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

Technique 3: Delivery moves
Lesson preparation

There is a constellation of things a typical teacher does to adapt a lesson and bring it to life for a certain group of students on a certain day. The adaptations are made in response to a variety of factors: the differences between third and fifth period (each class having its own slightly unique personality and group dynamic) or the mood on a Wednesday in October versus the last day before spring break, or how yesterday's lesson went. These actions prepare teachers to deliver a lesson uniquely and responsively to each class.

The first is Means of Participation (MOP) planning. MOP, as I discuss in technique 36, is choosing not just what question you will ask but also how you will ask students to answer that question—and then clearly communicating that expectation back to them. The lesson plan tells you the question, but how it's asked and answered—via Turn and Talk and/or a Cold Call; with Wait Time, or via Everybody Writes—is just as important. The best question in the world can still not “work” from a learning perspective if everyone doesn't answer it with their full effort and reflection. So lesson preparation should involve drafting a plan for how you will engage students in your questions with intentional decisions—a few Cold Calls at the outset to engage everyone. A few Stop and Jots to push for deeper thinking in the middle, and to give them the chance to write and rehearse their ideas. Some Turn and Talks to keep the energy rolling. Of course because you've planned these things doesn't mean you can't change them. It just means you start with a game plan, and, as we learned earlier from James Clear, then you're more likely to do the things you want to do instructionally.

Plan for Who: The next question after you've decided how students will participate is often: who. One of the reasons to not always take hands or let students call out is “voice equity.” The ideas of quiet students—the ones who think more deliberately, the ones who worry about how they might come across if they volunteer to speak—matter, too. So if you are Cold Calling or taking hands, thinking about whom you want to call on is often critical. A Cold Call might be a perfect tool to use at a given moment to get a little “voice equity” and ensure that everyone feels central to the discussion. But whom will you call on? Just Cold Calling would not solve the problem if, in the moment, you called on one of your students who always had their hand up anyway. Your decisions about the right Means of Participation—in this case Cold Call—will be much stronger if you have also thought through who would most benefit from being invited into the conversation or who might add the most to it.

When you plan whom to call on, you might think about individual students—it may be James you want to check in on or draw out—or certain characteristics of students—if a student who I think is often a reliable bellwether has got it wrong, lots of people probably do, say. Sometimes, I might steer questions to Jabari, because he struggled on perimeter questions on the quiz but has been making great progress. I'll let him answer during class, so he feels the progress. Or my goal could be to make sure everyone speaks and is included and feels the “voice equity.” I might make a note to “call on Tyson or Mary” because they are quieter, or to “call on quieter kids,” because I don't know who will be quiet that day. In other words, my goals can be individual or categorical. Making a note to call on someone with an “almost there” answer is one of my favorite examples of a categorical preparation note. Seeing the note—“Show Call an almost there”—in the margin, I would then circulate around the room, glancing over students' shoulders as they worked and choosing a strong answer that was lacking a key detail (i.e. “almost there”), and starting the discussion there. “Naveen has some really provocative insights and I think we can also help her make her good work even better. Let's have a look… .”

When reviewing the lesson online, you can see that Christine has done this at the bottom of page 3 and again at the bottom of page 6. She's got a list of kids whom she might want to call on for this. You can see some cross-outs. The list is changing. She's got a list for her co-teacher Kait Smith, too, who's leading a pull-out group.

Time Stamps: How do good lessons go bad? Slowly, then all at once. Everything is going fine if a little slower then you anticipated and then you look up and realize that you are having the discussion you hoped you'd have but twenty-five minutes later in the lesson than you'd planned. Suddenly you are in trouble. There'll be no independent practice, no written reflection, no time to review for the quiz. This is why using Time Stamps is important. They push you to intentional allocation decisions about your dearest resource. How much time on the Stop and Jot before the discussion, how much time on the discussion, and how much time on the written reflection afterwards. This helps you to see more quickly when you're getting behind. Time is finite so these are important trade-offs and the right decisions might change. It might be different for third period (honestly, they could use some time to slow down and think about other people's opinions) versus fifth period (they could learn to verbalize a bit more). It might be different on Wednesday than on Tuesday. It might be different Wednesday because of Tuesday, so if you planned on Monday you might want to go back through and update your time allocations as close to when you teach as possible.

Christine has done this on page 6 of her lesson. Next to the annotation box where students take notes on the reading, she's allocated five minutes. Next to question five she's allocated three minutes. When she says: two minutes on the clock to write your answers, that's because she's planned it: two minutes to write and one to hear an answer out loud. Then we move on. She gives seven minutes to the question about the fairy tales. There are going to be eager hands wanting to read their answers to question 5. The temptation will be to hear more and more of them. But Time Stamping lets Christine see that it's a trade-off between that and getting to the rest of the lesson, and she chooses the latter. She is prioritizing: The question about fairy tales is more important than some other things: more critical to understanding the book; more central to the writing they'll be doing. It's hard to prioritize when we want kids to learn everything, but even imperfect compromises made with foresight are better than the accidental prioritization of, “Whoops, we're out of time.” After all, what comes last is often there because it helps us make sense of what we've done. It's likely to be important. Maybe that's why at one point Christine's notes remind herself: “Do Not need to capture all examples!” and: “Can skip: pacing.” If she gets in trouble, that's the first question to go. One very small detail you might consider: including the actual time of day as opposed to running time of your lesson. It's easier to see when you are over time at 10:35 a.m. than “at twenty-two minutes.”

