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

Technique 1: Exemplar planning
Lesson preparation

If you're familiar with the 2.0 version of Teach Like a Champion, you may notice that some of the most significant changes in this latest edition come in this chapter. While much of what I wrote about in the second edition focused on how to plan an effective lesson, this chapter endeavors to shine a light on the methods my team and I have observed teachers use as they prepare to teach their lessons, instead. Essentially, I've replaced one chapter with another based on the importance implied by the change of a single word: from “plan” to “prepare.” What's the difference, you might ask, and why the change?

First, preparation is universal. Not everyone writes their own lesson plan every day. Many teachers use a plan written by a colleague or a curriculum provider. Some reuse a plan they wrote previously. But everyone prepares (or, I argue, should prepare) their lesson before they teach it. If a lesson plan is a sequence of activities you intend to use, lesson preparation is a set of decisions about how you will teach them. Those decisions can determine the lesson's success at least as much as the sequence of activities, but because planning and preparation are readily confused, it's easy to overlook the latter and think once the plan's done, you're ready to roll.

Say you teach the same lesson twice a day: third period and fifth period. Your third-period class is verbal and eager—sometimes so eager that you have to cut off the chatter and digressions to keep them on track. Fifth period is more introverted. Pretty cerebral, actually, but they need some prodding to speak up. You use the same lesson plan for both classes, but you prepare it differently.

“The techniques that work to support engagement with one group of learners may need to be applied differently from one classroom to the next,” notes Adeyemi Stembridge. “The design of highly engaging learning experiences requires a keen sense of context because human beings are a highly social species and interpersonal and cultural contexts matter.”¹

Perhaps on Tuesday, that means a bit more writing to get third period to slow down and reflect and a few more Turn and Talks to draw the fifth period classroom out. Perhaps a student in fifth period used a beautiful phrase to describe a passage from the novel and you want to remember to go back and ask her about it at a critical point in the lesson. Despite using the same lesson plan for both lessons, an effective process for lesson preparation has caused you to plan for crucial differences in how you'll teach each class.

The first step in preparation is to know the content of your lesson well. You can't teach at your best if you're not sure what comes next and have to read ahead when you should be listening, explaining, or observing. Managing working memory is important for teachers, not just students. I'll come back to this idea at the end of this section because there's more to it than first appears. But beyond the necessity of developing familiarity with what you're teaching, developing habits that can help you adapt your lesson successfully to the setting and react effectively to events as you teach is critical to a teacher's short- and long-term success. Such habits might seem like they would add to your workload, but done well they will reduce it, helping you succeed while maintaining balance and sustainability in your teaching life.

The reasons lesson preparation matters relate to cognitive science and the importance of perception, which is one of the most important skills of a teacher. “Experienced teachers develop a high level of sensitivity to students' level of interest, their involvement and their motivation,” Graham Nuthall writes in The Hidden Lives of Learners. They “can tell from the atmosphere of the classroom, from the look in the students' eyes, from the questions and answers, from the way they engage in activities, how much the students' minds are engaged. Effective teachers … use these signs to tell whether they need to change what they are doing, to speed up or slow down, to introduce more or less challenge.” Some caution may be warranted—even when we think we know students are engaged (or not) it's good to remember that we can be wrong and that reviewing written student work is a critical check on our assumptions—but for the most part we succeed when and if we perceive what is happening in our classrooms accurately and we make key instructional decisions accordingly. If you do not see the relevant cues, you cannot decide reliably. You will zig when students need you to zag.

But of course it's not quite true that “experienced” teachers do this. Those who have learned most productively from their experiences do, but you could have a twenty-year veteran who still fails to read a room or a first-year teacher whose read on the class is stellar. In fact, the real question is how every teacher can accelerate and improve their process of learning to “read the signs,” as Nuthall puts it. Adeyemi Stembridge argues that responsiveness, too, starts with perception. “We want to sharpen our perception and capacities for leveraging strategies in ways that are most beneficial to students in need of specific support,” he writes.² A key part of teaching responsively is reading the reactions and needs of our students as we teach. An important question, then, is how we can “see” better and more fully as we teach.

It might sound like something intangible, but perception responds to preparation. To perceive well, you need to prepare for what you'll be looking for and, ideally, free as much working memory as possible to be available, unencumbered, for observation. Inattentional blindness, I noted in Chapter One, is the name for the phenomenon whereby people frequently fail to see what is plainly before their eyes—never mind what is hidden or concealed. We are all at constant risk of failing to notice important details, especially when they occur in a complex visual field, and the classroom is almost always that.

