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

Notes
Preface to the 3.0 Edition: Equity, justice, and the science of learning

I've called this opening section of the third edition of this book a “preface,” but only because I had to call it something. I mostly skip prefaces and perhaps you do, too.

Please don't skip this one. I am going to tell you the story of this book's relationship to a rapidly changing world: How it fits within larger questions of equity and social justice. How it connects to the growing insights of cognitive science on learning.

Whether you're a TLAC veteran or new to the book, it will help you to make sense of what you read in the rest of this volume.

In the summer of 2019 I set out to revise Teach Like a Champion for a second time. I'd revised it once before, sharing what I'd learned from further study and tapping into the wisdom of teachers who'd adapted the original techniques. I'd watch them teach and think, I never would have thought of that or How could I have not thought of that? And so version 2.0 came about.

This time around I again wanted to tap into that wisdom, but I wanted to make a bigger change as well. I wanted to discuss research in cognitive psychology that was rapidly adding to our knowledge of how the human brain worked and how learning happened. The fact that what University of Virginia cognitive psychologist Daniel Willingham calls the “cognitive revolution” was not showing up in classroom instruction was, to me, an equity issue. Students deserved teaching informed by science. It was no longer viable to leave the connections to research implicit in my own book, or not to use the research to understand more clearly not only what was (and wasn't) important to do in the classroom but why.

Great 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 often able to evoke brilliance from even the most mundane of strategies.” But if a clear purpose could make mundane strategies brilliant, a lack of clarity about purpose could also cause an effective strategy to fail. To know why is to be several steps closer to consistently knowing how.

I wanted to do more of that. If you knew that, as Willingham puts it, students remember what they think about, you could be intentional about using Everybody Writes and Cold Call to help ensure that everyone thought deeply about the lesson content; if you knew that students need to feel psychological safety in order to learn, you could be intentional about using Habits of Attention to wrap them in a culture that ensured constant messages of support from peers.

So version 3.0 began to take shape. I replaced the chapter on lesson planning with one on lesson preparation. The two things are not the same, of course. Preparation is what you do after the plan is written—by you or somebody else—to get ready to teach it. Time spent in schools was convincing me of its profound importance—and the frequency with which it is overlooked. The first technique in that chapter is Exemplar Planning—writing out the ideal answers you want students to give to important questions you'll ask during class.¹ That might seem like a superfluous task. You might think, I already have a good sense for what students should say. But writing it out helps clear your working memory and this has a very important effect, I now understood.

I'll discuss working memory—essentially what you are conscious of thinking about—more in Chapter One, but when you are thinking hard about something and your working memory is full, the quality and depth of your perception is reduced. If you're driving a car while talking to your significant other on the phone, you're far more likely to misjudge the rate of approach of an oncoming vehicle and have an accident. It's not so much that your hands aren't free but that your working memory isn't. In critical moments, doing one thing implies not doing another. That's true for students and it's true for teachers. If you're trying to remember the answer you wanted students to give while they're answering you, you won't hear what they say as accurately as you could. But write the answer out and glance at it even briefly and it will make a profound difference. You will hear your students’ thinking more clearly.

Cognitive psychology was also increasingly clear about the importance of background knowledge and long-term memory so I added new techniques based on how teachers were applying Retrieval Practice and Knowledge Organizers. Dylan Wiliam has called Cognitive Load Theory “the single most important thing for teachers to know,” and you'll see its relevance throughout the book and especially in technique 21, Take the Steps. Eventually I decided to add Chapter One, as well, which summarizes key principles that might compose a strong mental model of classroom instruction—a mental model being itself something cognitive psychologists had identified as necessary to guide strong decision making.

That the book was changing was inevitable—not only because of the useful and sometimes brilliant adaptations I saw teachers make but also because of honest and earnest mistakes. There were classrooms I'd visit that took my breath away and also classrooms where a teacher was “doing TLAC” and I didn't like what I saw, and that, too, was cause for reflection. How could it be that I would see two teachers using similar techniques in nearby rooms and one made me feel pride and exhilaration and the other distress?

