Doug Lemov's field notes

Reflections on teaching, literacy, coaching, and practice.

11.19.21 Luke Gromer on Coaching the Decision, Not the Outcome

  One of the most important and challenging aspects of coaching young people, is coaching them to focus on things that will cause them to succeed over the long run and ignoring the pressing distractions of the short run. It’s a topic I wrote about a bit in The Coach’s Guide to Teaching. A developing athlete,…


03.27.20 Accountability and Feedback Online: One Big Questions is ‘When?’

Team TLAC and I had the pleasure of watching several online lessons from schools across the country (and in England) this week and having watched them I want to share a reflection. One of the constant challenges when you are talking to a screen is knowing what your students are doing as they watch it in…


01.25.20 Notes for Coaches: The Story of a Stoppage

As coaching goes, my daughter is lucky. She plays for a great club: serious about teaching and hires top quality coaches. Her coach this year is just what you’d want as a parent and a student of the game: builds positive culture; values teamwork and integrity; knows the game, respects it, teaches it right. He’s also…


01.11.19 On Coaching: You Give Two Kinds of Feedback. Are They Aligned??

Here’s a slide I showed recently to coaches at a workshop: The slide is an attempt to describe a common challenge I see in the teaching/coaching of athletes. Here’s the scene. Athletes are playing. We are observing them as coaches. We notice something that needs to be improved. So we stop and make a teaching point. …


05.08.17 Carry On My Son: The Signal and the Noise in Coaching

Anthony Fowler my colleague at Uncommon Schools sent me a note this morning to pass along this great moment between Steve Kerr and Steph Curry.   “There’s something about him sharing the evidence (stats), and giving the positive reinforcement for him to keep going, even when it seems like he’s not performing his best,” Anthony wrote….