Doug Lemov's field notes

Reflections on teaching, literacy, coaching, and practice.

07.31.20 Denise Karratti’s Online Classroom: Great Systems, Great Culture

We’ve been working with Hawaii DOE and a group of ace teaches there to develop good models of online teaching and yesterday I got to see some of the early footage. It’s pretty fantastic and I wanted to share a few exceptional moments from Denise Karratti’s 6th grade math lesson at Chiefess Kamakahelei Middle School. In…


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….


01.08.18 How Freedom Prep’s Jasmine Howard Checks for Understanding

  We’ve spent this past year working with Freedom Prep, a network of 4 high-performing schools in Memphis. The goal  for us is to help them take their program to the next level, and the journey has been a rich one–the team at Freedom Prep is dedicated, smart and insightful and their schools are bright, warm,…


01.17.17 How Dani Quinn Uses Show Me to Check for Understanding

Dani Quinn is a math teacher at the Michaela School in London. We recently video-taped her lesson and, in watching, I was struck right away by her Check for Understanding. She constantly used Show Me (technique #5 in TLaC) to assess students as she taught and she used that data to guide her lesson. And she…


09.28.16 A Guide to the Teach Like a Champion 2.0 Field Guide, Part 1: Case Studies

In the weeks since Jen, Joaquin, and I finished wrapping up the Teach Like a Champion Field Guide 2.0, we’ve been gradually recovering from our self-imposed exile amidst pizza boxes and coffee cups in the conference room at TLaCTowers. On more than one occasion, we locked ourselves in this room so that we could devote total…