I say that without judgment. One of many broader life lessons I've learned from great teachers can be found in technique 59, Positive Framing, and specifically in the section on Assume the Best, which involves avoiding the urge to attribute negative intention to an action unless it's unambiguously the case. When a couple of students don't follow your directions, for example, if you are assuming the best, you might say, “Guys, I must not have been clear enough about how to do this; I'd like you to work silently,” or “Pause. A couple of us forgot that this was supposed to be a silent task. Let's fix that now.” Assuming the best—I must not have been clear or you probably forgot versus you don't care or you ignored the directions—not only builds stronger, more positive relationships but it causes you to perceive your classroom—and the world—differently because what you practice seeing is, in the end, what you come to see. In The Happiness Advantage, Shawn Achor calls this the Tetris Effect. If you play the game Tetris long enough, you begin to imagine its brightly colored shapes falling everywhere. If you make a habit of naming things you are grateful for each day, you come to see a world full of things worthy of gratitude. If you practice assuming good intentions you see a world striving for goodness and this makes you happier, more optimistic, and probably a better teacher.

It's the same for students, incidentally. When we help them to make the most charitable interpretation possible of their peers—are you sure she meant to push you? are you sure he meant that as a slight?—we give them a better world. As John Haidt and Greg Lukianoff point out, having a charitable, positive, and optimistic mindset is a healthier way to go through life.²

All of which is a bit of a digression—at least if thinking about student well-being is ever a digression. My point is that as teachers, remembering to assume the best and say to students “My directions must not have been clear enough” rather than “Some of you weren't listening to the directions” actually causes us to interrupt our own tendency to make the fundamental attribution error³ and instead ask: Actually, were my directions clear enough? Perhaps not.

When I saw classrooms where techniques I'd described were used in a way that did not feel right, I strove to ask myself: Were my directions clear enough? Why might people forget? Was the reason techniques were occasionally misapplied a result of what I'd written—or of what I had left unsaid?

The answer, of course, was sometimes yes. How could it not be? Teaching is difficult work done under complex and often challenging conditions. It would be impossible to get everything right—for a teacher and certainly for someone seeking to describe what teachers did or might do.

I return to this topic later, but for now I'll describe one resulting change in this version of the book: Keystone Videos. These are extended videos (most are about ten minutes long) intended to show a longer arc of a teacher's lesson where they use multiple techniques in combination. They convey a broader sense of what the culture and ethos of exceptional classrooms look like and the ways techniques combine and interact. I've added them because to show a technique with clarity sometimes requires a degree of focus that both reveals and distorts a teacher's work.

Take Christine Torres: You'll see several videos from her classroom in this book. I first saw her teaching on an impromptu visit to Springfield Prep in Springfield, Massachusetts, and the moment I stepped into her room I was blown away. Her lessons were impeccably prepared. I would use the word scholarly to describe the rigor of the content and the ideas her students developed. She expressed her belief in their capacity for excellence in everything she did, and while she expected effort and focus from students, love, joy, and even playfulness also shone through.

I had observed as one of her students, making a comment intended for his peers, had muttered inaudibly while facing away from them as he spoke. “Don't talk to the wall 'cuz the wall don't ca-are,” Christine sang in a lilting voice. The student turned and smiled cautiously, noticing his classmates’ supportive gazes looking back at him. The wall might not care but his classmates were telling him with their eye contact that they did. He braced himself and offered an insight about the novel in a halting but clear voice, and you could see, afterwards, that he was happy—and just maybe a tiny bit surprised. He had done it; he could do it. This was a classroom that raised you up—it drew your best out of you.

Christine's classroom was, to use a phrase I will return to, a bright mirror. It reflected her students, revealing and appreciating who they already were, but it also changed them by bringing out things that had not been visible. It didn't just give them an opportunity, it influenced them intentionally to engage in positive behaviors they might not have risked, might not have even known existed, without the light of an intentionally supportive culture shining on them. Every environment socializes the people within it to make certain choices and exhibit certain behaviors, Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler explain in Nudge. There is no neutral case. There are merely cases of greater or lesser intentionality. A classroom where students react with disinterest to their classmates’ comments is no more “natural” than one like Christine's where they react with encouragement. One is just harder to create.