We have to accept this and prepare with it in mind if we want to perceive more accurately, as Chabris and Simons remind us when they write: “There is one proven way to eliminate inattentional blindness: make the unexpected object or event less unexpected.” If you think through potential errors in student thinking before you teach, you'll be more likely to notice them—or any mistakes. You learn to see in part by preparing to see. If you're clear in advance about what you want to see in the end product of student work, you'll look more precisely and notice more whether students are actually doing it.

But we also know that perception is affected by the load on our working memory. Pick up your cell phone and call your spouse or partner and you become less alert to what's happening on the road around you. Try to think about what’s the best answer to a question while you're listening to your students and you become less alert to what's happening around you. You'll have less cognitive bandwidth to use for perception. You are likely to miss signals. But if you think through—and write down—details of an ideal student answer to key questions—what we will call in this chapter an “exemplar”—you can process what students say and write with less load on working memory.

Your ability to foster student engagement is another aspect of teaching that responds to preparation. If you have thought through how you're going to ask students to participate during the Do Now, say, and who you're going to call on to answer it, you make it more likely that you will follow through on those actions and the result will be students who feel accountable to participate and who benefit from a classroom where everyone—not just the eager hand-raisers or call-out-the-answer types—gets a fair chance to speak. Do that and your lesson is likely to crackle with engagement and energy. If you don't, you're likely to find yourself reminding students that you're seeing the same two or three hands on every question. Making a statement like that to your class should be a reminder to yourself to prepare better.

So lesson preparation is the process of going back through the lesson plan and thinking what it will look like not just in a classroom but in your fifth-period classroom tomorrow. When and how do you want to be more intentional about drawing out some of the quiet kids? Which questions should students answer in writing so you can see what they're thinking? It will be different for third period, where you'll have to watch the clock so you don't glance up and realize that a “five-minute discussion” is now entering its twenty-fifth minute. You'll need time stamps—if you're going to get to the demonstration of plate tectonics, you'll have to keep the Do Now to seven minutes, no matter how eager the waving hands. The vocabulary review gets three minutes and a stopwatch on the smartboard to make certain you don't miss the second half of the lesson.

With all this in mind, let's step into Christine Torres's fifth-grade classroom at Springfield Prep in Springfield, Massachusetts, to understand a bit more about the connection between preparation and teaching. In the video Christine Torres: Keystone, you will probably notice almost immediately how dynamic her lesson is—every student locked-in to learning in the most positive way and each second used for a productive activity that causes students to think. They work hard and seem to love it. Goodness, you're thinking, if my class looked like that, I could do this job forever. We had the same response. In fact we shot this video of Christine because we'd visited her school—without our cameras, alas—a few weeks earlier and had been immediately transfixed by the joyful, energetic, thoughtful lesson Christine was teaching. We could barely drag ourselves out of her classroom, and then only because they promised we could videotape her as soon as possible. That's the back story on where this video comes from. But one other detail is relevant from that first visit to Springfield Prep. Christine shared a copy of her packet—the place where she prepares her lesson, a copy of which is available on the website www.wiley.com/go/teachlikeachampion3. This is the tool she used to get ready to teach a different lesson from the one you just watched, but one which reveals the process she uses for every lesson—which is interesting in and of itself. She is consistent in how she prepares and so her lessons are consistent in quality, engagement, and energy. Remarkably so, which is sort of the point. The first step in making your classroom look more like Christine's is to copy—or at least study and adapt—her approach to preparation.

You can see that Christine has spent time in “exemplar planning”: Before the lesson she took the time to write out the answer to each question as she hoped a top student would. This helps to focus her in discussions—to draw out the right points and hear the gaps. And she can glance at these notes as she teaches if she needs a quick reminder, so her working memory can stay relatively free.

Christine has also written out additional reminders to herself—the number of minutes she wants an activity to take, “back-pocket questions (BPQ)” she could use to support confused students, and, crucially, notes on how students will answer. After all, she could ask the same question of two classes but ask one to respond in writing via a Stop and Jot and the other to go straight to a Turn and Talk. These processes she goes through of marking up and preparing her lesson are different from the lesson plan—these are her handwritten, game-time adaptations to the prepared sequence of activities. Both tasks are necessary. The researching and careful crafting of lesson plans like this one take time and could not be done sustainably the night before (we know; she's using lessons as part of a pilot of the Reading Reconsidered Curriculum our team wrote) but preparation adapts that carefully crafted plan to ensure success with this group of students, today, with up-to-the minute knowledge of what the best moves will be, given the detail of how students are progressing and even what happened in class the day before. Even the best plan will not succeed without effective preparation and even great preparation of a poor plan will fall short. You need both.

