Doug Lemov's field notes

Reflections on teaching, literacy, coaching, and practice.

01.04.24 Managing (Your Own) Working Memory: How Julia Uses Her “Monitoring Key”

  Yesterday I posted about the challenges of managing limits on Working Memory for teachers. We know we’ve got to design our teaching to respond to the challenges the classrooms presents for student’s Working Memory, but we’ve also got to be thinking about the under-acknowledge issue of our own working memory overloads. Walking around the classroom…


03.24.23 Planning for Error: Emma Gray Prepares to Push the Rigor in Number the Stars

One of our favorite topics at TLAC Towers is Checking for Understanding. How do teachers prepare for and react to student errors and misunderstandings? Many of our best videos on the topic are of math teachers–the nature of math makes predicting and sequencing errors a bit simpler than in the humanities, say. So we were especially…


08.20.20 Whaaat??? Susie Kim Brings Sinclair’s ‘The Jungle’ to Life

Just wanted to take a minute to share some fantastic video of Susie Kim’s 7th grade Social Studies class at Achievement First’s East New York Middle School. It’s a great example of a lot of good teaching things, not least strong Ratio and Checking for Understanding Susie and her students are reading a passage from teaching…


06.19.20 Marine Academy Plymouth’s Jen Brimming Models Implicit Accountability

Yesterday I blogged about one of Chloe Hykin’s lessons at Marine Academy Plymouth. Not only was it really well designed and implemented but it was clearly part of an intentional school-wide effort to produce consistent and high-quality Lessons. Her response on Twitter was to share all of her peers’ work to share the credit. In fact…