Doug Lemov's field notes

Reflections on teaching, literacy, coaching, and practice.

04.26.21 The First Steps Back: My Best Bet For Summer School

In a year of massive educational challenges schools now confront the latest new challenge.  How to bring students back to the classroom after a year of reduced learning and social isolation, with dramatically increased inequity. This raises the question: What to do first—over the summer perhaps, even before the new year starts–especially in the area of…


02.16.17 Two Clips in Honor of World Read Aloud Day

With thanks to Larry Ferlazzo for the heads up, it turns out that today is World Read Aloud Day, and I am going to make up for the fact that I was not really on-the-ball with Valentine’s Day by being all over World Read Aloud Day.  With good reason. First, a clever Valentines/World Read Aloud Day…


02.04.16 On Control the Game and the Culture of Reading

We’re in Albany today with 150 or so educators from around the country talking reading. We spent a bit of time this morning talking about a video that I love—it’s of Maggie Johnson doing Control the Game reading of a key excerpt from To Kill a Mockingbird with her 8th graders. This is one of my favorite…


05.03.13 Jessica Bracey: Control the Game and Fluency (video)

We just added this clip of North Star Academy’s Jessica Bracey to our collection… we filed it under Fluency and Control the Game (CTG) though we aren’t yet sure which technique we’ll use it for during our workshops.       https://vimeo.com/317120055   In fact what we love about it is the synergy it shows between Fluency…