And you can see the results in the video. Christine appears to be making the perfect decision to maximize the level of participation by all students over and over throughout her lesson. Christine's teaching is magical, but like every great magician there's some sleight of hand involved. Her decisions are outstanding, but she only appears to be making them on the spur of the moment. She's planned out many of them, or has narrowed the choices she'd consider, in advance. If you look at her version of the student packet, where she's done her preparation, you can see that there are both decisions (“Turn and Talk here”) and options (“If time. Show Call exemplar.”). Some people worry that too much preparation will make it harder to express themselves and connect with students, but the opposite is true here. Christine is prepared and so she is able to be fully responsive. Students feel seen and known by their teacher and as though they have her full attention. Her warmth and humor are magnified by virtue of her being calm, relaxed, and ready—and perhaps from the students' pride in their work and willingness to engage successfully with the tasks presented. Her careful planning sets a pattern in the first few minutes of class: She's clear with students about the task, they respond positively, and she can relax and express all her humor and brilliance as a teacher. They lather, rinse, and repeat all class long. It all starts with what's on her “Preparation Page.”

James Clear's Atomic Habits lends insight into another way to understand why the time Christine invests in preparation results in such a powerful outcome in her classroom. Clear cites a British study where three groups of people were asked to try to begin exercising. The control group received no special treatment. The second group received motivational materials. The third group received motivational material and was asked to complete the following sentence: “I will take 20 minutes of vigorous exercise on [DATE] in [TIME] at [PLACE].” The rates of people from the three groups who actually exercised were 35 percent, 38 percent, and 91 percent. The follow-through rates when people committed to a particular action for time and place nearly tripled over those who wanted to do those things but weren't specific in planning time and place. In Clear's words, “People who make a specific plan for when and where they will perform a new habit are more likely to follow-through. Too many people try to change habits [or apply teaching techniques] without these basic details figured out.”

Christine's notes reveal that she has done something similar to what Clear advises. Every time she jots “Cold Call here” or “Turn and Talk here,” Christine has made a specific plan for where and when she will take a particular action and thus has tripled the chances that she'll actually do these things. More specific preparation makes it more likely that we'll do the things we hope to do in teaching. It is a follow-through multiplier that helps us become the teachers we want to be.

Christine's lesson preparation habits are impressive but there isn't one universal method for Lesson Preparation. Situations are different and people are different. When your intuition and curriculum have been sharpened by years of instruction, you may be able to prepare simply—perhaps scripting the exemplar to a single critical question and then entering the classroom confidently… at least on a routine day with a lesson you've taught before. But it may take some time before you get there. Perhaps you're a teaching a new class this year. You'd probably want to increase your preparation level at the outset even if over the course of the year you began to simplify or adapt the process you used at the outset. But it's important to make it a habit. Naming the core preparation practices, making sure they're productive and useful, and committing to when you'll complete them is critical. Just as the preparation itself increases the chances you will take the actions you plan on when you teach, so too your chances of preparation will multiply if you commit to consistent time, place, and methods.

This is likely to result in stronger student achievement and a more positive and engaging experience for your students, not to mention more enjoyment of teaching for you. I will return to this idea later but as Adeyemi Stembridge puts it, reflecting on his own lesson preparation habits in Culturally Responsive Teaching in the Classroom, “I always start my planning with time to think carefully about what I want my students to understand and feel.” What students feel is critical to their sense of belonging is made up of many things. Part of it is the connection to the content and the teacher; part of it is being caught up in the flow of a lesson that moves briskly with what Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls “flow” and therefore moves them to another world—in Christine's case to Denmark in 1943—and fires their imaginations. The journey begins when one is made to feel included in something dynamic and engaging. An artfully crafted and executed lesson does that.

Before we define specific techniques for lesson preparation, let me return to the most basic question about preparation: How well do you know the content covered in your lesson? This might seem like a pointless question. No teacher except one thrown suddenly into emergency duty outside her subject would answer: “Oh, not very well, really.” But there is a huge range of what teachers mean when they say they know their content and it's worth asking if knowing more about the context and the facts really matters.

Research tells us that higher-order thinking relies on facts and is only possible when people are possessed of a strong body of knowledge about a given topic. Here's a demonstration of that.

