Doug Lemov's field notes

Reflections on teaching, literacy, coaching, and practice.

09.24.23 We Loved These Examples of Lesson Preparation from Our Recent Workshop

TLAC team members Teneicesia White and Sadie McCleary recently returned from leading a workshop in Raleigh, NC, where the focus was on Checking for Understanding. While there they gathered some fantastic examples of Lesson Preparation from teachers who joined them!  Sadie was so inspired she shared this analysis: This example of Lesson Preparation from Paige, a…


07.12.23 How Katie Jukes Builds Contagious Enthusiasm for Learning

    Last week I posted a really lovely video of Beth Peakman’s Cold Call and Wait Time at Rivers Primary Academy in Walsall, England.  Today I get to share another video from the same school. This one is of Katie Jukes’ year two maths lesson. It shows how Katie builds contagious enthusiasm for learning.   Katie…


09.21.22 New Video: The Art of ‘Means of Participation’

  How you ask students to answer a question is often as important as the question you ask. If you don’t get everyone to answer, if you don’t cause everyone to think deeply about the answer, even the best question will only be so useful. So great teaching relies on clarity about Means of Participation–that’s what…


10.21.20 Some Handy Tools for Building Student Engagement in Online Classes

As most readers of this blog probably know we’ve been offering small group online webinar-style workshops this fall on remote teaching. The workshops allow us to connect to, share with and learn from teachers and school leaders everywhere and rarely a workshop goes by where we don’t learn something we can pay forward to teachers at…


09.18.20 How Memphis Rise Helps Teachers Build Vibrant Online Culture

Means of Participation is our phrase for a set of consistent procedures that describe clearly to students HOW they should participate in class at any given moment. When the Means of Participation is ambiguous–i.e. left unclear by the teacher–the results are mostly one of the following: Crickets: No one will violate the unspoken code of silence…