Doug Lemov's field notes

If you’re a regular reader of our blog you’re probably familiar with Joshua Humphrey who teaches math at KIPP St. Louis HS. I wrote previously about one of his asynchronous lessons from the Spring where he socialized students to take active control over the video by pausing consistently and where he modeled implicit assessment–asking students to self-check their work against a model, a a critical tool for asynchronous teaching where assessment options are more limited.

Now I’m happy to share a bit of a synchronous lesson taught by Joshua and his colleague Cara Ciccarelli.

The first thing that struck us was their use of the chat. We’ve posted before on the various ways it an be used and described a few models in our webinars:

But Joshua and Cara do it a little different here. They’re not so much waiting to hear from everyone as giving a student the chance to answer correctly, letting students see (rather than just hear) that answer and using it as the jumping off point for the next step in the lesson. It’s a nice variation on the idea of taking “volunteers” in other words…using written instead of verbal answers. Love how they remind students to use parentheses… Love the shine for the student who gets it right (“Let me stop you all right there. Look at what Antonio just chatted out…”) but as soon as they get their answer, they close the chat. Time’s a wasting.

Next we loved the use of the E-white board to model note taking. What Joshua and Cara want is for students to take notes so they will have a model for how to complete rate of change problems handy, always. It’s so easy for notes–and note-taking as a daily paper to pencil process–to get forgotten online. Not here, even online it’s Board = Paper, and the model is more direct and transferable when it’s hand written and the expectation that students should be getting it down in notes is much clearer . Again, note taking by hand is still important and powerful in an online setting.

We also love the seamless team teaching. Lot’s to love, in other words

Thanks as always to Joshua, Cara and KIPP st Louis for sharing their work with us.

board=paper, cara ciccarelli, Joshua humphrey, kipp st louis, note taking, online teaching