Later we sent our cameras to Christine's classroom and among the things we cut from the video was a series of tiny moments where Christine did some version of what she had done when she sang, “Don't talk to the wall 'cuz the wall don't care” and socialized her students to speak audibly and to one another. “Loud and proud” was how she most often put it.

It would be hard to understand how she does that—the speed, the tone, the variation in the phrases she uses—if you didn't see a series of examples in rapid succession. You need a montage—a series of moments when she took those actions spliced together tidily. But if you only saw the montage you'd only get part of the picture. You'd also need a taste of what I'd seen and felt standing in the back of Christine's classroom that first morning—a sense for how rigorous her teaching was and of the love her students felt from and for her. You'd need to see those things to understand how her use of Format Matters (technique 18, which includes pushing students to speak audibly) interacted with the other things she did. So we added the keystone videos, which you can read descriptions of in the introduction. They are often taken in classrooms from which you can also see shorter, more focused clips that demonstrate a specific technique; my hope is that watching the Keystone videos will give you the bigger picture.

* * * * * * *

That was where this version of the book stood when, suddenly, 2020 happened.

It goes without saying that the disruption resulting from the COVID-19 epidemic had profound effects on schools and teaching. Some of that is reflected in this book—I've included sidebars with examples of techniques used in an online setting on the assumption that remote teaching will play a role in schooling in some capacity even after schools come back to (or closer to) normal.⁴

But growing urgency in the movement for social justice and social change also exploded in 2020 in the wake of the killing of George Floyd at the hands of police in Minneapolis,⁵ the most recent example of a horrifying pattern of Black and Brown citizens being killed by law enforcement. And of course it recalled the long history of systemic inequities in other institutions, including schools. This stirred me and my colleagues to more explicitly define the role we wanted to play in the fight for a more equitable and just society.

I want to say as directly as possible that Teach Like a Champion is and always has been a book about social justice. (The systematic inequality of the American education system has been obvious to anyone who cared to look since long before 2020.) Its premise is that students not born to privilege and opportunity—often Black and Brown—deserve schools and classrooms that don't just provide them an opportunity to achieve—implying that the chance is there if they choose it—though far too many go to schools that fail that test. Its premise is that the opportunity to sit in classrooms where one can cautiously pursue an interest in scholarly endeavor is not good enough. Social justice means (to me, at least, and I hope to the people who read this book) every student's right to be in classrooms that consistently ensure they can pursue their dreams of becoming scientists, engineers, and artists, the presidents of banks, organizations, and nations in classrooms that socialize scholarship and protect and create the optimal conditions for achievement. They deserve schools that encourage and push them to engage in behaviors that foster their own learning and the learning of those around them. And they deserve something that the author and literacy expert Alfred Tatum calls “disciplinary equity.”

“There are dozens of disciplines taught at the university level in which it feels like there is a Black eraser,” Tatum wrote recently. It's imperative that “all disciplines belong to all groups,”⁶ he noted, but the feeling of erasure exists (in engineering and computer science and biochemistry, for example) because we do not sufficiently “provide the foundation in elementary, middle and high schools.” Providing that foundation requires strength of academics and strength of culture—a bright mirror in every classroom that reflects students and draws them into the light.

The moment when Christine's student turned hesitantly to face to the room—unsure that he could do it—and saw not only encouragement and support in his classmates’ eyes, but also a social norm reflected, one that said: we participate with enthusiasm Ms. Torres’ room; we are unabashedly intellectual, and so found that he could do it—that was a moment of social justice.

When culture is not strong like that, when it does not foster positive and productive engagement as the norm, teachers make compromises. A lesson plan's primary attribute must then be its capacity to win students’ attention with something catchy because they are not expected and socialized to pay attention. The question How rigorous can I make this lesson? is off the table.

