A couple of weeks ago I got an email from Evan Stoudt, Freshman Dean and Algebra teacher at Sci Academy in New Orleans–one of my favorite schools. I find them especially reflective about how to combine real college prep academic rigor with loving attention to the in-school (and often out-of-school) lives of their students. Evan mentioned…
Technique #1 in the new Teach Like a Champion 2.0 is “Reject Self Report.” The idea being that we should listen for the moments when, having just taught something or explained a task, we ask students questions like: “Everybody understand?” or “Everyone got it?” These questions, we should realize, are functionally rhetorical. There is only one…
The following is an excerpt from Teach Like a Champion 2.0 about the technique Reject Self-Report. I discuss it further in this post. Volumes of social science literature have established that self-report is highly unreliable. Questions that ask for binary (that is, yes-no) answers are particularly suspect. Throw in group dynamics in the classroom, and…
I spent some time with journalist Ian Leslie last fall when I was in London–we spoke a couple of times and he came to a couple of workshops. This morning he published a reflection on Teach Like a Champion and the ideas behind it in the Guardian. I was very happy to see the work my…
I watched an interesting lesson today, a pretty good one, in which the teacher asked her students to describe the setting of Amy Tan’s short essay “Fish Cheeks.” When one student did so—describing it as a “weird and different Christmas,” the teacher asked him for evidence to support his claim. When he provided it, she asked…