Doug Lemov's field notes

Reflections on teaching, literacy, coaching, and practice.

08.06.20 To Help Dissolve the Screen, Dissolve the Slide

One of the best things about my team’s study of online learning techniques is that we get to ‘live the learning.’ As soon as we learn something we get to try it out in the workshops we do. Here’s a tiny little example. We talk in all of our workshops about “dissolving the screen”–connecting with students…


06.09.20 Putting It All Together: Scenes from Joshua Humphrey’s Asynchronous Math Lesson

Just finished watching footage of Joshua Humphrey, who teaches math at KIPP St. Louis High School. Joshua’s lesson was full of great moves that I thought others would benefit from watching as much as I did. Background: The footage I’m sharing is of an asynchronous lesson. Joshua’s students watch two short asynchronous lessons per day and…


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…


04.30.20 “Dissolving the Screen” in Ben Esser’s Online Classroom

In our work supporting remote teaching, we’ve been using the term Dissolve the Screen to describe one of the key tools we see successful teachers using. To “dissolve the screen” is to heighten students’ awareness of the back-and-forth exchange that still exists between their teacher and themselves so they feel it more strongly. To connect this…