This trade-off is by no means limited to certain schools. As you read this, there are tens of thousands of students across almost every strata of American society sitting in classrooms in various states of compromise, where a quiet tyranny—more or less invisible but still potent—exerts itself. TNTP's 2018 report, The Opportunity Myth, suggests how endemic this quiet tyranny is. Following nearly 4,000 students in five diverse school systems, TNTP found that even when they had completed the work they were given, even when they strove to give their best and set a goal of further study, students were routinely, overwhelmingly not on track to accomplish the things they aspired to. The work they did in school was not challenging or demanding enough. Even those who received high marks were not prepared. “Their lives,” the authors wrote, “are slipping further away each day, unbeknownst to them and their families—not because they can't master challenging material, but because they're rarely given a real chance to try. Students spent more than 500 hours per school year on assignments that weren't appropriate for their grade and with instruction that didn't ask enough of them—the equivalent of six months of wasted class time in each core subject.”

Social justice to me is classrooms that are radically better, classrooms that foster academic achievement and that prepare every student to accomplish their dreams. If a classroom does not operate as if the young people in it were capable of greatness, it will never be a just classroom. But operating as if young people are capable of greatness does not mean pandering. It means loving young people enough to push them, with warmth, grace, and humanity, to work harder than they may be inclined to. It means loving them enough to set limits, with humanity, constancy, and steadiness, of course. Those of us who are parents know this is true with our own children.⁷

The term social justice, I am aware, means different things to different people. Different teachers will in good conscience answer the call of equity in different ways,⁸ but if students attend schools that do not foster in them excellence in reading, writing, science, and math, and therefore leave them unprepared to achieve excellence and leadership in their chosen field, we have not created a more socially just world, no matter how committed to action we may be. Equity starts with achievement.

Further, as one of the best school leaders I know observed,⁹ if our students do not bring knowledge and analytical skills to the discussion of social justice itself, we risk giving rise to lethal mutations—poorly thought-through best intentions that are more harm than good. In 2021, educators in Oregon received an official document advising them that asking students to show their work on math problems was a form of “white supremacy.” A friend shared an online discussion in which educators argued that homework and grading were “colonialist constructs.” It's hard to tell how many people believe specious arguments that striving to reach the highest levels of achievement, accomplishment, and excellence is somehow antithetical to people of color or tantamount to “embracing Whiteness.” It's alarming to even have to wonder. This book is written in the belief that such propositions are not just wrong but destructive and that academic achievement is the enabling engine of equity and social justice.

One of the most memorable texts I've read in the past year or so is Damon Tweedy's Black Man in a White Coat, a memoir of the author's experiences during his medical education and as a practicing doctor. If nothing else, the COVID crisis has proven that, as with almost every other benefit of our society, quality medical care is unevenly distributed. To anyone who had read Tweedy's book this could not have been a surprise. If we aspire to a just, equitable, and fair society it will require an abundance of doctors of every background but, doubly so, doctors from communities of color and others who are poorly served by the medical field. Social justice likewise relies in the long run on our educating a diverse array of doctors and engineers, scientists and lawyers, artists, financiers, and tech entrepreneurs.

Here is an example: during COVID, pulse oximeters, the devices used to measure oxygen levels in the blood, were three times more likely to give incorrect readings for people with Black skin than with White, The Economist recently reported.¹⁰ This is because the devices were designed with more translucent, white skin in mind. Unknown numbers of patients with darker skin in distress were sent home in error due to this design bias. And of course design bias exists in a thousand places and will likely continue to live in those places until greater diversity is achieved among the engineers who create and manufacture medical devices. That—per Alfred Tatum's argument—means “disciplinary equity”: highly trained and prepared students of color in advanced science and math courses—and in every other field.

So if social justice to you means marching in protest, I support you. Many of your students may line up behind you, too. But know also that some will want to engineer information systems instead¹¹ and this too is important. Some will choose to lose themselves in the color and composition of the painting they are working on. This too is important. Their right is to be prepared by our schools and our classrooms to go wherever those passions take them. That is also part of social justice: every young person made able to define and pursue their own dream. Is it necessary to point out for the majority of children of poverty, for the majority of Black and Brown children, and just possibly for the majority of children, period, this is not reliably the case?

While the role of teaching in a just and equitable society is my passion, I should note that I do not think that this is a book about educating “poor kids” or “Black and Brown kids.” Kids are kids, even if schools are not always what they deserve. This is a book about teaching better, though it is true that I learned what I learned by studying teachers in the part of the education sector that is most important to me, personally.

