We’ve been watching a lot of footage of the first weeks of school lately—observing how top teachers set expectations and install systems that they’ll use throughout the year. We recently watched a clip of Achievement First Bushwick Middle School’s Eric Snider teaching his students to have productive discussions. My colleague Maggie Johnson loved it and…
Earlier this year Teach Like a Champion team-members Hilary Lewis, Erica Woolway and John Costello visited PS 172 in Brooklyn as part of our efforts to study what high-performing schools and teachers do differently. John shared these notes: I’m always excited when New York State releases their end-of-year data. The excel spreadsheet is massive. New York’s…
This week in our video review meetings we cut a master clip of Courtney Huber, a fourth grade teacher at North Star Academy’s Vailsburg Elementary School in Newark. We call it a master clip because it is a case study in the use of all the parts of Checking for Understanding woven together. It starts as…
On Friday, Maggie Johnson and I led a workshop for teachers (whom we love) at our Uncommon Schools in Rochester (which we love). The focus was building Ratio through discussion. The idea was to talk about ways to get more substantive thinking and participation from students through better discussions. One of our key topics was the…
Batch Process is technique #44 in TLaC 2.0. The idea is that rather than responding to or mediating every student comment during discussion, it can be beneficial to let students talk several times in a row, directly to one another, before you step in to guide or shape. This idea is sometimes referred to as playing…