Teach Like a Champion Field Guide 2.0

A Practical Resource to Make the 62 Techniques Your Own

Doug Lemov, Joaquin Hernandez, Jennifer Kim

• Publisher: Jossey-Bass
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781119254157
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Teaching Methods

The must-have companion workbook to the bestselling Teach Like a Champion 2.0

Teach Like a Champion Field Guide 2.0 is the teacher's hands-on guide to improving their craft. In Teach Like a Champion 2.0, veteran teaching coach Doug Lemov updated, improved upon, and replaced the original edition of this global bestseller, setting forth 62 of the most rigorously vetted and critically observed teaching techniques around. Field Guide 2.0 is a practical workbook for these 62 techniques, outlining all the tools a teacher needs to make champion teaching a reality in their classroom starting now. Coauthored by fellow educators Joaquin Hernandez and Jennifer Kim, the book is a practical guide for adapting the techniques to fit classrooms and teachers everywhere. With over 75 video clips of the techniques in play and 100+ field-tested activities to boot, Field Guide 2.0 is the professional development tool every school leader dreams of. It's the teaching playbook that every teacher, principal, and coach should have in their library, chock-full of actionable tools that unlock a teacher's potential so they can push their students to do the same!

The updated '2.0' version of Teach Like a Champion written to update, improve upon and replace the original

Just like Teach Like a Champion Field Guide helped educators put the original 49 techniques into practice, Field Guide 2.0 is the ultimate resource for the 62 techniques in Teach Like a Champion 2.0. They're the most rigorous, champion-vetted techniques yet and this book takes you through them from top to bottom with the kind of clarity and breadth you've come to expect from the experts at Teach Like a Champion. The book includes:

• Practical approaches to each of the 62 techniques
• 75+ video clips with analysis of the techniques in play in the classroom (note: for online access of this content, please visit my.teachlikeachampion.com)
• Hands-on activities to bring the 62 techniques from the page into the classroom

Teach Like a Champion 2.0 is a book by educators for educators. It's about giving teachers what they need to share their strengths so that every teacher, from first year rookie to third-year veteran, can approach their classes with the skills they need for their students to succeed. Teach Like a Champion Field Guide 2.0 is the indispensable guide to getting there, one technique at a time.

Technique 1
REJECT SELF-REPORT

OVERVIEW

Teachers frequently use phrases like “Does everyone understand?” or “Everybody got that?” while they are teaching. When they use them, they essentially acknowledge to themselves that they have arrived at a good place to pause and check for understanding. But such phrases usually mean they are doing the opposite—they gloss over struggle and provide false confirmation. Self-report questions, especially those that feel rhetorical, are a very poor source of data on how the class is doing, so it’s useful to try to replace such phrases with something more productive.

This is especially true if students are about to embark on independent work. The more time you invest in a task and the more autonomous your students will be in completing it, the more important it is to Reject Self-Report and effectively check for understanding—sooner rather than later.

Reflection

What usually happens in your classroom when you ask a student or a group of them, “Got it?” or “Everyone understand?”

Write your own thoughts here before you continue reading our reflections.

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Our thoughts (you may have had other thoughts as well): A few students may clearly indicate that they get it, but many may not answer at all, or may simply fall in line with the rest of their peers. As a result, we often come away with little idea of whether or not students understand the material in question. We pause a moment, then take students’ silence as implicit permission to go on.

FUNDAMENTALS

You can improve your ability to check for understanding by engineering a short sequence of questions to provide dependable data about what your students know. If these are quick, carefully chosen, precise, and aimed at a strategic sample of the class, they can be useful in demonstrating the extent of understanding very quickly.

Avoiding the Pitfall of “Yes” and “No”

One general problem with yes-or-no questions is that half the time a guess is right, and this results in data of limited accuracy. Additional problems can emerge when you try to use yes-or-no questions to find out whether students understand. Students often think they understand when they don’t. For example, a yes may really mean, “Well, I understand something about it.” In other words, yes-or-no questions do little to call students’ attention to specific skills or knowledge they are supposed to understand. This encourages them not to inquire but simply to say yes, and possibly to believe it themselves.

Phrases like “Got it?” and “Understand?”—phrases that ask for a yes-or-no reply where silence appears to be assent—are deeply embedded in most people’s natural manner when talking to a group, and there’s nothing wrong with that. No doubt we all say them in class, often at a point of transition to reassure ourselves about moving on.

But we can’t depend on the answer as data. When you really need to understand what your class knows, strive to replace phrases like “Everybody got that?” with a handful of focused questions that help you answer the question objectively: “Why did Keith multiply by y?” “Why did France enter the war on our side?” This doesn’t have to take long—often less than a minute.

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Find this blog post at teachlikeachampion.com/blog/coaching-and-practice/especially-reject-self-report/.

To appreciate how valuable and time-saving it is to get beyond self-report, read the entry “When (Especially) to ‘Reject Self-Report.’”

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Welcoming “No”

When we do ask yes-or-no self-report questions, we often signal that they aren’t meant to be answered, by barely pausing before moving on to something else. This can signal that we don’t really want an answer, and students learn not to speak up. Sometimes a student really will answer a self-report question with an honest “No” or tell you they “don’t really get it.” That’s a critical moment in the life of a classroom. If we respond with exasperation or by simply repeating an a...