But I am not foolish enough to think that because I have strong feelings for this aspect of social justice that I fully understand it or the experience of the communities I seek to serve, so part of writing this book involved a months-long process of learning and study of my own, often in the company of my colleagues on the Teach Like a Champion team. The range of the research I read expanded to include social theory, social justice, and culturally responsive teaching, for example. You will see some of the authors I read in that process referenced in the pages of this book: Zaretta Hammond, Lisa Delpit, Alfred Tatum, Rudine Sims-Bishop, and Adeyemi Stembridge.

My entire staff also participated in an internal review of all of our work. This was led by my co-Managing Director, Darryl Williams—it's hard to lead the process of questioning one's own thinking—but involved feedback and insights from all of my colleagues as well as partners and school leaders who use Teach Like a Champion in organizations and schools. We discussed at length the techniques and terms in the book to ensure that the tone felt right and descriptions would reduce the possibility of misapplication or misinterpretation. We carefully watched and rewatched videos, paying close attention to how techniques were portrayed so that teachers would apply and adapt them successfully to dignify, uplift, and honor students. There were times, to be honest, when the videos or my writing did not accurately capture what we set out to convey and this resulted in my rewriting passages of this book, renaming techniques or concepts within techniques, and retiring some videos.

I am aware that many readers of Teach Like a Champion may have heard critiques of some techniques—Format Matters and what was then called SLANT, for example. And it was with some surprise that, while engaging in the process of revision, I opened my copy of Teach Like a Champion 2.0 to reread it and was surprised to find how little of what I believed about why and how I had included in some techniques. You will find those sections of the book in particular extensively revised to help frame them carefully and ensure that all readers fully grasp why as much as how so they can use them with confidence to help students thrive and succeed. I want to be clear—I think those techniques, done right, are among the most critical levers of success and social justice. You could see that in Christine's classroom as you will see it in a dozen more. But they are powerful tools, too, so it is important to get them right. Critiques that claim they are a form of tyranny or an effort to “control Black and Brown bodies,” when they are not informed by deliberate distortion, miss the point: The freedoms gained from a culture that asks students to track one another, and where students’ ideas are therefore deliberated, refined, and celebrated, far outweighs the supposed restrictions it imposes. That said, I, too, have been in a room where the application felt wrong. A flawed application does not indict a sound principle—but it does remind us of how important better and more responsive application is.

There were other areas of revision, too. In reading back over my original work I could occasionally see negatively framed examples and at times descriptions that seemed not to assume the best about students. Part of the reason for this was and is my deep appreciation for teachers. My desire for this book is that it will prepare teachers for the most challenging scenarios they will face—the ones that erode their faith that they can succeed and cause people to leave the profession—as much as the happy and sunny times that inspire them and make teaching the best job in the world. There are precious few books that talk about those difficult moments. And so at times I have written examples that show students at their most challenging. It is not my assumption that young people are “usually” this way. My presumption is always that it is understood that educators love young people even—well, especially—when they set limits and provide structure for them, but I can see how some examples might have read otherwise. If nothing else I have gone back through them and tried to reduce any implication that students are out to misbehave. It is also important to be honest about the job, however. Students in any classroom anywhere represent a cross section of human nature. Any classroom anywhere is a room full of goodness and weakness, virtue and silliness, wisdom and folly. That's why the job is so hard. I'm grateful if, as a reader, you understand that the reason I sometimes give examples of challenging behavior is because it's a reality teachers deal with—too often in silence and without systematic support.

In the end, the process of self-reflection and examination has also helped me to be clear about what I believe. What I believe is that issues of social justice are inseparable from issues of teaching and that issues of teaching include the necessity of deliberately designing classroom cultures to ensure the most supportive culture for young people.

Some people are uncomfortable with this. They see engineering cultures as coercive, an exercise in the excess of power and authority. But I return to the Fundamental Attribution Error. We attribute other people's behavior to “abiding personal characteristics” and “minimize the influence of the surrounding situation.” We see permanent traits—he doesn't care—instead of a person who might care deeply in a different context. We think insufficiently about environment—how do I create conditions that make him want to care?—and underestimate how people respond to cues and norms. At times those norms are practically shouting at us and yet we somehow cannot seem to hear them at all.

