A few nights ago I was watching a movie with my family. I was in a chair. My wife and one of my daughters were over on the couch. To my left and mostly behind me as I was looking at the screen. But I noticed a strange behavior in myself: I kept glancing…
Ben Esser has featured on the TLAC blog and in TLAC books as a teacher. He’s since moved to Chile where he supports and coaches colleagues. He recently shared this reflection on the culture-building magic of his colleagues, Maca Torres and Maria Jose de Vicente. Unimaginable as it may be in the northern hemisphere, in South…
Retrieval Practice is the act of recalling previously encountered information into working memory, or conscious thinking. Brief spurts of Retrieval Practice help students solidify information in their long-term memories, and, importantly, understanding is not learning until it is encoded in long-term memory. We recently had the pleasure of watching Steve Kuninsky conduct some Retrieval Practice with…
Watered down instruction is a problem in American classrooms. TNTP’s 2018 white paper, The Opportunity Myth describes the scope of this problem. The average student “spent more than 500 hours per school year on assignments that weren’t appropriate for their grade and with instruction that didn’t ask enough of them—the equivalent of six months of wasted class time…
Two of the most important culture building techniques in Teach Like a Champion are Habits of Attention and Habits of Discussion. Habits of Attention is about teachers shaping the non-verbal signals students send to one another when they are talking. When the people in the room are looking at you–and looking a bit interested–you are…