. Almost as soon as I began to share the ideas I'd gleaned from teachers in the original version of this book, the guidance became obsolete. I began to see the ideas reflected back at me in the classrooms of teachers, but adapted, tweaked, and improved so that what I was seeing when teachers executed the techniques from the book was often better than what I described.
I came to call this process the Virtuous Cycle: give teachers a good thing, and they make it better, smarter, faster. They make you wonder how you didn't think of something so obviously good or nuanced the first time around. This to me is the most inspiring part of the profession, and why I am deeply optimistic about teaching. Nothing could make me happier than to be confronted by the obsolescence of the original ideas and to think about how soon this second version of the book will need further updating. For now, the new title reflects the depth of knowledge this cycle has generated.
As I will outline later, Teach Like a Champion 2.0 also includes brand-new techniques. This is because great teachers are entrepreneurs, and teaching is full of what Deborah Ball, dean of the School of Education at the University of Michigan, calls “endemic problems.” Endemic, in this case, is the opposite of “exotic”; it means problems that are entirely predictable—we know they're going to happen. Endemic questions include those such as, What do you do when a student gives up and simply won't try? How do you know what the student who hides silently in the corner is learning? How can you maximize the amount of work students are doing? And what do you do when you ask a student to sit down, and he smirks and tells you to sit down? As these examples suggest, the predictability of endemic problems does not imply that they are simple to solve. And it shouldn't take a dozen years of brutal trial and error, suffering, and fatigue for a teacher to figure out these problems. Further observation has helped me to see the many endemic problems for which teachers have derived brilliant solutions. The degree of these additions, too, argued for a book that was 2.0—as much sequel as revision.
On Teachers and the Advice They Get
Teachers are drowning in advice. Most of the time, they are tasked with executing ideas and directives that come from elsewhere—from people who don't actually teach every day. Perhaps as a result, many of those ideas and directives are disconnected from the challenges that shape a teacher's daily work. They are often developed for purposes other than mastering the mundane (to some) endemic challenges of teaching, and this tends to exacerbate the wide range of guidance teachers receive. It's worth asking then what advice should look like. I think of guidance as coming in three varieties: ideology driven, research driven, and data driven.
Ideology-driven guidance represents the most common form of advice teachers receive. From time immemorial, people have thought of things that could or should happen in classrooms and proceeded to tell teachers to do them. This kind of guidance tends to say, “This is what a classroom should be like,” which is problematic even if you agree with the idea in question
