Teach like a champion 3.0: 63 techniques that put students on the path to college - Lemov Doug 2021

Acknowledgments

This book would have been impossible without the team of people whose work is reflected in almost every line. My colleagues on the Teach Like a Champion team have made untold contributions, both direct and indirect. There are hundreds of their insights about videos or techniques in this book—and in the rest of the work we produce. But they have also contributed something that's harder to define. The moments when they offer a phrase to describe exactly what a teacher is doing or when we roll back the tape because they've seen something fascinating in a student's response are just as likely to come right after some moment in which they laugh with self-deprecating humor at something they've said, acknowledge a teammate's efforts, or defer credit to someone else. They are wise, gracious, funny, humble, discerning colleagues, this is to say, who create an environment where doing the work of studying teaching is rewarding, challenging, and even fun.

When we get teachers and school leaders together for professional development—in person or, now, virtually—our goal is always to honor people by helping them get better at such important work and to ensure that everyone—us and them—learns a lot, but also to have fun doing it—to make teaching a team sport marked by joy and camaraderie. Teachers deserve to work in that kind of environment, and I know that because I am lucky enough to appreciate it firsthand.

That team includes Emily Badillo, Jaimie Brillante, Dan Cotton, John Costello, Colleen Driggs, Dillon Fisher, Kevin Grijalva, Kim Griffith, Brittany Hargrove, Joaquin Hernandez, Tracey Koren, Jasmine Lane, Hilary Lewis, Rob Richard, Jen Rugani, Hannah Solomon, Beth Verrilli, Michelle Wagner, Darryl Williams, and Erica Woolway. I am grateful to each of them, though several played roles in the production of this volume who deserve particular mention.

The videos in this book—and all the videos we use in training and study—were edited and produced by Rob Richard and John Costello. Theirs is both technical and intellectual work—not just showing what a teacher has done on screen but then making it optimally legible to viewers by focusing in on the good stuff without distorting the reality of the classroom overall. This can mean removing the moment when the classroom phone rings or the child in the third row knocks everything off his desk or deciding that two great examples of a teacher using Cold Call is more useful than five pretty good examples. Every video is a sort of visual poem, and John and Rob have authored them all while also building a system to keep track of thousands of such poems. Think for a moment about what it means to keep 20 years of video organized so a team of people can say, “Remember that classroom from the school in Tennessee that we watched about four or five years ago?” and later that day we're all watching it again.

Hannah Solomon serves many roles on our team but one of them was developmental editor for this book. It might not have been “herding cats,” exactly, but only because there was just one cat and “herding” implies that he is heading in the right direction—or at least making something like progress—and you are merely nudging him back on course. Hannah's work included project management—keeping me on task is hard enough; doing that and keeping track of the all the tasks, not to mention all the drafts, is an order of the highest magnitude; now imagine doing it with your most disorganized and distracted student who very earnestly tells you over and over he'll have it by Wednesday when in your heart you know otherwise. Meanwhile, Hannah also provided round after round of gracious and candid feedback on drafts, gathered and designed support materials, helped to select videos, and generally offered good advice and counsel in a hundred ways. There were dark and hopeless hours in writing this book. But then I would get my draft back and she would have taken the time to spell out exactly why she liked a phrase or a paragraph in the most supportive way and I would keep going. I am profoundly grateful for that and also for the many times she pushed me to change my thinking as we reflected on and revised the techniques.

Emily Badillo also played a critical role in the writing of this book. If the name is familiar it's because her videos appear throughout the book as well. She too was invaluable in reading and marking up drafts—and in drafting sections and sourcing support material, as well as screening and recommending videos.

As I was writing this book, my team and I were also providing training and curriculum to thousands of teachers in the United States and abroad. We had an organization to run, in other words. Every leader brings their own unique skills to such an effort. My own leadership skills include leaving emails unanswered for months, making sure meetings begin awkwardly and sometimes before everyone knows about them. Also: hiding in my office for days at a time to obsess over a paragraph while deadlines go hurtling past. Thus my partners in leading Team TLAC, Chief Academic Officer Erica Woolway and Co-Managing Director Darryl Williams, deserve a double dose of thanks and credit—for their ideas, insights, and deep understanding of teaching, as well as for their ability to gently manage around my “skills.” I couldn't ask for better partners.

Writing can be a slow process, but the process of writing this book was especially challenging given that it was done during the year 2020. Amy Fandrei and Pete Gaughan at John Wiley & Sons were supportive and understanding, not to mention unflappable, throughout. I hope the result seems close to worth the headaches I caused them.

Rafe Sagalyn continues to guide and support my work as an advocate and agent, and I am grateful to have the guidance of someone so wise whose goal is to help me find my own vision for my writing and bring it to reality.

This book also reflects the insights of a broader community of teachers and educators—in the United States, in England, even around the world—who share their insights and observations with me and each other. Many days I think social media is a pox on civilization but it is also a means through which, thanks to the thousands of teachers who see it as a tool to share knowledge and insights positively and constructively, I have been able to learn an immense amount very quickly. I have tried to quote a few of the teachers whose comments have particularly struck me. I describe a few cases where, in a pickle, I asked a question of my Twitter colleagues and found myself blessed to share in their wisdom and insight. Thank you, then, to everyone who teaches and thus does the most important work in society, and doubly so to those who have shared their knowledge of that work with me.

Finally, as I have written and rewritten three volumes of this book, my own three children have grown up. Needless to say, I love them immensely and am proud of them. They are bigger now, they were littler then, and yet still there is no sacrifice I wouldn't make for them. But you knew that and I mention it here because the work that I do has always been connected to my own parenting. I wake at night and struggle with some anxiety about my children and I know other parents lie awake struggling too, often with even greater anxieties. I think often of those parents who love their children as deeply and as profoundly as I do mine but cannot rely on sending them to schools and classrooms that provide them with the fullest opportunity to learn and thrive. This book is an effort to ensure the best possible classrooms everywhere—for my own children and for every other parent's children.

I'll close with the biggest thanks I owe: to my wife, Lisa. To thank her for making this book possible is a bit unfair when there's so much more to be thankful for in a thousand ways. So, Lisa, thank you for the sunshine, which, among other things, creates the light by which I've been able to write.