Imagine that you woke up tomorrow morning and the sky was green rather than blue. In the box below, jot two possible explanations of what, from a scientific perspective, could conceivably have caused that to happen:

Well, how'd you do? Were you creative? Brilliantly analytical? Did you suggest that something would have to affect the particles in the Earth's atmosphere, causing them to absorb blue light more than it currently does, but only slightly so as to leave green, with the next shortest waves, as the most visible? Did you suggest that perhaps an increase in water droplets in the air might reflect the yellows and oranges of sunrise and combine with the natural blue of the sky, perhaps against a backdrop of clouds, to make it appear green?

Or were you unable to answer? Did you guess something implausible, maybe about the reflection of the ocean (a common misconception) and then give up on the project? Is your thinking box blank? If that's the case, then you've just been reminded of the point made in Chapter One: Higher-order thinking is context-specific and knowledge-dependent. If you don't have knowledge about what causes the sky to be blue (or any other color) this exercise in creative and analytical thinking is lost on you. You can think deeply only about things you know something about—the more you know, the more deeply and creatively.

From a student learning perspective this means that we must consider our pupils' level of background knowledge in advance if we want real rigor during lessons. Preparing a lesson by noting that you will ask “probing questions” is insufficient unless you have ensured that students have knowledge to draw on as you probe and ask them “Why?” I'm actually pretty shaky on my knowledge of the atmosphere so you could have asked me a thousand probing questions about the color of the sky and not elicit much more than resentment. At some point in your asking me “… but might it have something to do with particles in the air?” I would get angry and frustrated. I've already told you that I don't know. You can keep asking me “why” if you want but I still won't know, so perhaps you should stop asking.

Compare that response to how Christine's students act in her lesson: the eager hands, the vibrant burst of ideas when she offers a Turn and Talk. Her students engage because she has leveled the playing field for them. You can see the places where her lesson plan infuses knowledge deliberately to prepare them to think deeply—the articles about rationing, the fairy tales of Hans Christian Andersen, and the description of what a trousseau is, but Christine has also prepared to feed knowledge where necessary and made thinking about gaps in knowledge part of getting ready to teach. Notice, for example:

· The sentences she's underlined in the article about rationing because they contain key background knowledge that will allow students to better analyze the book and her note to add these to the slide.

· Her notes on ensuring that students understand that “past perfect” implies that something was but no longer is, so they can think more deeply about the unspoken fact that Annemarie's sister is deceased.

But knowledge also matters for teachers. That's the sleeper. It is also true that we can think more deeply and creatively about our lessons if we know more about them, if we have reviewed key knowledge beforehand so that it is encoded in long-term memory. Imagine trying to teach the preceding green sky lesson based only on having read the answer and brief explanation I've provided. You certainly wouldn't teach it well or flexibly. More likely you'd teach it in a way that forestalled the likelihood of getting questions from students you couldn't answer. Your unsteady knowledge would constrain your teaching moves. You'd be reluctant to ask probing “why” questions if your answer to every student conjecture was, “Hmmm. Interesting. Maybe we can look it up later and find out.” You'd do much better to have thought through a few likely responses and ensure you were clear on why they did or did not make sense. And though that's obviously true for a lesson on the visible light spectrum, it's just as true for topics like archetypes and fairy tales, as my colleague Hannah Solomon pointed out. Without first having made sure to reflect deeply on them, your lesson might still fail. But you'd be more likely to overlook the importance of reading up on fairy tales and the like because of their familiarity. Notice, however, this screenshot from Christine's lesson. She's annotated the plan with notes of preparation that show she's been thinking about fairy tales and why they are particularly relevant to a story about life during wartime. Not only does her lesson plan provide background knowledge but her preparation shows that she's reviewed and reflected and applied what she knows to be ready to teach it.

So perhaps it's worth asking: What habits do you have as a teacher to ensure that you are always investing in your knowledge? In this chapter we'll discuss a few, but I'll also observe that several successful schools I know use the phrase “intellectual preparation” to describe a key step in lesson preparation and they build this into professional development. Teachers get together before they teach a book or unit to talk through its important questions and share and prioritize key background knowledge that will allow them to teach it. I love the idea of such a meeting. The message is: How much you know about what you're teaching is a key part of how you prepare.

