Technique #59 in Teach Like a Champion is Precise Praise. One of it’s key ideas is that you should give lots of positive reinforcement to students to build morale &motivation but that you should try to distinguish acknowledgement from praise. In the book I describe the difference this way: Acknowledgment is what you often use when…
Last week I posted a very short clip of a famous soccer/football coach, Dick Bate, running a training session. In it you can see that he has carefully planned the words he will use to describe the concept he is teaching. And he uses those words every time. Because he has planned the phrase to go…
Break It Down (Technique #35) is a valuable and important teacher move, but it’s also without a doubt one of the hardest techniques in Teach Like a Champion to execute. The idea is that when a student gives an incomplete or wrong answer, the teacher replies with a question that provides just enough hint, reminder, or…
I’ve been writing a lot of “10 seconds in…” posts lately. The idea is to watch just ten seconds of a teacher in action (like here and here). Close study of just a few seconds in a top classroom can yield a bunch of useful takeaways. I kind of stumbled on to the idea, but it’s…
I was prepping for a project we’re cooking up this morning and re-watched one of the oldest videos we still show in our workshops. It’s of Alexandra Bronson– at the time we shot it she was a science teacher at Williamsburg Collegiate in Brooklyn. Now she’s Principal there. In watching it i noticed something ‘typically new.’ …