Yet another field of study that has been influential to me in writing this book is evolutionary biology, the net of which is that the humans who won out in the struggle for evolution won by coordinating in groups and have evolved to be exceptionally responsive to what is required for inclusion in the group—it is of the highest importance from an evolutionary point of view. We are creatures of culture first, supremely responsive to social norms, and every young person deserves to step into a classroom where social norms are as positive and constructive as possible.

Let me explain what I mean by describing a moment in the life of a student. We'll call her Asha. She is sitting in Biology class and has just had an idea. It's half developed—a notion still—but she wonders if she has thought of something that others have not. Maybe this is something smart. She's a bit scared to share what she's thinking. Her idea could be wrong or, just as bad, obvious already to everyone else. Maybe no one else cares much about DNA recombination and the fire it has suddenly lit in her mind. Maybe saying something earnest about DNA recombination makes you that kid—the one who raises her hand too often, who tries too hard, who breaks the social code. These sorts of thoughts have heretofore led her to adhere to a philosophy that counsels Keep it to yourself; don't let anyone see your intellect; take no risks; fit in. But somehow in this moment the desire to voice her thought overcomes her anxiety. She raises her hand and her teacher calls on her.

What happens next is critical to Asha's future. Will her classmates seem like they care about her idea? Will she read interest in their faces? Will they nod and show their appreciation? Ask a follow-up question? Jot down a phrase in their notes? Or will they be slouched in their chairs and turned away, checking their phones literally or metaphorically, their body language expressing their indifference? Oh, did you say something? Smirk. Will the next comment ignore her idea? Will there even be a next comment, or will her words drift away in a silence that tells her that no one cared enough to acknowledge or even look at her after she spoke?

These factors are Stations of the Cross in Asha's journey. They will influence the relationship she perceives between herself and school and her aspirations. She is a vibrant soul, full of ideas she does not ordinarily share and wondering quietly if maybe someone like her could become a doctor. She doesn't know anyone who's done that, but she finds herself thinking about it sometimes.

Obviously, those dreams don't all come down to this moment, but we would be foolish to dismiss its relevance. It could be the first tiny step on the path to medical school. Or it could be the last time she raises her hand all year.

Yes, it matters whether her teacher responds to her comment with encouragement—but perhaps not as much as how the social environment, the rest of Asha's peers, respond. If her teacher praises Asha's comment amidst scorn and resounding silence from her peers, the benefit will be limited. The teacher's capacity to shape norms in Asha's classroom matters at least as much as her ability to connect individually with Asha. Relationships matter, but the social norms we create probably matter more. That's a hard thing to acknowledge. It removes us from the center of the story a little bit. But it's a powerful thing to recognize as well. In many classrooms there is no model for what the social norms should communicate while Asha speaks or after she has spoken and her words hang in the air. Is it really their business whether students show an interest in what their classmates say? Or perhaps there is a model, but it is mostly words—her teacher and maybe her school do not believe that what happens in that moment is within their control. Imagine what a headache it would be to try to make that happen with hundreds of students, many of whom “just don't care”? In the end, what happens in this moment and a thousand like it will most likely be an accident: lucky or unfortunate, supportive or destructive, with immense consequences for Asha and her classmates.

Something close to optimal culture, where Asha's classmates are communicating with eye contact and body language: we are listening; we respect your idea; it interests us; keep raising your hand, does not occur naturally or by accident. It occurs when adults cause it to happen.

Let me close with a short parable about something I call the Band-Aid Paradox.

At the beginning of his book Predictably Irrational, a study of “why people misunderstand the consequences of their behaviors and for that reason repeatedly make wrong decisions,” Duke behavioral economist and psychologist Dan Ariely tells a story about bandages.

Nurses often operate under the belief that that ripping bandages off quickly delivers less pain to patients than slower, more gradual removal. Fast bandage removal is proven to be the preferable form of treatment, many believe.

