Doug Lemov's field notes

Reflections on teaching, literacy, coaching, and practice.

09.21.22 New Video: The Art of ‘Means of Participation’

  How you ask students to answer a question is often as important as the question you ask. If you don’t get everyone to answer, if you don’t cause everyone to think deeply about the answer, even the best question will only be so useful. So great teaching relies on clarity about Means of Participation–that’s what…


09.20.22 Combining Cold Call and Wait Time- A Video to Go with the Great illustration

My colleague Bradley Busch and his colleagues at Inner Drive recently posted this outstanding illustration of the way combining Cold Call with Wait Time and “timing the name”–that is, not identifying whom you are calling on until after the question is asked and students have had time to think–can boost the amount of student thinking. (Bradley’s…


09.07.22 How Brittany Carson Starts the Year with Show Call

Up here at TLAC Towers, Show Call is one of our very favorite techniques. Think of it as a visual Cold Call with a whole lot of additional benefits. In a Show Call you present a piece of student work, chosen at your discretion and regardless of who volunteers, to look at and study as a…


08.31.22 Exciting New Changes to The TLAC Leadership Team

From left: Williams, Woolway, Driggs, Richard, Lewis   We’re happy to share some exciting news about changes to the Teach Like a Champion leadership team. As many of you know we’ve transitioned to be independent of Uncommon Schools. This is a move that’s designed to give us more operating flexibility so we can emphasize our external…


08.24.22 Workshop: Helping Medical Educators Become Master Teachers

In September, we’ll be offering our first workshop for medical educators.  Our purpose is to study techniques that can help people in the medical field teach more effectively and more productively.  Yes, we borrow from outstanding K-12 examples… but we also study real world examples of how doctors are taught. This video of University of Pittsburgh…