Welcome to Field Notes. I’ve named this blog that to emphasize the idea that just about everything in my books is someone else’s brilliant idea. My idea was just to write it down. I like the role of the observer and think there’s a lot of power in it. Think about it—there isn’t a problem in teaching or learning that someone somewhere…
In my spare time this year I’ve been working on developing a set of teaching videos of soccer coaches, part of it as a result of my work with the US Soccer Federation, where the coaches I’ve worked with–Dave Chesler and Tony Lepore especially–have blown me away with their attentiveness to and insight about the craft of…
I started mapping out the chapters of an updated version of Teach Like a Champion last week. I’m tentatively calling it TLAC 2.0. The key idea is that TLAC has given rise to a “virtuous cycle”: When you give great people useful tools they do amazing things with them, things you wouldn’t have foreseen. They take good and…
For the past year or two we’ve been working closely with a major teacher training organization to help them develop successful new teachers faster and more effectively. They work in more than a dozen cities and are the most data-driven organization we know of. One of the things we recently learned is particularly fascinating for…
There’s a lot of discussion out there about parental involvement in schools. If you ask me, the most productive forms of parental involvement are not the ones most people focus on in those discussions. I’m not sure it’s realistic, or all that beneficial to suggest that parents can or should be “co-decision-making partners” in a…
Got to spend the evening watching Iain Munro, Academy Director at the Philadelphia Union’s academy program, coaching and I was struck by what he did first and why. Iain’s kids played a modified 5 v 5 scrimmage for 15 minutes when they arrived. He likes the idea of kids getting to play right away so they don’t spend the…