Doug Lemov's field notes

Reflections on teaching, literacy, coaching, and practice.

03.25.20 The Bright Mirror: On the Classrooms We Suddenly Left Behind

This is a strange post to write at the present moment–but also hopefully relevant. It’s about the last video of the old world–classroom teaching with a teacher and 30 kids and a book–my team and I watched before classrooms went dark and we all went to online. After writing all last week about things we can…


03.16.17 Lessons in Practice from the Seattle Seahawks

My Practice Perfect co-author Katie Yezzi recently came across a pretty amazing video of Seattle Seahawks head coach Pete Carroll talking about practice and his approach to it.  Beyond the key takeaway that practice is incredibly important to any performance profession–“Practice is everything,” Carroll says in the video–there are a ton of useful lessons for those…


06.10.13 Learning and Struggle–A Postcard from Nashville

Spent the day in Nashville, observing training (and new teachers) at TNTP’s Nashville Teaching Fellows program. Pretty outstanding program.  Gonna post more later about the great things they do to prepare new teachers for the classroom.  In the meantime I thought I’d share this tiny little—but really powerful—artifact from my visit.  This was on the wall…


03.12.13 TLaC Clips: Eric Snider’s Joy Factor (video)

I recently got a request for more examples of Joy Factor at the middle school level. As I was watching some great new footage from our pals over at Achievement First, I noticed this Joy Factor moment from AF Bushwick Middle School’s Eric Snider.       https://vimeo.com/317080339   Some thoughts as you watch: We always try…


01.02.13 Teachers at Work (video)

Thought I’d share this footage of some super high-quality practice by teachers.  The teachers hard at work in this video are at one of our recent workshops and include Jennifer Wong-Den, Co-principal at Leadership Prep Brownsville, who’s practicing her Cold Calls and Jessica Hayes, Dean at Excellence CS for Boys, working as the coach.  The idea…