Teaching Like a Champion: Part 3 (Reading Together)

This chapter deals with how to structure and deliver your lessons in a way that helps your students gain and retain knowledge.

Lemov recommends using the I/We/You approach in order to move the knowledge from the teacher to the student.

I Techniques*
- The Hook: Use a short, engaging introduction to excite students about learning.
- Name the Steps: Give students specific steps by which to work or solve problems of the type you're presenting.
- Board = Paper: Model for students how to track the information they need to retain from your lessons.
- Circulate: Move around the classroom to engage and hold students accountable.

We Techniques*
- Break It Down: Respond to a lack of clear student understanding by breaking a problematic idea down into component parts.
- Ratio: Push more and more of the cognitive work out to students. Feigned ignorance (by the teacher) and unbundling can be especially useful.
- Check for Understanding: Determine whether students are ready for more and if they need the material presented again.

You Techniques
- At Bats: Students have the opportunity for lots of repetition.
- Exit Ticket: A single question to answer at the close of class.
- Take a Stand: Students make a judgment about the answer of one of their peers.

*taken from pages 73-74

What stood out to you? Leave your comments below.
Read chapter 3 for next week and come back here to join the discussion.

Teaching Like a Champion: Part 2 (Reading Together)

I found this section about planning helpful and I'm already thinking about ways I can implement the techniques that were discussed.

This week's chapter focused on planning that ensures academic achievement. Unlike the other techniques, these six are designed to be done before you enter your classroom.

Begin with the end
- start your planning with what objective you want to achieve

Four criteria for effective objectives
- manageable (should be completed within a single lesson)
- measurable
- made first
- most important (focus only on what's important for your students on their journey to college)

Post your objective in your classroom

Shortest path
- the simplest explanation or strategy is best

Double plan
- plan what your students will be doing while you're teaching

Draw the map
- plan how your classroom layout will reinforce how you want your students to engage with you, the material, and each other

What stood out to you? Leave your comments below.
Read chapter 3 for next week and come back here to join the discussion.

Teach Like a Champion: Part 1 (Reading Together)

I hope you enjoyed this week's reading on setting high academic standards. I know it challenged me to help my students not just slide through.

Here are the five techniques that were discussed.

No Opt Out
- Make sure your students know that it's not okay to not try.
- When a student doesn't know the answer to a question, ask another student the same question. Once he has answered it (correctly), come back to the first student and ask him the question again. This communicates that students can't just get off the hook by saying they don't know.

Right is Right
- Don't allow almost right answers to count as right. Follow up with the student until you get the complete answer you are looking for.
- Praise effort, but don't confuse effort with mastery.

Stretch it
- Reward right answers with follow-up questions that extend knowledge.
- Easiest form of follow-up questions are how and why questions.

Format matters
- Hold your students to answers that are grammatically correct, audible, and (if in math or science) have the correct units.

Without apology
- Don't lower the bar by apologizing for the content or for your students.

What stood out to you? Leave your comments below.
Read chapter 2 for next week and come back here to join the discussion.

Teach Like a Champion: Introduction (Reading Together)

After having started reading this book this week, I am even more excited about having picked out this book. I'm really looking forward to being able to add more "tools" to my teaching toolbox.

The introduction makes clear that this book was written to provide specific, concrete,and actionable techniques.  These techniques may not necessarily be glamorous, but they work.

A couple other main points that stood out to me:

- What I need to consider: what do I want my students to master?
"Great teachers plan objectives, then assessments, then activities." (page 10)

- Use lesson planning as not just a rote practice, but rather as the opportunity to truly design each individual class.

What stood out to you? Leave your comments below.
And, don't forget to read chapter 1 for next week.

Anouncement: New Book for Reading Together - Teach Like a Champion

I'm starting a new book for the Reading Together book club: Teach Like a Champion by Doug Lemov and Norman Atkins. We'll begin the introduction this week, and then we'll discuss it next Tuesday (March 20). We'll read the first chapter and discuss it the following week. It's that easy: just one chapter a week.

This program allows us to read works together that can help us in our professional development as well as providing a level of accountability and the added interest of comparing notes as we read together.

You can get a copy of Teach Like a Champion from Amazon here.