Doug Lemov's field notes

Reflections on teaching, literacy, coaching, and practice.

05.28.15 Close Reading Preview: Establishing Meaning

Colleen, Erica and I are about to wrap up the manuscript of Reading Reconsidered. One of the most important chapters in it is about Close Reading which, we note, has become an urgent clarion call but remains relatively poorly defined… except here we hope.  In the excerpt below, we discuss one of the key tasks of…


05.20.15 From Reading Reconsidered: On Teaching Vocabulary

Another excerpt coming at you from the throes of finalizing Reading Reconsidered.  This excerpt is on our two-pronged approach to Vocabulary.   To command words is to master both their breadth and their depth.  Reading for anything more than basic comprehension relies on the a reader’s capacity to understand both a large number of words (breadth) and also…


05.14.15 A Reading Reconsidered Excerpt: Layered Reading

Colleen Driggs, Erica Woolway and I are busy wrapping up the manuscript of our new book on literacy, Reading Reconsidered.  We’ll put it to bed in a few weeks’ time and you should see it on shelves next winter.  In the meantime here’s an excerpt from the chapter on Close Reading.  The topic is something called…


01.29.15 From Reading Reconsidered- Embedding: The Full Story

Posting on embedding non-fiction earlier today made me realize I ought to post something defining the idea more clearly.  Here’s a very early draft of (part of) how Colleen, Erica and I discuss it in Reading Reconsidered. Embedding non-fiction is the process of pairing secondary non-fiction texts (usually non-narrative non-fiction) alongside a primary text in an…


01.29.15 Embedding Non-Fiction in A Single Shard

Colleen, Erica, and I have been toiling away at our forthcoming book on literacy, Reading Reconsidered.  One of the topics we discuss is non-fiction–the importance of reading more of it; the challenges of reading more of it; the importance of knowledge as both a cause and and effect of successful reading.  One of the key ideas…