A burn victim during his youth, Ariely had a great many bandages removed by this method and was skeptical. His feelings must have been strong, because studying psychology years later, he tested the idea empirically and found that slower bandage removal was in fact more preferable to patients.

Ariely returned to the hospital where he had spent months in recovery and presented his findings to the nurses there but was surprised to find that even in the face of his research, nurses persisted with suboptimal treatment.

Ariely had failed to account for the psychological discomfort nurses felt as they removed bandages. Patients expressed anxiety, fear, and discomfort as nurses slowly pulled their bandages. The feeling that they might be hurting someone was bad, even if they knew rationally that they were helping, and drawing those moments out made it even worse for the nurses.

Turns out that for caregivers, the psychological aspects of administering treatment—even clearly beneficial treatment—is a significant factor in determining the care they provide. I'm going to call this the Band-Aid Paradox. Caregivers’ anxiety about treatment can cause them to choose a suboptimal form of treatment and explain it via an argument apparently grounded in patients’ interest.

A similar Band-Aid Paradox influences practices in the field of teaching. Administering “treatments” often results in a conflict between what “feels good”—or feels safe or jibes with the practitioner's self-concept or perceptions about equity. Doubly so when, like doctors whose self-concept is based on being a healer, our identity is intertwined with beliefs about right and wrong.

Teachers are constantly faced with challenging and difficult tasks and must contemplate the very real possibility that they will struggle or fail, publicly and in front of an unforgiving audience, as they endeavor to execute them. It is, we should always remain aware, easier to rationalize the preferential treatment for the caregiver than try the riskier one that will serve students in the long run. Faced with making a classroom where students are socialized to show they value one another's ideas through prosocial nonverbal actions including eye contact, the path of explaining why students should not be coerced to track their classmates in the first place beckons.

The harder the task, the greater the risk some educator somewhere will create a very smart or righteous-sounding rationale against it. That is certainly a far less risky path than the difficult and thankless work of shaping norms to ensure the rights of all children to learn in classrooms that truly prepare them to achieve their dreams.

I have written, in the margin of my version of Teach Like a Champion 2.0, a phrase that I have tried to use frequently in this book: loving accountability. That might not be a phrase that would naturally occur to a lot of people. Admittedly, it took several years of writing about teaching for it to come to me. But it is deeply important. It reminds us, first, that moments of accountability can and should be done with a smile to remind students that we care about them, and, second, that accountability is a form of love.

When we Cold Call, for example, we are drawing students—sometimes willingly, sometimes hesitantly—into the conversation and thus telling them their voice matters. We are building for them a habit of paying attention more fully, and sustaining that habit of attention. As Zaretta Hammond writes, in a phrase I will return to, “Before we can be motivated to learn what is in front of us, we must pay attention to it. The hallmark of an independent learner is his ability to direct his attention toward his own leaning.” Building someone's attentiveness in class is a gift.

And if students feel a hint of anxiety, OK, that comes with growing sometimes. Knowing that learning requires you to speak up at times and knowing from experience that you are able; learning to pay attention—at first because you know your teacher is probably going to call on you to keep you honest and later because, well, it has become a habit—those are the gifts of a classroom led with love. A smile during the Cold Call reminds both your students and yourself—because pulling Band-Aids slowly is hard—that it's a good thing.

In the section on Cold Call you can see Denarius Frazier and BreOnna Tindall do this. They are smiling reassuringly and warmly at their students as they Cold Call and you can feel the love in those moments. They will remind you, I hope, that it is not a contradiction to call accountability a form of love. It's not always what students would choose at first if they were given a choice, but they often prefer it in the end when teaching informed by lovingly accountability—like Denarius's and BreOnna's and Christine's and a score of other teachers in this book—results in not only success but in engagement, when students lose themselves in the lesson and feel learning as a state of flow.¹² Then they are happier even if they never connect the happiness to the accountability that started it.

