Teach like a champion 3.0: 63 techniques that put students on the path to college - Lemov Doug 2021
Specific, concrete, actionable techniques
Introduction to the third edition: The art of teaching and Its tools
Great teaching is an art. In the other arts—painting, sculpture, the writing of novels—great masters leverage a proficiency with basic tools to transform the rawest of materials (stone, paper, ink) into the most valued assets in society. This alchemy is all the more astounding because the tools often appear unremarkable to others. Who would look at a chisel, a mallet, and a file and imagine them producing Michelangelo's David?
Great art relies on the mastery and application of foundational skills, learned through diligent study—“craftsmanship,” if you will. You learn to strike a chisel with a mallet and refine the skill with time, learning at which angle to strike the chisel and how tightly to hold it. Far more important than any theory is your proficiency with the lowly chisel. True, not everyone who learns to drive a chisel will create a David, but neither can anyone who fails to master the tool do much more than make marks on rocks.
Every artist—teachers included—is an artisan whose task is to study a set of tools and unlock the secrets of their use. The more you understand the chisel, the more it guides you to see what is possible. Rounding a contour with unexpected smoothness, the chisel causes you to realize, suddenly, that you could bring added subtlety to a facial expression, more tension to the muscles of the figure. Mastery of tools does not just allow creation; it informs it. The process is often far from glamorous; an artist's life is a tradesman's life, really, characterized by calluses and stone dust, requiring diligence and humility, but its rewards are immense. It is a worthy life's work.
Traveling abroad during my junior year in college, I saw Picasso's school notebooks on display at the Picasso Museum in Barcelona. What I remember best are the sketches filling the margins of his pages. These weren't sketchbooks, mind you. These were notebooks like those every student keeps: notes from lectures. The tiny sketches memorialized a teacher's face or Picasso's own hand grasping a pencil, with perfect perspective, line, and shading. I had always thought Picasso's work was about abstraction, about a way of thinking that rendered the ability to draw accurately and realistically irrelevant. His sketches told another story, bearing witness to his mastery of fundamentals and constant drive to refine his skills. Even in the stray moments of his schooling, he was honing the building blocks of his technique. He was an artisan first and then an artist, as the fact that he filled, by one count, 178 sketchbooks in his life further attests.
This book is about the tools of the teaching craft and so I hope it will be useful to teachers everywhere. But it takes a special interest in the sector of the profession that is most important to me personally: public schools, particularly those that serve primarily students of poverty and who therefore walk a narrow and uncertain path to the opportunity they deserve. It should not be that to be born with fewer financial resources restricts one's opportunity, certainly not in a nation that believes in meritocracy, but the truth is what it is. The price of failure in schools serving students on the wrong side of the privilege gap is often high, the challenges significant. Teachers there often work in a crucible where our society's failures are paramount and sometimes seem nearly overwhelming. Still, every day in every such neighborhood, there are teachers who without much fanfare take the students who others say “can't”—can't read great literature, can't do algebra or calculus, can't and don't want to learn—and help, inspire, motivate, and even cajole them to become scholars who do. Impossibly, we often don't know who those teachers are, but they are everywhere—generally laboring unnoticed down the hall from one of the 50 percent of new hires in urban districts who leave teaching within their first three years. Think about that: It turns out that for those struggling new teachers, solutions to the challenges that will ultimately drive them out of the profession flourish just a few yards away. It turns out that for students, walking into the right classroom can pry the doors of opportunity back open. The problem is that we aren't serious enough about learning from the teachers who can provide these answers.
My goal was to find as many such teachers as I could and honor them by focusing on, and studying, their teaching. To write this book, I spent a lot of time standing in the back of classrooms and watching videotape of great teachers in action. I used Jim Collins's observation from Built to Last and Good to Great that what separates great from good matters more than what describes mere competence. I wanted to know not what made a teacher pretty good but what made her exceptional, able to beat the odds. Were there consistent ideas that allowed them to more reliably transform lives? Were there words and actions the rest of us could copy and adapt? Were there general trends to provide a road map, were there principles behind the excellence? Or was their excellence idiosyncratic and unmappable?
What I found was that while each great teacher is unique, as a group their teaching held elements in common. I started to see both theme and variation, so I began to make a list of the things they did and the ways in which they did them. I gave those actions names so I could remember them, and over time my list grew in both the number of topics and the level of specificity. Ideas coalesced into techniques. But I also found that great teachers came in every stripe and style: They were extroverts and introverts; planners and improvisers; quick-witted and serious. But in the aggregate, a story emerged. There is a toolbox for excellence even in the face of challenge, it turns out. The contents have been forged by ten thousand teachers working quietly and usually without recognition at the end of cracked-linoleum hallways. I am sure that some of my analysis of what they do is wrong. In fact, I have rewritten this book several times to try to capture more of what I am learning about what exceptional teachers do with better accuracy. One point I have tried to stress is that having a tool is not an argument for using it heedlessly. A painter has a case full of brushes and painting knives, but she does not use every one of them with each portrait or landscape.
If you're a teacher near the beginning of your study of the craft of teaching, my aim is to help you become one of those teachers who, for a long and distinguished career, unlocks the latent talent and skill waiting in students, even if previous efforts have been unsuccessful. If you commit yourself and your talents to this work, you deserve to be successful and to change lives. If you are successful, you will most likely be happy in the work, and when you are happy, in turn, you will do better work.
