Doug Lemov's field notes

Reflections on teaching, literacy, coaching, and practice.

11.11.20 New: Our Webinar on Teaching Reading Online

As many of you know, our team has spent much of our time over the last several months poring through footage of teachers doing incredible work in their online classrooms, trying glean as much as we can about what leads to successful online instruction. Much of what we’ve learned we’ve shared in our current online webinars:…


11.10.20 Notes on Molly Maphis’ Phonics Lesson

We learned a lot from a video we recently watched of second-grade teacher Molly Maphis at Nashville Classical Charter School. Team TLAC’s Brittany Hargrove has worked extensively with elementary schools to help them build effective and engaging classrooms. She wrote this post describing some of the effective things she saw in Molly’s lesson: One of the…


10.15.20 Heather Pirolli Models an Online Show Call.

Show Call is one of our favorite classroom techniques on Team TLAC. It involves choosing a student’s work and projecting it to the class, whereupon it gets studied–lovingly but with rigor–especially if it includes a common error that everyone can learn from. It’s a technique that translates well into an online setting, so I thought I’d…


09.21.20 Dan Willingham’s Workarounds for Online Teaching: Some Video Examples

The Cognitive Psychologist Daniel Willingham had a useful Op-Ed in the LA Times last week in which he discussed the ways that online learning is cognitively strange (my phrase; blame me if you don’t like it)–that is, it asks us to interact socially in ways we aren’t used to and haven’t evolved for and that are…