For a coach, the goal, unless you coach both at the elite level and with kids, say, 17 years old or older (e.g. college program or just maybe a HS varsity team) should be to develop players. We want them to be the best player they can be somewhere down the road–when they are 17 or…
The following is taken from chapter 4 of Teach Like a Champion 2.0. It’s one of my favorite sections of the new book. It’s natural for teachers to write lessons that focus on what they will be doing: which key points they will cover, questions they will ask, activities they will facilitate, work they will assign,…
Several years ago I got to watch U.S. Soccer Director of Scouting Tony Lepore run a training and identification session for promising U14 boys near Boston. The session was impeccably well-designed, and I have often reflected on how much I learned. At the end of the session, though, the boys were scrimmaging and Tony graciously spent…
Rue Ratray is one of my heroes. He’s an amazing and inspirational teacher (and now teacher coach) in Lawrence, MA. I recently asked him to write an occasional guest blog for Field Notes. This is his latest, on the topic of Rigor and Frustration. Great ideas throughout for teaching reading, especially. I don’t think anyone reading…
Another excerpt coming at you from the throes of finalizing Reading Reconsidered. This excerpt is on our two-pronged approach to Vocabulary. To command words is to master both their breadth and their depth. Reading for anything more than basic comprehension relies on the a reader’s capacity to understand both a large number of words (breadth) and also…