Defining what works - Introduction to the third edition: The art of teaching and Its tools

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

Defining what works
Introduction to the third edition: The art of teaching and Its tools

If you've read previous versions of this book you know that my process of finding teachers to study began with test scores. I looked for individuals and schools that, controlling for poverty, were positive outliers. These were teachers (and sometimes whole schools) who worked with students in neighborhoods where often only a fraction of students graduate from high school, never mind go on to college, or where typically only 10 or 20 percent of students might pass a given state test (an incomplete but still important measure of progress) in a typical year. And yet working in that same landscape, the teachers I was studying helped their students achieve at a dramatically higher rate than anyone would have predicted: they might have double the number of students passing … or four times the number of students passing. Sometimes every single kid passed. Sometimes they had more kids score “advanced” than teachers in surrounding schools had kids score “proficient.” Their results often closed the gap between kids born to poverty and kids born to privilege.

Test scores of course are an imperfect measure. They tell us a lot but not nearly everything and are often best used to generate and test hypotheses: You watch a series of teachers with unusually strong results and start to see trends and commonalities. So whenever possible, I tried to use as much additional data as I could get, and to look for signals that were durable over time—sustained results as opposed to one-time blips. When a school was successful for a long time, I also considered the principal's guidance and input in sourcing teachers. Although there are data to suggest that the average principal is only so-so at identifying the best teachers, very good principals are, of course, different from the average. One could argue that the reason they are successful is their ability to understand whose teaching is especially effective. And over time I came to rely on my team—by now they've spent hundreds and hundreds of hours studying and discussing classroom video—to spot moments that would be useful for teachers to study—moments that were replicable, and adaptable, and likely to help teachers help students thrive.