Doug Lemov's field notes

Reflections on teaching, literacy, coaching, and practice.

01.04.24 Managing (Your Own) Working Memory: How Julia Uses Her “Monitoring Key”

  Yesterday I posted about the challenges of managing limits on Working Memory for teachers. We know we’ve got to design our teaching to respond to the challenges the classrooms presents for student’s Working Memory, but we’ve also got to be thinking about the under-acknowledge issue of our own working memory overloads. Walking around the classroom…


01.03.24 Working Memory, Teachers and Tracking Data

Posted a quick note on Twitter the other day about working memory and teachers- how using a clip board to note observations could allow teachers to free their working memory and thus be more responsive to students as they interacted. Having an exemplar–an ideal student answer you’d like to get to–written out and carried around with…


12.12.23 Classic Clips: Eric Snider “Establishes Meaning” in The Giver

  We’re getting ready to lead a two day workshop on Reading Reconsidered in Raleigh, NC on January 18 and 19 (details here).  As part of the preparation we were going over some older reading footage and we found this gem from Eric Snider. It’s a short clip and if you watched it you could be…


12.08.23 Teaching Advice From Taylor (Swift)

  A colleague who attended our recent workshop for medical educators, Josie Amory of Seattle, WA, passed along this Instagram post from Taylor Swift about her concert preparation routine: “This insta post reminded me of the discussion we had about working memory and habits good teachers use to reduce their dependence on working memory, which in…


12.08.23 New Team Members and New Roles on the TLAC Team

We often introduce ourselves in our workshops by sharing that Teach Like a Champion is more than just a book, but that we are actually a team of people who have come together to study teaching with the belief  that any contemplation of a more just, equitable and inclusive society requires that schools are not just…