Doug Lemov's field notes

Reflections on teaching, literacy, coaching, and practice.

04.22.21 Erica Woolway: Lessons Learned from a Pandemic Year

Part 2: New Learning We Can Use This is the second in our series of post around the lessons we’ve learned from remote instruction. In this post we will focus on some of our new learnings – things that hadn’t fully considered before spending a year remotely. We’ve long talked about the importance of Participation Ratio and…


03.12.21 Mastering Online Discussion with Allison Dungey

We’ve just finished watching Allison Dungey’s lesson from Achievement First. She and her kids do a great job discussing Lois Lowry’s Number the Stars and there’s lots to learn about getting the most out of discussions online from watching the clip. Jasmine Lane put together these notes on some of the things we liked:  It’s helpful…


11.20.20 Postcard from the Edge: Details on the ‘Other’ Pandemic

There is a second pandemic happening. If you’re watching that should not be a surprise. In the education sector almost everyone is working very very hard. They are doing often their best in a terrible situation. They deserve thanks and praise. But that doesn’t change the fact that educational devastation is being sown across the land….


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…