Doug Lemov's field notes

Reflections on teaching, literacy, coaching, and practice.

12.13.23 Lasting Change at Scale: Lessons From Our Work With Harmony Public Schools

  42,000 students and counting…   In October, our Consulting & Partnerships team completed a 30-month partnership (March 2021-September 2023) with Texas’ largest charter school network, Harmony Public Schools. Our role was to help the network refine its vision for instructional leadership, then build training and systems to study progress across its 55 (now 60) schools. …


12.12.23 Classic Clips: Eric Snider “Establishes Meaning” in The Giver

  We’re getting ready to lead a two day workshop on Reading Reconsidered in Raleigh, NC on January 18 and 19 (details here).  As part of the preparation we were going over some older reading footage and we found this gem from Eric Snider. It’s a short clip and if you watched it you could be…


12.08.23 Teaching Advice From Taylor (Swift)

  A colleague who attended our recent workshop for medical educators, Josie Amory of Seattle, WA, passed along this Instagram post from Taylor Swift about her concert preparation routine: “This insta post reminded me of the discussion we had about working memory and habits good teachers use to reduce their dependence on working memory, which in…


12.08.23 New Team Members and New Roles on the TLAC Team

We often introduce ourselves in our workshops by sharing that Teach Like a Champion is more than just a book, but that we are actually a team of people who have come together to study teaching with the belief  that any contemplation of a more just, equitable and inclusive society requires that schools are not just…


11.16.23 Foundational Literacy Isn’t Easy But Dayla Bedford Shows the Way

    This week Jen Rugani and I have been presenting our first iteration of a new workshop, Foundational Literacy. Why a Foundational Literacy workshop? There’s been a massive and important migration towards structured literacy programs with systematic and synthetic phonics in the primary grades. That’s a good thing. (Heavy debt of gratitude here to Emily…