Teach like a champion 3.0: 63 techniques that put students on the path to college - Lemov Doug 2021
Notes
Building ratio through questioning
1. 1. https://www.aft.org/sites/default/files/periodicals/willingham_0.pdf.
2. 2. It's also worth noting that desirable difficulty assumes that students are successful in their thinking most of the time. We remember things better if we are able to answer, and less so, for the most part and for most of us it seems, if we cogitate on giant abstract questions of being and nothingness.
3. 3. The term schema gets used vaguely and a bit recklessly—often in the classroom with very young students in a way-too-jargony way—so I tend to avoid it. I just refer to knowledge, which is really what it is: a lot of knowledge that is connected.
4. 4. That is, if you know something you will begin to connect it to other things you are thinking and learning about and this will become a web of connections and facts. Arguably this is the difference between knowledge and information and expresses why schools should be intentional about how they present knowledge—they can shape the organizational structure as much as the amount of knowledge that students learn (see technique 5, Knowledge Organizers). Ironically, though, those who claim that schools teach isolated facts not only don't appear to have been in many schools recently but appear to be lacking in knowledge about how human cognition works. As a side note, I am pretty sure the phrase “even isolated facts don't stay that way for long” comes from something Daisy Christodoulou has written but I have been unable to find a citation. Still, this is a good opportunity to recommend her book Seven Myths About Education.
5. 5. An interview with Paul Simon on the Dick Cavett Show provides a good example. Simon is discussing how he wrote the song Bridge Over Troubled Water. He describes being stuck and suddenly thinking of a Bach Chorale, which he transposed and inserted into the song. (But only because knowledge of chorales and what they sounded like was in his long-term memory.) At a second point, Simon recalls, a gospel album that had been “constantly on my mind” because he had been playing it over and over “must have subconsciously influenced me because I started to go to gospel changes. …” To do this he had to encode the knowledge of how gospel sounded generally and what gospel “changes” sounded like in his long-term memory by playing the record over and over. And understanding the idea of typical chord change patterns (“changes”) itself relies of knowledge of musical theory; you have to know what “changes” are to listen for them. All of this caused insights to “come to him” suddenly while he was thinking about his own song. Inspiration and creativity relied on broad knowledge of Bach, gospel, and music theory. The insights were as much about the fusions of various schemes of knowledge as anything else.
6. 6. Paul Simon, for example, would be extremely unlikely to think: I think I'll read up on Bach Chorales because just maybe they'd fit here in my song. He had to have the knowledge already to make the connection. The knowledge is what tells him what to “look up.”
7. 7. See Willingham, especially. “Memory is the residue of thought, meaning that the more you think about something, the more likely it is that you'll remember it later.” Cognitive scientists like Willingham would argue that if you don't remember it, you haven't really learned it, which is why memory and learning are closely related. https://www.aft.org/sites/default/files/periodicals/willingham_0.pdf.
8. 8. If there's one thing my work life under pandemic has taught me, it's that I need the possibility of having to answer in order to stay fully engaged. Having seen this in a thousand Zoom calls, I recognize its echoes in face-to-face interactions.
9. 9. Another way that planning questions in advance can help: You’re more likely to avoid asking a question for which, upon reflection, there is no clear answer.
10. 10. Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff, The Coddling of the American Mind (Penguin Books, 2019), 29.
11. 11. Elise J. Dallimore, Julie H. Hertenstein, and Marjorie B. Platt, “Impact of Cold-Calling on Student Voluntary Participation,” Journal of Education Management, 2012. The authors compared 16 sections of a single course with 600-plus total students in which half of the teachers used Cold Call and half did not.
12. 12. Cold Call is a great example of the Band-Aid Paradox from the Preface to this book. Cold Calling involves some anxiety for a teacher. Will it go well? Will it be stressful for students? It is harder to figure out how to remove Band-Aids slowly that to justify ripping them off quickly. Some people will choose the latter. But you don't have to.
13. 13. I'm grateful to Ellie Ryall, a history teacher in England who shared this thought via Twitter. Since then, she has had the wisdom to ditch Twitter and therefore I can't give her the footnote she deserves.
14. 14. You can read more about the impact of pronunciation and the importance of phonemic awareness in this seminal article on the Matthew effect in reading: https://www.psychologytoday.com/files/u81/Stanovich__1986_.pdf.
15. 15. Also they can be cut short if students are not fully attentive in the lead-up to the Call and Response. A count of “One, two!” can occasionally be cut off by the teacher (“One …”) to indicate that the class is not ready while still maintaining the anticipation of the fun that's to come.
16. 16. The book is a profound and challenging reflection on schools, parents, and choice for dozens of reasons. I highly recommend it for far more substantive reasons than a reflection on Call and Response.
17. 17. You can read the full blog post here: https://achemicalorthodoxy.wordpress.com/2020/10/14/front-loading/.
18. 18. You can read more about Torquay Academy and Memphis Rise and their student-facing systems in the Teach Like a Champion “Field Notes.” Memphis Rise: https://teachlikeachampion.com/blog/how-memphis-rise-helps-teachers-build-vibrant-online-culture/; Torquay Academy blog: https://teachlikeachampion.com/blog/learn-like-champion-torquay-academys-students-loop-tlac/.