Technique 1: Exemplar planning

Teachers and school leaders tend to have an overwhelming response to clips of Sarah Wright's teaching. The video Sarah Wright: Tio Luis, shot in her fifth-grade classroom at Chattanooga Prep in Chattanooga, Tennessee, shows why. The joy and purposefulness of Sarah's classroom are striking. Her students, all boys in this case, grin from ear to ear as they dive into a Turn and Talk in which they imagine they are the villainous character, Tio Luis, from Pam Muñoz Ryan's Esperanza Rising. They write eager, detailed responses. The boys delight in using—sometimes imperfectly but always enthusiastically—rich new vocabulary words and in celebrating a peer's exemplary response. All the while they are locked-in to the novel. Perhaps as you watch you hear a faint echo of Christine Torres's lesson, which we discussed in the introduction to this chapter. And in fact the echo you might hear is not a coincidence. The similarities include the way students are universally engaged in quality learning activities without a second of downtime; the way they seem to think studying this book is just about the greatest thing in the world. And there's one more parallel that's not quite as clear from watching the video but that is at least as profound as any of the other likenesses: Sarah and Christine achieve similar outcomes because they prepare similarly.³

What you see in their classrooms is a product of decisions made hours before the lesson began as much as it is a product of those made in the moment, though of course the two things are related. A prepared teacher is often a happy teacher and a poised teacher—one who can express herself more fully and who makes better decisions in the moment. She knows where she's going and isn't anxious or worried about what's next, how to do it, and how long it will take; her working memory is free to listen to each answer or to keep a planned five-minute discussion to five minutes in real time because she knows where she wants it to go and can steer it there as gently or decisively as needed. She is a teacher who finds it easy to laugh alongside her students and celebrate their work like Sarah does. You can't be fully present unless you're prepared.

Like Christine's preparation, Sarah's is a product of habit and experience. Sarah initially prepared her lesson much like Christine did: planning her key instructional moves—her Means of Participation—and the mistakes she thought she might see, but her final step came that morning. “I had 45 minutes,” she told me, referring to a busy morning on the day she taught this lesson. So she went through and reviewed her exemplars.

Exemplars, you'll recall, are correct answers that you write out to your own questions. They are the answers you hope a student will give to your question. It would be easy to overlook this step or underestimate its value in planning. It seems perhaps both obvious and redundant. You might argue that you have the answer “in your head” and don't need to write it out. But this simple action might be the single most important step in preparing to teach.

To see why, let's take a look at a tiny moment from two lessons where you can see exemplars being used. First, there's the clip Denarius Frazier: Remainder. Check what he does at 1:12 in this lesson on dividing polynomials—you'll see the whole lesson in Chapter Three, “Check for Understanding.” Explaining to a student why her work is incorrect, he quickly glances at his exemplar, which he's carrying with him. It helps him to diagnose what she's done wrong more quickly and accurately. “Your remainder is off because this value right here is incorrect,” he says. He is able to spot the incorrect value quickly and easily because he has the ideal answer ready to compare it to. He doesn't have to strain to keep all of the information in his working memory. About a second is enough to remind him.

Julia Addeo does something similar in the clip Julia Addeo: Keystone, which I'll also discuss more fully in the “Check for Understanding” chapter. The first thirty-seven seconds show her comparing students' work to her exemplar and quickly and easily spotting their mistakes by comparing their work to the exemplar. She's able to move fast and get to multiple students. But she's also able to free more of her working memory to think about why they are making these mistakes and what she can do about it. You can see her do this. She steps back from her observations to think about how she wants to address the misconceptions she's seeing and, in so doing, glances again at her exemplar. “What should be happening to make this process go right?” she appears to be asking herself. The exemplar helps her to see that clearly.

In The Checklist Manifesto, the science writer Atul Gawande describes situations in which trained professionals use a similar tool—checklists—to assess the final outcome of a process. “Under conditions of complexity,” he writes, checklists “are required for success.” Good checklists “provide reminders of … the most critical and important steps. They allow for precision and efficiency. The user can make sure the final result is thorough and preserve working memory in assessing it at the same time.” A lot like an exemplar, in other words, with the difference being that an exemplar can be narrative and each element need not be satisfied in a particular order. Both tools are valuable because they discipline the process of looking and free working memory. Interestingly, Gawande argues that checklists are most valuable in two situations. First, they are useful when performing especially complex and sophisticated work. Surgeons use them, for example—though they resisted them for years. So do engineers who build massive skyscrapers. In each of these examples, “the volume and complexity of what we know has exceeded our individual ability to deliver its benefits correctly, safely, or reliably.” A tool to focus observations is more important for experts because they know much more than they can keep in working memory while observing! Certainly this is true for teachers, who balance a complex daily instructional plan filled with challenging content and the individual learning needs of up to thirty twelve-year-olds, for example.

