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

Mental models
Five themes: Mental models and purposeful execution

For carpenters, attaching two pieces of wood at right angles has for centuries been a complex challenge, especially if they have not wanted any nails or screws to show—or if such hardware was not available. Over time, though, woodworkers gradually surmounted this challenge through a technique called mortise and tenon. Refined over centuries, the method involves narrowing a section of one piece of wood (a tenon) and wedging it into a gap cut in another (a mortise) and ensures that joints can be made snug and sturdy, even at 90 degrees, without hardware.

Within the mortise and tenon technique, however, a wide range of adaptations are required to overcome different challenges. For a dining room table, the joint must be trim, elegant, and all-but-invisible. The joints for the beams of a barn must be massively strong but designed for quick assembly while they are held aloft. For a ramp, the joint may need to be removable. Thus there are stub mortises, through mortises, and wedged mortises; tusked tenons, pegged tenons, and biscuit tenons.

For carpenters, terminology memorializes the insights of a thousand fellow craftsmen, just as it empowers an individual facing a challenge to more clearly consider the solutions available and engage other carpenters in discussing them with precision.

It's the same, of course, for teachers—or at least this book is an effort to make it that way. Want to engage more students more intentionally in the work of thinking? Try a Cold Call—that is, calling on students regardless of whether they've volunteered—and doing so with warmth and genuine interest in their answers—“inclusively,” as I like to describe it. Even so, a wide range of adaptations are possible with the Cold Call. Asking the question before stating the name of the student you are calling on can cause other students to answer the question in anticipation of possibly being called on themselves. Breaking apart a large question into smaller ones can involve more students in answering. Cold Calling a second student to respond to the first answer can help socialize pupils to listen carefully to one another. We can call those things timing the name, unbundling, and follow-on.¹ To name the details of a technique and its adaptations leaves a trail of bread crumbs that you can use to refine its use.

But technique and the ability to describe it are not enough. We execute, many of us, nearly a thousand lessons a year—some we've designed ourselves and some in which we bring someone else's blueprint to fruition. We do this with thirty seventh graders on a Tuesday morning. And then again with thirty different seventh graders that afternoon, at which point the second group will surely remind us that we never teach the same lesson twice. Expertise—making the plan come out right for each class—means solving for a steady stream of variables and contexts. Your lesson plan assumed that students would understand juxtaposition, but they don't. You thought students would eagerly offer myriad thoughts about the chapter, but the first class weighed in tepidly and only one student raised her hand in the second.

And so a teacher, even one ready with a box of tools she has mastered, makes decisions not only about which tool to use, but how. A dearth of hands? You could Cold Call, but you could also Turn and Talk, or use a quick low-stakes writing prompt—a Stop and Jot. Your tone could be whimsical: "Usually I can't keep you guys from a conversation about The Giver. Has something terrible happened to the Kardashians and I'm the last to know?”² You could go philosophical: “Yes, it's a hard question. Who will be brave enough to answer it?” You could be blunt: “I need to see more hands.” You could say nothing.

In a typical lesson you decide, often quickly. Then you decide, decide, and decide again. You are a batter facing a hundred pitches in a row—a comparison I will return to in a moment, but first it's worth asking: What do you need to decide quickly, reliably, and well, while thinking about other things and often under a bit of pressure in the form of, say, twenty-nine restless students, twenty-five minutes' worth of work left to get done, and a ticking clock to remind you that you have fifteen minutes left in the class period?

Cognitive science would tell that having a strong mental model is critical. In this case that means having a clear conception of what the elements of a successful lesson should look like. This too, benefits from intentional language to frame the principles reliably.

Mental models

One evening a few years ago I watched a soccer match with a coach named Iain Munro who had played professionally for nearly twenty years in the UK and then coached for twenty more. At one point during the match he was having a bite to eat, and I was in the middle of asking him a question. Suddenly he looked up and interjected: “The right back is out of position.”

“Sorry?” I said, wondering which team's right back, and whether he was talking about the game unfolding in the stadium far below or something more abstract and metaphorical.

“He's come too far towards the center and cannot see his man,” Iain said. He gestured with his sandwich to point this out to me. As he did so an opposition player noticed the same thing. He drove a pass to a teammate on the dead run in the right back's blind spot. Moments later it was 1—0.

We'd been watching the game for half an hour in a relaxed way when suddenly, one player among twenty-two was out of position for a few seconds, and Iain had seen it instantly, from eighty yards away, while chatting and eating a sandwich. A sort of alarm had gone off. You could see it in his body language: He knew it meant trouble.

How had he done that? The key was his knowledge of what things were supposed to look like. “The back four have a proper shape,” he said. “Together they should look a bit like a saucer. The saucer should tilt a bit in response to where the ball is,” he said, gesturing with his hands.

What Iain was describing was a mental model, a framework that people use to understand complex environments. His mind was continually comparing what was in front of him to this mental model and it helped him to notice quickly things that were important or out of place.

Teachers too have mental models. You briefly turn your back on your class but can distinguish without looking the normal and natural chatter of students busily on-task from talking that “sounds wrong.” You might not be able to explain how it's wrong, but hearing it, you know distraction is afoot. You have a mental model of classroom noise.

Research tells us that mental models are critical to effective decision making in almost every field of expertise but especially in fields where people are asked to make a great many decisions quickly while they are focused on multiple things.