If you are a master teacher already, I hope a discussion of tools and their applications, the framing of a vocabulary for talking about the critical and sometimes overlooked moments of your day, will inspire you not only to refine your craft but also to love doing so and to feel the pleasure of committing (or recommitting) to the deepest possible mastery of the complex and worthy endeavor that is your life's work. I assume that in many cases this book may describe things you already know and do. That's great by me, and in that case, my goal is to help you get a little better at them, perhaps seeing useful applications and variations you haven't considered. Either way, your growth is at least as important as that of a novice teacher. Teaching is the best and most important work in our society. Those who do it deserve to experience constant growth and learning. That, after all, is what we wish for our students.
If you lead a school, I hope this book will help you in helping teachers do this challenging work as successfully as possible. In our field, the first obligation of an organization is to help its people succeed. When teachers end the day with a sense of accomplishment, when they feel they are both successful and growing more so, they stay in our schools for a long time, do outstanding work, work joyfully, and inspire others, and thus pay the organization back many times over.
The pages that follow are an effort to describe and organize the tools used by game-changing teachers, and to reflect on how and why they use them so that you can make informed decisions of your own.
My work has not been to invent the tools I describe here but to explain how others use them and what makes them effective. This has meant putting names on techniques in the interest of helping create a common vocabulary with which to analyze and discuss the classroom. The names may seem like a gimmick at first, but they are one of the most important parts. If there were no word democracy, it would be a thousand times harder to have and sustain a thing called “democracy.” We would forever be bogged down in inefficiency—“You know that thing we talked about where everyone gets a say …”—at exactly the moment we needed to take action. Teachers and administrators must be able to talk quickly and efficiently with colleagues about a clearly defined and shared set of ideas in order to sustain their work. They need a shared vocabulary thorough enough to allow a comprehensive analysis of the wide range of often complex events that happen in a classroom. I believe that names matter and are worth using. Ideally, they will allow you to talk about your own teaching and that of your peers in efficient, specific language.
But I want to be clear. Despite the names, what appears here is neither mine, especially, nor a theory. It is a set of field notes from observations of the work of others, some of whom you will meet in this book, and many others whom you will not. I wish to thank them all for the diligence and skill that informed and inspired this work.
Specific, concrete, actionable techniques
When I was a young teacher, I'd go to trainings and leave with lofty words ringing in my ears. They touched on everything that had made me want to teach. “Have high expectations for your students.” “Expect the most from students every day.” “Teach kids, not content.” I'd be inspired, ready to improve—until I got to school the next day. I'd find myself asking, “Well, how do I do that? What's the action I should take at 8:25 a.m. to demonstrate those raised expectations?”
What ultimately helped me improve my teaching was when a peer told me something very concrete like, “When you want them to follow your directions, stand still. If you're walking around passing out papers, it looks like the directions are no more important than all of the other things you're doing. Show that your directions matter. Stand still.” Over time, it was this sort of concrete, specific, actionable advice, far more than reminders that I must have high expectations, that allowed me to raise expectations in my classroom.
My approach in this book reflects that experience. I have tried to describe the techniques of champion teachers in a concrete, specific, and actionable way that allows you to start using them tomorrow. I chose to call these tools “techniques” and not “strategies”—even though the teaching profession tends to use the latter term—because to me, a strategy is a generalized approach that informs decisions, whereas a technique is a thing you say or do in a particular way. If you are a sprinter, your strategy might be to get out of the blocks fast and run from the front; your technique would be to incline your body forward at about five degrees as you drive your legs up and out ahead of you. If you wanted to be a great sprinter, practicing and refining that technique would help you achieve more than refining your strategy. And because a technique is an action, the more you practiced it, the better you'd get. Mulling over your decision to run from the front a hundred times doesn't make you any better; practicing a hundred sprints with just the right body position does. This is why, I think, focusing on honing and improving specific techniques is the fastest route to success.
It's also worth noting that this set of techniques is not a “system.” For me, the benefit of considering individual techniques is that they are small, discrete units of inquiry. You can choose something that interests you and study it, improving quickly and seeing the results. And you can incorporate a new technique into what you already do without having to redesign your entire approach or buying in to everything in the book. As Chip and Dan Heath point out in their book Switch, how people encounter useful information has a lot to do with whether they are successful in using it to change and improve their lives. Oftentimes what we conclude is resistance to change—by teachers, say—is in fact lack of clarity about what concrete thing to do next to begin the change: “OK, I get that I should be more rigorous, but how do I do that, or start to do that in a concrete, manageable way?” Giving people tools to try might seem less efficient than giving them an overarching system that encompasses everything they do, but trying to do everything at once is a recipe for lack of action. Having a manageable focused idea to work on can help make change and improvement safe and easy to pursue, with the result that the technique becomes part of your life. We often achieve more change over the long run via small changes in the short run.
Another key observation from Switch is that we tend to assume that the size of a solution must match the size of the problem. You were observed; there were criticisms; it seems you have to make wholesale changes to everything you do. Or do you? Perhaps just connecting with a few students who appear disinterested via Cold Call, or preparing differently so you can listen better during your classes, would make a huge difference and cause other things to fall into place. Little changes can often make a big difference.