Doug Lemov's field notes

Reflections on teaching, literacy, coaching, and practice.

05.13.20 Means of Participation Online with Ben Esser

As you know we’ve been watching and posting a ton of video of great online teaching. We posted this great clip of Alonzo Hall and Linda Fraser’s A+ procedures and routines. We posted this great clip of Ben Esser ‘dissolving the screen.’ Today I want to share another clip of Ben, here taking a page from…


05.11.20 Dissolving the Screen

Distance learning leaves teachers less connected to students and students less connected to teachers. Ideally, then, the way we approach online learning would address that challenge by not only making our students feel more connected but by making them feel connected to us specifically by the work we do together. That is, we would send the…


05.09.20 On Thinking and Learning

Thinking is not learning. Thinking is part of the learning process but not all of it. Just striving for lots of thinking or even deep thinking in classrooms won’t necessarily result in learning. Maybe that’s obvious to you. It wasn’t to me for a long time and I suspect in that regard I’m not unique among…


05.07.20 Coaching Athletes to Perceive: Examples w New York Red Bulls

I’ve been working a bit with New York Red Bulls to help their youth coaches teach players to watch more productively and learn more while they’re away from the game…though in fact learning to watch is just as critical once players are back. I wrote previously about some ways you could do that: specifically by asking…