In his research on teacher expertise, David Berliner³ showed video of classrooms to novice and expert teachers. Novices struggled to make sense of what they saw. “They often reported contradictory observations and appeared confused about what they were observing,” Berliner writes. Like Iain, however, experts often appeared to be observing passively until something looked out of place. This triggered a reaction. “When anomalies occurred,” experts responded “effortlessly and fluidly,” in part because they were quickly able to discern what was an anomaly. They didn't overreact to what was normal, but they noticed potential problems quickly. They could distinguish students who were quieter than normal because they were thinking deeply from students who were quiet because they were bored. They were able to quickly separate signal from noise, in part because they were comparing what they saw to a mental model.

So where the rest of this book discusses specific techniques, this chapter describes core principles that can help teachers build a stronger mental model and thus choose among techniques and make better decisions while teaching, with “better” defined, most of all, as resulting in more learning and development among students. Deciding begins with accurate perception—a mental model aids in perception—but while perception derives from experience it develops more rapidly when it is informed by understanding of key principles.

This is something I did not include in earlier iterations of the book but have added to this edition to put even greater emphasis on understanding the purpose of the techniques. “Brilliant teaching always begins with clear vision and a sound purpose,” Adeyemi Stembridge writes in Culturally Responsive Education in the Classroom. “The teacher who deeply understands this is … able to evoke brilliance from even the most mundane of strategies” (p. 154). Put another way, “Everything works somewhere and nothing works everywhere,” as Dylan Wiliam writes. Impeccable technique at exactly the wrong time or for the wrong reason is a dead-end street.

After a school visit not long ago, my colleague Darryl Williams reflected on an example. We'd seen a teacher engage her students beautifully—every hand eagerly in the air for most of her lesson. The energy was palpable and, as a reader of Teach Like a Champion might point out, the participation ratio was high. There were lots of opportunities to Turn and Talk. But Darryl had felt as though something was off. The questions themselves were insubstantial and the answers were vague. The teacher had not thought through what the most important questions were and what good answers would sound like in advance. “If people try to use techniques to compensate for a lack of clarity about their content, the lesson won't work,” Darryl said.

Compare that to Sadie McCleary's teaching in the video Sadie McCleary: Keystone. She too uses Turn and Talks to boost the ratio in her classroom. Hands are in the air and students engage dynamically. But her intentionality about what technique she's choosing and why is remarkable. Sadie described her thinking this way:

If it's a meatier question, I always have students write or Turn and Talk first to increase participation, then circulate while they're talking and choose a kid or two to Cold Call.

If it's something that is easier, I might ask out loud but gather data in the moment by Cold Calling specific students—I often choose kids who I think of as bellwethers—indicative of how kids often think about things. If it's something really simple that I want all students to quickly remind themselves of, I might use Call and Response and we'll all say it aloud.

Sadie thinks carefully about technique, but her understanding of the principles of how learning happens frames her decisions—her goal is to keep students thinking constantly and actively building long-term memory. Sailing along, there are knots to tie and sheets to trim, but a teacher also has to keep an eye on the compass.

You might argue that the chapter titles of this book are already a set of design principles for a model of the effective classroom—that one should “check for understanding” and have high academic and behavioral expectations, for example, or that the “ratio” of student work should be high and include a balance of writing, discussion, and questioning. In many ways they are, but they are teaching principles and even those principles need to be supported by principles of learning that can help to explain why certain methods work as well as how and when to use them.

First, though, let me make a brief digression on the topic of perception. Perception is crucial for educators to understand because it shapes decision making. We can only make decisions about what we see. For a teacher to recognize that Julissa is slowly growing despondent over the math, she must first perceive Julissa's body language and facial expression. Many people assume that this is far simpler than it actually is, that if we look at Julissa we will see her, but seeing is in fact far from automatic. The first, often overlooked step in making better decisions is seeing better.

“We are aware of only a small portion of our visual world at any moment,” Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons write in The Invisible Gorilla, their study of a topic teachers will know a little something about: inattentional blindness. That's the technical term for every person on earth's ability to look directly at something important and simply not see it: a car entering the intersection, a student tentatively raising her hand or, frankly, an eraser flying across the room. It happens all the time to people who work in complex perceptive environments. We want to think perception is objective and automatic. We don't really believe that we fail to perceive. That's the tricky part. Chabris and Simons write that it is “flatly incompatible with how we understand our own minds.”

So what do you do when perception is fallible but really matters—when it's critical to note the student who is quietly edging toward frustration, for example, or when you've been working area problems for ten minutes and Daphne has not picked up her pencil yet? “There is one proven way to eliminate inattentional blindness—make the unexpected object or event less unexpected,” the authors conclude. In other words, the best way to see well is to know what should occur. Your mental model guides what you look for. The more we understand, the more we see. And when we don't understand what we're seeing this too influences our looking. A recent study found that skilled radiologists were more accurate in making correct diagnoses from X-rays than novices (that is, they were more likely to perceive them correctly), but the errors of less skilled radiologists were not randomly distributed.⁴ They feared “missing something” and this anxiety caused them to consistently overdiagnose conditions that did not exist. Even worrying that you don't understand what you're seeing shapes how you see it.

With that in mind, it's worth spending some time discussing five guiding principles, which I hope will provide a helpful mental model of how learning works and increase your ability to perceive accurately in the classroom and to apply the techniques in this book in a way that gets the most out of students. They are:

1. Understanding human cognitive structure means building long-term memory and managing working memory.

2. Habits accelerate learning.

3. What students attend to is what they will learn about.

4. Motivation is social.

5. Teaching well is relationship building.