| Tags | teaching |
We’ll be kicking off our teaching curriculum with a brief intro to one of the most influential books in the teaching profession, Teach Like a Champion by Doug Lemov. We’ve highlighted below how it is that we’ll start getting familiar with the powerful tools and principles contained within the book.
This 12 page book summary provides a really nice 2 page intro to the rigorous methodology that author Doug Lemov and his team used to distill the best teaching practices from the best performing teachers they could find. Give those first 2 pages a quick read before continuing to read what’s below.
The purpose of the quick familiarity projects is to give you a basic intro to the various techniques covered in the book, and to introduce you to some of the key language / specific terms used in the book. These terms (you might call it a taxonomy) give us a common language through which we can have more detailed and nuanced conversations about how we’re teaching.
At this stage of the journey we just want you to be aware of the different practices and the terms we use for them, so that you can start noticing some things in your teaching that you wouldn’t have noticed before.
The chapters are organized around techniques that have loosely the same goal. For example Chapters 1 to 5 all look at techniques that help to maintain high academic standards. One of the nice things about this book is that the techniques are very concrete and immediately applicable.
That said, just being aware of the techniques won’t transform your teaching if you’re not applying them in your everyday teaching. We’ll start implementing systems into our daily operations which power up some of the most relevant techniques by integrating them into our everyday practice. In the “Chapter Deep Dive” projects we’ll be taking a slightly deeper look at each of the techniques and doing some prioritization and brainstorming around how and where we can best leverage the techniques.
“At bats” is one of the techniques in the book. It could basically be summarized as “Practice makes perfect”. So, in these projects, we’ll take one technique at a time, and apply the technique / lens to a bunch of different teaching sessions or Code Reviews.
The science of “Deliberate practice” (practice that actually works) requires feedback/coaching to improve, so we’ll set up some structures for coaching each other on these principles.
We’re very grateful for the incredible effort and care that you already put into our learners, and we look forward to seeing the impact of further powering up your teaching practice.
Here’s to meaningful impact for every learner!!