Books in the mail: Teach Like A Champion

Doug Lemov's new book about improving classroom arrived on my desk today and I'm quite interested in reading it. My understanding of the premise is that he has developed a new vocabulary to describe teaching processes that will improve the kind of feedback that teachers receive. I'm not sure if this is what he actually does, but those are my beliefs as to the book's contents, and something I would argue are dreadfully needed in education as it's not enough simply to demand higher scores or lower drop out rates - the idea that there are more effective and less effective techniques seems straightforward, but a good job describing these has yet to be done.

One word of caution now that the book has arrived, I do take a little issue at his subtitle: 49 techniques that put students on the path to college, as if to say the whole purpose of the k-12 system is to move the roughly 1/3 of high school students who attend any form of post-secondary education (at least here in Alberta) to something resembling 1/2 or higher. It also suggests that a k-12 education that terminates in a successful high school graduation is not a success unless the student enrolls in further study.

Building a Better Teacher

Last week The New York Times ran a piece on education reform. It's a topic that's quite near and dear to my heart, so I was intrigued. The article was essentially a pre-release interview with Doug Lemov, the author of a new book entitled Teach Like A Champion. Lemov's basic thrust was that teachers lack the basic vocabulary to describe the act of teaching and this undermines many of their efforts to teach better. My experiences with teachers and teacher improvement certainly validates this idea. True, teachers have no shortage of conceptual frameworks to explain and support the activities that they are having students engage in, they are considerably weaker in using language to describe their day-to-day activities to their peers. This is an important shortcoming to remedy because it prevents teachers from properly identifying what it is that's working in their classrooms as well as offering each other constructive criticism aimed at improving weak practice.

In the last five years or so, I think there has been a tremendous degree of improvement in the language of assessment; teachers have a better capacity to explain what they are assessing, when, how, and why, but assessment and instruction are not the same. I'd like to think that the one follows the other, that from a better understanding of assessment, we will be better able to zero in on what exactly students need to do better in order to understand better.

Having said that, I was a little disappointed to see that much of the article's focus was on techniques for classroom management, rather than instruction. I am intrigued enough to have ordered a copy of Lemov's book, but I find that conversations that focus on classroom management tend to miss the point. When looking at ideas related to classroom reform, I ask myself the following questions:

- who decides what the student will learn on a given day?

- who decides how the student will learn?

- who decides when the student is done learning?

People who answer these questions with "the teacher" are not moving in the same direction as me.