Education Week - February 4, 2015 - 6

Teach Like a Champion Update Lifts Focus on Technique
Teacher-educators
mull applicability
By Stephen Sawchuk
Doug Lemov's book Teach Like a
Champion, which puts forth a detailed
instructional taxonomy for
teachers, flew off the shelves when
it was published in 2010. For the
Albany, N.Y.-based educator, that
suggested one thing: Teachers are
hungry for help in mastering the
techniques of their craft.
Five years later, the interest in
"practice based" teacher preparation
has grown, in no small
part due to journalist Elizabeth
Green's well-received best-seller
Building a Better Teacher which
profiled Mr. Lemov's efforts and
those of several other teachereducators.
Now,
with the release of Mr.
Lemov's update to his taxonomy-
and with promising developments
in university-based attempts to
deconstruct the craft of teaching-proponents
are facing the
challenge of incorporating the use
of practiced-based methods into
teacher preparation writ large.
"One of the questions is that
there are so many places that do
teacher education," said Pamela
L. Grossman, the dean of the University
of Pennsylvania's graduate
school of education. "First we have
to know exactly what it is we're
proposing, and how easy it is to
do with the places that have already
bought into the idea. And
then we have to confront the challenges
and constraints around field
experiences.
"Not in all places are people
able to go directly from rehearsing
something in the teacher ed.
classroom directly into a school,"
she said.
Version 2.0
Mr. Lemov's framework is based
largely on his experiences teaching
and observing the practices of
high-performing teachers, many
working in the Uncommon Schools
charter school network, where he is
a managing director.
The updated version, which was
published in January, obliquely
addresses one of the more frequent
criticisms of the book: that
it's meant to inculcate in teachers
and students the behavioral norms
in so-called "no excuses" charter
schools, a term Mr. Lemov dislikes.
"I do think, for better or worse,
there are people out there, both
advocates of the book and skeptics,
who perceive it to be all about behavior
management," Mr. Lemov
said in an interview.
In fact, the most heavily updated
portions of the book focus on instructional
techniques. Version
"2.0" of the book contains far more
detail on different strategies for
gauging student understanding, including
one key expansion: establishing
a culture where students
feel safe making mistakes, which
allows for a teacher to recognize
where a student's understanding
has broken down and to re-teach
rize complex ideas in single sentences-something
that pushes
them toward the use of more varied
syntax.
Mr. Lemov underscored that the
taxonomy is not a recipe, but rather,
gives teachers discretion about
which practices to use and when.
"I'm uncomfortable with the idea
that people think it's a formula," he
said.
"
DOUG LEMOV
Author, Teach Like a Champion
that aspect of the lesson.
In the new version, Mr. Lemov
also details additional pedagogical
techniques on what he calls
"ratio": making sure students do
lots of challenging cognitive work
in a classroom. A chapter on using
writing to boost classroom rigor,
for example, includes the recommendation
that students summaThere
has been much more
response [to the book] from
districts and from people
directly working with
schools, than from schools
of education."
At teacher Kacie Evans' school
in the 700-student
Morris County district
in Alta Vista,
Kan., educators have
been honing one of
Mr. Lemov's techniques
per year. The middle
school teacher is a fan
of "cold calling"-a
technique designed to
elicit participation from
all students in class
discussions.
"I like it for the engagement,"
Ms. Evans
said. "You know everyone
is paying attention."
Teacher-educators at traditional
universities, meanwhile, have been
researching a key question related
to Mr. Lemov's work: How might
certain teaching practices vary
based on the specific content area
being taught?
Ms. Grossman is among teachereducators
participating in a research
group, the Core Practice
Collaborative, that is tackling
that question. The effort includes
scholars at the University of California
Los Angeles, the University
of Washington, and the University
of Michigan, among others.
Participants are using common
methods to instruct candidates
in core teaching practices in English/language
arts, science, history,
and mathematics. Eventually,
the group hopes to make training
materials on the practices widely
available to teacher-educators.
"We pretty much all agreed on
the practice of facilitating classroom
discussion. We're trying that
out across content areas," Ms.
Grossman said. "But the practice of
modeling-which is making visible
the cognitive processes-is something
the history and ela groups
could agree about and found useful,
and the math and science
group are still considering. Where
can we get that consistency across
content knowledge? Where does it
fall apart, and why?"
Questions of Scale
Scaling up the adoption of practiced-based
ideas into methods
classes so far appears to be a relatively
slow and unsteady process.
"There has been much more response
from districts and from
people directly working with
schools, than from schools of education,"
Mr. Lemov said about his
taxonomy. "There, it has been more
moderated."
One possible reason for the Teach
Like a Champion book's popularity
among already-practicing teachers
is that the taxonomy provides some
techniques that are immediately
applicable in classrooms-pushing
students to explain why and how
their answers are correct or make
sense, for instance.
But some content-specific techniques
of the sort not directly addressed
by Mr. Lemov's book, such
as leading the discussion of a poetry
text or novel, take repeated
practice to master, noted Peter
Williamson, the director of the secondary
teacher education program
at Stanford University. And that
means giving prospective teachers
plenty of structure and time to
learn them.
Ideally, he said, teacher-candidates
could go straight from rehearsing
such teaching practices
with their professors to testing
them with pupils in a K-12 setting,
and receiving near-immediate
feedback.
"That's a wonderful model, but
it requires a great deal of capacity-the
right kinds of schools,
and people who can move between
university and school settings very
fluidly," he said.
Coverage of policy efforts to improve
the teaching profession is supported
by a grant from the Joyce Foundation,
at www.joycefdn.org/Programs/
Education. Education Week retains
sole editorial control over the content
of this coverage.
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