Doug Lemov's field notes

Reflections on teaching, literacy, coaching, and practice.

11.24.19 Field Trips Benefit from Background Knowledge, Too

Last week I wrote a post about hands-on learning, and how what seemed like a rich experience–launching rockets–might not be so useful if students didn’t know what they were looking at. On the other hand if students had been primed with knowledge beforehand they could observe relevant things and increase their knowledge by adding detail to…


09.17.13 On Field Trips (and a fascinating study in Educationnext)–Updated

A great article and analysis of field trips in the outstanding education journal EducatinNext this morning.  It describes a study in which authors Greene, Kisida and Bowen set out to assess whether field trips had a measurable effect on student learning.  First of all, I love the idea of trying to measure the learning value of…