Doug Lemov's field notes

Reflections on teaching, literacy, coaching, and practice.

08.20.20 Whaaat??? Susie Kim Brings Sinclair’s ‘The Jungle’ to Life

Just wanted to take a minute to share some fantastic video of Susie Kim’s 7th grade Social Studies class at Achievement First’s East New York Middle School. It’s a great example of a lot of good teaching things, not least strong Ratio and Checking for Understanding Susie and her students are reading a passage from teaching…


08.13.20 Notes on Starting a Lesson (Online)

Last week I posted a really great clip of Denise Karratti, a middle school math teacher from Hawaii teaching her kiddos remotely back in May. Her procedures and routines and her culture were fantastic. Today I thought I’d take a more careful look at how she starts her lesson because it’s a really nice case study….


08.13.20 On Writing: A Balanced Healthy Diet

Just sat in on a few minutes on our own Emily Badillo and Jen Rugani training teachers to use our new reading curriculum. They were discussing the three types of prompts we use and how and why we balance them, and shared this slide with examples from our unit on Brown Girl Dreaming. The first prompt…


08.12.20 Highlights from Arianna Chopp’s Online Reading Lesson

Recently I shared an online lesson template that Darryl Williams developed for schools. The idea was to build a model for what “typical” online lessons looked like and that included a balance of activities to ensure student engagement and focus and a variety of modes of interaction. We’ve since updated and simplified it slightly for clarity….


08.08.20 A Rendezvous with the Importance of Pronunciation

My daughters just came downstairs giggling. My older daughter gently teasing my littlest for asking her in a game what the ren-dezz-vuss (i.e. rendezvous) point would be. “No silly,” said my elder. “Ron-day-voo.” But as I told my littlest, she should be proud. The mispronunciation meant that she’d learned the word through reading–she’d never heard it…