Teach like a champion 3.0: 63 techniques that put students on the path to college - Lemov Doug 2021
Notes
Lesson structures
1. 1. TLAC purists will notice the change in name of this technique from Name the Steps to Take the Steps. The core idea is breaking complex tasks up into discrete steps and teaching and practicing them. I've de-emphasized the naming part. The naming can be useful but it can also lead to an excessive focus on a resulting acronym—that is, you fall in love with your acronym and then don't retire it when students are ready.
2. 2. Birch and Bloom coined this term in a 2007 paper “The curse of knowledge in reasoning about false beliefs.” I am partial to Greg Ashman's treatment of it in The Power of Explicit Teaching and Direct Instruction.
3. 3. In a study of how physicists studied complex problems, Chi, Glaser, and Feltovich found that experts see deep principles when novices see superficial features.
4. 4. On January 30, 2021. Thank you to the lovely and insightful people who shared their thoughts. It's reassuring to know there remain corners of sanity, goodness, and community on social media.
5. 5. I used this term in TLAC 1.0 to refer to engaging exercises to win students' interest at the outset of a lesson or unit.
6. 6. The addition of excess and extraneous details, notes the ghost of Hemingway, does not make an essay better.
7. 7. Show Call (technique 13) is an ideal tool for this.
8. 8. “Mysterious Houses” by Victoria Taylor-Gore.
9. 9. There's a fair amount of research emerging about how to present material in notes so that it's most effective for students and maximizes their working memory. Diagrams are included, for example, but only carefully made with short explanatory notes and very limited extraneous information. If this topic is of interest to you, Oliver Caviglioli's Dual Coding is an excellent starting point.
10. 10. Pam A. Mueller and Daniel Oppenheimer conducted three separate studies to compare longhand note takers to those who took notes on laptops (“The Pen Is Mightier Than the Keyboard: Advantages of Longhand Over Laptop Note Taking,” Psychological Science 25, no. 6 [2014]). “In three studies,” the authors wrote, “we found that students who took notes on laptops performed worse on conceptual questions than students who took notes longhand. We show that whereas taking more notes can be beneficial, laptop note takers' tendency to transcribe lectures verbatim rather than processing information and reframing it in their own words is detrimental to learning.” In a 2014 discussion of Mueller and Oppenheimer's research in Scientific American, Cindi May notes, “Because longhand notes contain students' own words and handwriting, they may serve as more effective memory cues by recreating the context (e.g. thought processes, emotions, conclusions) as well as content (e.g. individual facts) from the original learning session.” Some researchers suggest that typewritten notes offer other advantages (e.g. they may be preferable because they can be more easily edited). This may be true, but it is also true that having a laptop out during class causes students to multitask and distract themselves. Daisy Christodoulou's Teachers vs Tech? summarizes much of the research in this area. She cites Carter, Greenberg, and Walker's 2016 study in which students who did not bring devices to a course did better than those who did and Glass and Kang's 2018 study in which students were randomly split into two lecture groups, one with devices and one without, with the result being that students without devices did better. One possible reason might be the benefits of longhand note taking. Another might be the reduction of attentional focus caused by the presence of a screened device.
11. 11. I took my own advice here. When my son left for college, I gave him two pieces of academic advice: (1) Never miss class, and (2) put your laptop away during class and handwrite your notes, then retype the notes afterward to review.
12. 12. Which is important for teachers to be consistent about as they write on the board!
13. 13. Her book should be required reading for every teacher. You can read my review of it here: https://www.educationnext.org/forgetting-how-to-read-review-reader-come-home-maryanne-wolf/.
14. 14. Rates of reading dropped especially steeply over the years when students typically get a smartphone, from 76 percent at age 8 to 40 percent at age 14. https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED607777.pdf.
15. 15. Perhaps as a result the 2005 ACT revealed that “only about half of our nation's ACT-tested students are ready for college-level reading.”
16. 16. It is important to be aware that the smartphone is designed to fracture attention and addict its users and it is very successful at doing so. How far is yours from you right now? When did you last check it? Now that I have mentioned it, are you itching to have a quick peek?
17. 17. The Grapes of Wrath provides a fortuitous example—it alternates between chapters written in straightforward prose and chapters written in a variety of experimental styles that merge prose and poetry. Can students read the novel independently? It depends on which chapter you assign.
18. 18. It's also worth noting that beginning with shared reading can act as an effective transition into independent reading—it's much easier to continue reading something you've started together, rather than to jump in cold.
19. 19. Control the Game—which you are welcome to keep using if you prefer—originally came from the game of soccer. Certain central midfielders have the job of controlling the game, not by hogging the ball themselves but by being a brief and often nearly invisible pivot point: the ball comes to them and they pass it somewhere else. They coordinate the attack and set the rhythm, determining when others get opportunities and setting them up to succeed. Such players rarely score the goals. Their job is to organize and arrange the team, to get the ball to others so they can score. This process—ball comes in briefly, they pass it on to someone new, ball comes back, and they quickly move it on again in a different direction—reminded me of what a teacher does when steering reading opportunities around the room. Truly, it was an obscure and quirky reference at best. But there were a lot of techniques to name and you can't get them all right. At least it wasn't an acronym.
20. 20. Student Achievement Partners’ report is only one of many that emphasize the critical role of fluency in comprehension at all grade levels as there is extensive research on this point. Their “Short Guide to Placing Text at the Center of Learning” can be found at their website: https://achievethecore.org/content/upload/A%20Short%20Guide%20to%20Placing%20Text%20at%20the%20Center%20of%20Learning.pdf#:~:text=Rationale%3A%20Research%20shows%20dysfluency%20causes,tests%20versus%20those%20who%20fail.&text=Students%20who%20were%20previously%20fluent%20can%20become%20dysfluent%20when%20text%20complexity%20increases.
21. 21. This is a deliberate allusion to Mark Seidenberg's outstanding book Language at the Speed of Sight. It should be required reading in every graduate and undergraduate education program.
22. 22. https://shanahanonliteracy.com/blog/wake-up-reading-wars-combatants-fluency-instruction-is-part-of-the-science-of-reading.
23. 23. Maryanne Wolf's book Reader, Come Home is an outstanding study of the ways constant exposure to technology is changing the portions of the brain that we use when we read. These portions of the brain are neuroplastic—they change in response to what they are asked to do. I strongly recommend the book. I also wrote a book review of it that makes the broader case that I don't have time for here as to why Wolf's book is so deeply important. https://www.educationnext.org/forgetting-how-to-read-review-reader-come-home-maryanne-wolf/.
24. 24. And, sadly, even within the walls of many schools.
25. 25. Especially for independent reading.
26. 26. In some cases the challenges of student oral reading have come to dominate the conversation, to the point that teachers are routinely advised to “never ask students to read aloud.” It's often dismissively referred to by the pejorative phrase “popcorn reading,” but creating a simplistic straw man is not grounds for dismissing a crucial classroom practice. There are surely challenges to student oral reading, but they are also easily managed and overcome by a capable classroom teacher.
27. 27. See Oliver Caviglioli, Dual Coding.
28. 28. I discuss the Law of Comparative Judgments in technique 13, Show Call. As I noted there, it was derived in the 1920s by psychologist Louis Thurstone and demonstrates that people make better judgments about quality and learn more from analysis when asked to compare two examples of something than they do when trying to judge the quality of one example of something.