Doug Lemov's field notes

Show Call is one of my very favorite teaching techniques and if you’re a reader of this blog you know that Spencer Davis is one of our favorite teachers to study. So what could be better than a video of Spencer modeling Show Call.

Context:  Spencer’s sixth graders are reading Wonder. They’ve just read a passage about one character’s perspective on her friendship aith another character. the lesson plan–from our Reading Reconsidered Curriculum–pulls the two girls’ descriptions of the changes in their friendship and places them side by side.  Spencer asks students to make notes on similarities and differences.  He gives them seven minutes to do this. Then at the end, he Show Calls two students work. Both of them are exemplars- that is they’ve both done a great job.

Here’s the vid:

Spencer’s goal here is to build a strong incentive among students to do their best written work. He’s trying to make the written lives of students visible, to socialize effort and to give students a model of what great note-taking looks like. [If you allocate 7 minutes of class time to a task you want to make sure students work hard at it and know what “good” looks like!]

Spencer honors the two young women by sharing their work and having them describe it. He asks others to update their notes accordingly. The message (and incentives) around how hard you work when you given a written task are revised upwards. As we discuss on Team TLAC in our discussions of the technique Silent Solo this is a big deal.  

Successful teaching often consists of sublime moments achieved in part via mundane tools. Changes in the ways we ask students to write can transform the ways they think and maximize the value and quality of other activities we engage in as well. If you can get everyone in the room to write for a sustained period of time, [with full effort] the benefits to student thinking and discussion will be many.

Spencer does just that here- using Show Call to socialize the habit of full effort at written tasks here.