Back-Pocket Questions: Back-pocket questions are the ones you'll fall back on when students struggle with the initial question in your lesson. They're hard to think of in the moment and trying to do so slows you down. Plus you may not think of exactly the right follow-up question in the moment and there's a greater chance than normal that the question won't be perfect, so may confuse the student you're hoping to help. So sketching out a few potential back-pocket questions in the calm before you teach and writing them down where you can find them easily is a great practice. You can see examples of this in Christine's packet. You can see how she's planned to respond in case students struggle to make sense of the sentence “We enjoy escaping into the fantasy of a happy ending.” She'll ask, “Why do people like reading and listening to them?” to help students realize fairy tales are a form of pleasure that's not supposed to be realistic—they're supposed to be escapist.

Segues: Part of what makes well-prepared lessons effective is that the teacher connects upcoming content to the previous task or to what's coming. Take this example from Laura Baxter's fourth-grade class in Nashville, Tennessee, in their study of Esperanza Rising. The class has just wrapped up the vocabulary portion of the lesson, and Laura shares that her favorite of the new words they've studied is irritable. “Oh, wait till you see how irritable Esperanza is on this train ride,” she says, intrigue in her voice, and after a few crisp What to Do instructions—“Packet in the corner [of your desk], text in front of you. Ready to read on page 72,” she's reading and the chapter is underway. Her segue has students looking eagerly forward to see how irritable, in fact, Esperanza will be. Preparing a segue means looking ahead to connect content and helping students to see how the parts of a lesson fit together via a very transitional phrase. The segue becomes a through-line for students, to make the lesson feel more like a whole, and the things they do more connected.

“I almost always start our reading with a question that connects the prior day's reading to this day's,” ace literature teacher Sarah Wright told me. That form of a segue “is like a hook,” she noted. “You've got the hands going up … and then … every student is on the edge of his seat because you've made the connection to what they care about. The more you can make those connections, the more you are connecting the brain neurons and helping students remember and build on all of their knowledge as they are going through the text.”

By writing segue statements, you shape how students will experience the overall lesson by telling them—and yourself—the story of how the discrete pieces come together in one unified, objective-driven whole.

Rigor Checklist

A few years ago I watched a day's worth of lessons at schools in a major East Coast city school district. They had been working with a program that was using Teach Like a Champion to train new teachers and wanted feedback on how the teachers were doing. One classroom stayed with me more than the others. The teacher had done a lovely job of establishing productive procedures and routines and positive culture. Her students sat eagerly at their desks, ready to learn, listening expectantly. She had worked hard and done well to set the stage for an outstanding lesson. But there were crucial things missing. The lesson involved simplistic tasks—underlining a sentence in an article that was too easy. Students circled answers to multiple-choice questions but didn't do any writing. They sat at their desks, waiting for some worthy and inspiring task to begin, the brightness ebbing slowly away from their faces. This was what school was, they were learning.

The journalist Ellis Cose writes of sitting in his second- or third-grade classroom this way: “It came to me as I was sitting at my desk trying to keep myself interested as the teacher led the class, one listless word at a time, through the book I had read the first day of school, a book (and not a particularly interesting one) she would end up taking the entire semester to slow walk us through.”⁶ Alfred Tatum summarizes Cose's realization this way, noting that it applies to far more students than one: “The longer he went to school the more he was convinced that real learning would not take place.”⁷ In this way what Tatum calls “anti-intellectualism” develops in American classrooms. Students are bored when challenge, rigor, and a feeling of momentum are lacking. Teachers read this boredom as a signal that students cannot or will not do more advanced work. They do more mundane work instead. A sort of death spiral ensues. The moments that have most frustrated my own children in school have been the moments when they have realized that lessons marked by tasks devoid of rigor were also what tomorrow and the next day would look like.⁸

Elsewhere in the school were a few classrooms led by a few masters and a shockingly large number of disorderly and chaotic classrooms where no learning happened because teachers lacked the tidy systems and carefully built expectations that the teacher I was observing had constructed. And yet here, in this promising teacher's room, an opportunity was lost. The teacher had lost sight of what a worthy lesson should look like—what its component parts should be. Perhaps her mental model was incomplete; perhaps she was just focused on other things.

At about this time I was reading about the power of checklists, “quick and simple tools aimed to buttress the skills of professionals,” as Atul Gawande puts it. A checklist is, in a sense, a reminder that ensures key aspects of the final product don't get left out. I found myself imagining a rigor checklist. A gut check teachers could use—even or perhaps especially when they were focused on other things like installing strong procedures—that would let them assess: Was this lesson worthy? Were the core things in place? Every lesson wouldn't need every piece, but over time if a teacher had to say, no, we didn't write today, no, we didn't read any challenging grade-level-or-above text, they would know they needed to make some changes.

The goal wouldn't be comprehensiveness. It would be a gut check. A quick and efficient tool to help teachers make sure they weren't consistently missing something.

Here's what I put together:

· Students write frequently and describe or reflect on at least one important idea in complete sentences (Grade 1 and above).

· Teacher consistently asks students to improve, develop, and revise initial answers both verbally or in writing.

· Teacher introduces new and advanced vocabulary and students use these words frequently to engage and discuss the content of the lesson.

· Students read challenging text (grade level or above) and text-dependent questions are used to ensure they are able to establish meaning. The discussion is not limited to the establishing of meaning but the step is not overlooked.

· Teacher achieves voice equity; almost everyone participates by speaking; everyone participates by listening. Teacher uses Cold Call, follow-ons, and formative writing among other tools to achieve this.

· Students use retrieval practice to encode key knowledge in long-term memory.

It's imperfect. Other people would name different things. In fact you can make your own if you don't like mine. But to me this would be a great tool to give teachers—especially when they were training on other important aspects of building an effective classroom that might distract them from the big picture—so that when they finished preparing a lesson they could ask themselves, In the long run, am I on the right path?