Teach Like a Champion 2.0

Back in July of 2015, I read Doug Lemov’s book, Teach Like a Champion 2.0, and instantly became obsessed with it.

Lemov is the managing director of the Uncommon Schools–a set of charter schools in Boston, New Jersey, and New York. His book project started as “The Taxonomy of Effective Teaching.” Lemov noticed that there were some schools located in impoverished neighborhoods which, despite expectations, had the majority of its students score high on standardized tests. He wondered what it was about those schools that allowed them to succeed where so many others failed, and he had a hunch that their success was due to effective teaching. So he started visiting classrooms in these schools, often with a video camera, observing “champion” teachers in action, trying to identify specific things they did that made their students so successful. In the current “2.0” edition of his book, he identifies 62 techniques.

Lemov has done the industry a huge service by not only cataloging specific techniques that expert teachers use, but also by naming them, potentially giving us all a shared vocabulary in which to talk about what teachers do. By giving techniques names, Lemov also makes it easier for us to create instructional designs that reference these techniques.

And beyond that, there are just so many great insights–almost on every page–about the actual art of teaching a class. Though the book is not primarily aimed either at adult education or instructional designers, I think it has useful things to say to both of those audiences nevertheless.

If you are a trainer or an instructional designer who designs workshops or classroom training for your organization, this book is worth your time.

Here’s a good video of Lemov discussing many of the ideas from the first edition of his book. It gets off to a bit of a rocky start so I’ve set this link to skip the first few minutes so you can get right to the good stuff, which is almost all of the rest of the video.

Enjoy.

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