Doug Lemov's field notes

Reflections on teaching, literacy, coaching, and practice.

05.31.23 Simple Tools Ben Katcher Uses To Keep The Big Group on Task (So He Can Work With a Small Group)

  Watered down instruction is a problem in American classrooms. TNTP’s 2018 white paper, The Opportunity Myth describes the scope of this problem. The average student “spent more than 500 hours per school year on assignments that weren’t appropriate for their grade and with instruction that didn’t ask enough of them—the equivalent of six months of wasted class time…


09.07.18 The First Days of School: Installing a Procedure While Teaching Content

  Jen Rugani is the newest member of Team TLAC. She’s a former Principal at Leadership Prep Canarsie Elementary in Brooklyn and a former TLAC teaching fellow. As a teacher and school leader she felt pretty strongly about what the start to a good school year looked like so a recent video really caght her eye….


02.08.18 Honing Those Teacher ‘Dance Moves’ (Video)

Radar is out term for your capacity to see your class accurately for what it is. It’s a critical teaching skill. Decision-making always starts with perception–the more accurate the perception the better the decision. The psychologist David Berliner has studied this among teachers and found that novice teachers observing a classroom often fail to perceive them…


04.07.16 Watch Carefully: Prevention Beats Cure

“Students say I’m strict, but I don’t write referrals. How is that?” Peter D. Ford, a teacher I admire, recently tweeted. There’s something deeply important to reflect on in his words. In the classroom, as in medicine, prevention always beats cure. What you want is not so much the ability to fix it when students are…


09.24.15 Denarius Frazier’s 100%: Subtlety and an Ounce of Prevention (Video)

One of the best clips we added to our collection this week was one of the simplest… or maybe it wasn’t that simple… just subtle. My colleague Erica Woolway describes it: The clip shows how Uncommon Collegiate Charter High School math teacher Denarius Frazier uses the 100% tools, especially Radar and Be Seen Looking to keep…