Doug Lemov's field notes

Reflections on teaching, literacy, coaching, and practice.

09.07.22 How Brittany Carson Starts the Year with Show Call

Up here at TLAC Towers, Show Call is one of our very favorite techniques. Think of it as a visual Cold Call with a whole lot of additional benefits. In a Show Call you present a piece of student work, chosen at your discretion and regardless of who volunteers, to look at and study as a…


10.15.20 Heather Pirolli Models an Online Show Call.

Show Call is one of our favorite classroom techniques on Team TLAC. It involves choosing a student’s work and projecting it to the class, whereupon it gets studied–lovingly but with rigor–especially if it includes a common error that everyone can learn from. It’s a technique that translates well into an online setting, so I thought I’d…


07.15.20 Tips for Online Show Call from Jeff Li’s Lesson

After a bit of a hiatus for other projects, my team and I are back to studying video of teachers working online this week. Yesterday we watched video of Jeff Li, who’s an outstanding math teacher at KIPP in NYC and who has been a guest blogger here before. Jeff was teaching as part of the…


04.10.19 One More Clip for ‘Show Call Week’

Ok, it’s not really ‘Show Call Week,’ but this is the third post I’ve shared this week involving an example of the technique, which is one of my favorites. Maybe it’s a sign. Anyway this one is from Sarah Wright’s classroom again. I posted another example of her Show Call earlier this week. This one is…


04.09.19 A Postcard from Cornerstone Prep in Memphis

Darryl Williams and I had the pleasure of visiting two campuses of Memphis’ Cornerstone Prep last Friday. They’re both ASD neighborhood schools–two of the highest performing in the ASD, and not surprisingly I learned a lot from our visit. The school was warm and inviting for students and adults.  In both cases expectations for what happened…