Even knowing that, though, some of them would still take the easier path. In such cases it is helpful to think of whom we serve in education. We serve the version of our students looking back on their schooling ten or fifteen years later, in light of its long-run effect on their lives. And we serve their parents, who are counting on us to push their children to create a future for themselves even in a world that surrounds them with distractions and messages that it's OK, cool even, not to do the things now that will create opportunity later. There is some tradition of young people not wanting to do what their parents say but coming, in the end, to say the things their parents said to them to their own children. Education is a long game and parents are counting on us to take the long view. You can hear this in the interviews in Robert Pondisicio's outstanding How the Other Half Learns. Among the most gut-wrenching are the parents whose own educations were unsuccessful, and who seek schools and classrooms that will prevent the same outcome from befalling their children. “I got lost in the system,” one mother tells Pondiscio, “and I refuse to let that happen to my son.” The sense of desperation is palpable.

Part of teaching well is teaching students to choose a path that is steep and rocky, that they will sometimes complain about. It's a long way up and perhaps others appear to be on what seems like an easier path, even if it does not lead to the summit. The steeper path involves not just harder work but psychologically harder work—for teacher as much as student. It involves slowly pulling off Band-Aids. It involves knowing that love is sometimes paradoxical.

If you seek justification for doing what is easy, this book will not likely please you. That said, there are many books that will. If your purpose is to find the most effective and caring way to do what needs doing to best serve students, even when it is difficult—especially when it is difficult—my goal is to provide that. If that is the book you are looking for, please turn the page.

Notes

1. 1. The idea began with Paul Bambrick-Santoyo and his team at Uncommon Schools.

2. 2. See The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure (New York: Penguin Books, 2018).

3. 3. Fundamental Attribution Error: “The tendency to overestimate the degree to which an individual's behavior is determined by his or her abiding personal characteristics, attitudes, or beliefs and, correspondingly, to minimize the influence of the surrounding situation on that behavior” (APA Dictionary of Psychology, https://dictionary.apa.org/fundamental-attribution-error).

4. 4. More thoughts on remote learning are included in the book my team and I wrote to support teachers during remote instruction: Teaching in the Online Classroom.

5. 5. I don't mean to imply that Floyd's killing was the sole source of the outrage and anger so many felt. Obviously, the long string of killings of citizens of color in the care of institutions whose job was to protect them has been a source of ongoing consternation and frustration.

6. 6. Tatum is the Provost and Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs at Metropolitan State University in Denver. His comments were made in a series of tweets on April 12, 2021.

7. 7. When a small child would like to eat ice cream in lieu of dinner, all but the most indulgent parents understand that to love the child is to say no. When the child is older they will have days when they want to do what is hurtful to themselves in the long run or challenge the rules we set for their benefit: I'm quitting the track team; I'm not writing my essay; I'm going to stay out past curfew. Teenagers are wired to do these things; adults who love them are supposed to do what will help them thrive throughout their lives, even if it is difficult. To love them is to say, “Get your shoes; I'm driving you to practice,” “Let me help you start your thesis paragraph before it gets late,” or “I'll see you here at 11 sharp if you plan on using the car again.” A loving adult says this even if it results in temporary resentment.

8. 8. To some it implies that teachers should encourage students to participate actively in social protest, for example. To some it implies that issues of social justice should be a major focus of the books students read and the topics they study. To others it is more important that students prepare themselves for professional success by more traditional means such as reading Shakespeare and studying cell structure.

9. 9. Brandi Chin of Denver School of Science and Technology. You should see her school. (Actually, you can see it, when you watch video of ace teacher BreOnna Tindall later in this book.)

10. 10. “Design Bias Is Harmful, and in Some Cases May Be Lethal,” Working in the Dark, The Economist, April 10, 2021.

11. 11. I am reminded of a quote from Adeyemi Stembridge: “In any given school with any particular student, race may mean everything or nothing at all. We must make ourselves available for the discomfort inherently accompanying the topic of race and we must also be prepared to dismiss everything we know about race to allow students to show us who they are as unique individuals with agency and their own catalogue of concepts, contexts and lived experiences.” A responsive educator must always see and respond to the student he or she serves. Even when they do not share the interests of their teachers it is those interests we must serve.

12. 12. I discuss the idea of “flow” in learning in the introduction to Chapter Six, “Pacing,” but Cold Call can be a key tool to achieving the dynamic momentum that brings it about.