Doug Lemov's field notes

My friend Linda Brown, who if you don’t know her is one of the world’s true heroes, was pestering me the other day to describe how Teach Like a Champion 2.0 is different from the original.  I’m speaking at her organization, in April and of course, being Browny, she needs it described really clearly and in plain English.  And she won’t take recycled web-links either.  But when Browny says ‘jump,’ I say ‘how high?’ so I wrote her a blurb trying to explain what a 2.0 was.  Anyway, it came out pretty well (she does not put up with muddle). Good enough that I thought I’d share it.

Here is what’s NEW about Teach Like a Champion 2.0 and how it’s different from 1.0:

 

 

First, the book represents everything I’ve learned from watching even more great teachers since the first version of the book came out.  Truth be told, I think I learned more in the last five years of watching than in the first five.  And the focus is on increased rigor. Turns out that what great teachers do when you give them tools like the ones in TLaC 1.0 is adapt them right away to make them more rigorous.  That’s what happened to TLaC, so much of the book is about how the original techniques can be even better.

 

 

Second, I tried to help readers prioritize what was important.  I dropped about ten techniques that were “nice” but not absolutely critical, and I tried to emphasize what was most important.  Specifically I took two techniques that were especially crucial, Ratio and Check for Understanding, and that, frankly, I didn’t do a good enough job with in the first version of the book, and tried to turn them into whole chapters.  Then I realized that chapters weren’t enough and they each got a whole section of the book.  So there are three chapters on building Ratio–my favorite chapter in the book is the one on Building Ratio Through Writing.  And there are two whole chapters on Check for Understanding, what John Wooden called the most important task of the teacher— differentiating ‘I taught it’ from ‘They learned it.’

 

 

Finally, as part of that project, I named and described a bunch of new techniques that I think are super important and super helpful to teachers.

 

In the end, I think about this book as one part revision and one part sequel.  And of course, it’s 100% stolen from great teachers.  All the good ideas always are.

Teach Like a Champion 2.0