The second situation when checklists are especially valuable is when you want reliable results across a large organization with a lot of autonomy—a school, for example. If everyone agrees on what right looks like, it can reduce variability in execution while preserving autonomy. Want to start having “intellectual preparation” meetings at your school? Writing and comparing exemplars to various key questions might be the ideal activity. When we ask students, “How is Jonas changing in this chapter?” discussing the nuances of what could or should be in your exemplar is a perfect way to discuss interpretations and insights about the text.

There's a bit of humility necessary to unlock the power of exemplar planning. It seems like such a mundane task at first, but the more you know, ironically, the more you need to organize what you're looking for. I assure you, Denarius knows his division of polynomials and Julia knows her binomials. Christine knows Number the Stars. Sarah knows how Tio Luis feels upon discovering Abuelita's disappearance. But they write the ideal answer out anyway and this helps them to organize and reinforce in their own minds what they want to see and hear when their students respond.

So perhaps it's not surprising that Sarah chose, with her limited preparation time on her busy morning the day of her Esperanza lesson, to review and revise her exemplars. She went back over them and made small adaptations and additions. This helped to refresh the sequence of lesson activities in her mind, caused her to review the contents of the book so it was sharper in her memory, and ensured that she had an ideal answer to refer to as she listened to her students. It also caused her to think, with the lesson that day, of who she might call on when or how she might ask students to participate (topics I cover in the technique Delivery Moves further on). You can add other elements to your lesson preparation—this chapter will describe several that are immensely valuable, but when you have “one of those days,” and forty-five minutes is all you get, exemplar planning is the one task to fall back on.

Sarah is an English teacher, of course, so her process of writing out exemplars reflects that. She often focuses on key words or phrases she wants her students to use or a section she wants them to refer to in the text. Were Sarah a chemistry or math teacher, her process might include showing her work, then setting up each problem in the same format expected of students for easy reference during class. But no matter the subject the key is that the exemplar planning must be written down. This forces you to put your thinking into words as students must. It allows you, as Sarah did, to revise and amend as other thoughts come to you, and it makes your thinking portable, which as I noted earlier can allow you to share and discuss it with colleagues during professional development. And most of all it means you can take it with you when you teach, as we've seen Julia and Christine doing. And you can see that Sarah has hers in hand as well. She puts it down briefly to celebrate Akheem's answer but when the clapping and celebrating is done, she picks it right back up again.

Why, you might wonder, has Sarah's exemplar plan become her right hand (and Denarius's and Julia's and Christine's, as well) as she teaches? Thinking back to our discussion of the limited capacity of working memory can help to explain it. By familiarizing herself deeply with the target answer to every question, Sarah can be thinking not “What’s the answer?” when she hears or reads student work but rather “Where and how are they confused?” She is able to respond quickly and nimbly and to be fully present while teaching because far more of her working memory is allocated to perception than a comparable teacher who is also using working memory to remember things. She is calm enough to remember to smile, confident enough in her plan to celebrate greatness, to laugh at silliness, and to encourage risk-taking. Having the exemplar in hand speeds her progress around the room and helps her get to everybody.

A final point to reiterate about exemplar planning: It makes for excellent professional development in two ways. First, there are arguably few better conversations among teachers in a department than “What constitutes an outstanding answer to the following (important) question?” To discuss those things for six or eight questions would be a crucial and powerful form of intellectual preparation. It's hard to imagine a better department meeting. We review the book, but we also hear ideas that we may not have considered. A teacher saying Oh, I'm definitely adding that to my exemplar is a teacher expanding their knowledge of the content they teach. My colleague Paul Bambrick-Santoyo calls this process “sparring with the exemplar”: You script your best answer and then sit down with colleagues and compare yours to theirs. Teachers leave intellectually prepared, with a deep understanding of the book and quite possibly differing perspectives on it. And of course it's the ideal kind of professional development because it happens before teachers teach their lessons. It makes them better now rather than in some far-off sunny day next year when they teach the book again. Of course if your department doesn't offer this kind of professional development you can do it virtually, finding colleagues elsewhere with whom to spar.

For this reason the English curriculum we've developed comes with exemplar student answers in the teaching material, but our recommendation is always that teachers not read them until they have written their own. You learn more when you've thought it through in advance. That said, we also script exemplars because it helps our lesson designers to refine their questions. If they struggle to answer or don't like their answer, well, they know the question has to change—a fact we mention because for those teachers who do write their own lesson exemplar planning is an even more powerful step.