Doug Lemov's field notes

Reflections on teaching, literacy, coaching, and practice.

11.24.16 Check for Understanding: Courtney Huber’s ‘Master Clip’ Shows How

This week in our video review meetings we cut a master clip of Courtney Huber, a fourth grade teacher at North Star Academy’s Vailsburg Elementary School in Newark.  We call it a master clip because it is a case study in the use of all the parts of Checking for Understanding woven together.  It starts as…


10.17.16 A Tiny ‘Own and Track’ Moment from Bryan Belanger’s Classroom

I stopped into TLaC 2.0 cover boy Bryan Belanger’s math class this morning for about 10 minutes on my way to a meeting.  I observed a tiny moment of brilliance. Here’s what he did. Bryan gave his students this problem to solve independently: Which of the following functions would be parallel to the line y=3x? Select…


02.03.16 More on the Unheralded but Highly Effective Technique #10: Own and Track

During a recent lesson, Vicki Hernandez, an 8th grade biology teacher at Troy Prep in Troy, NY, asked her students to answer this question about cell respiration: Certain poisons are toxic to organisms because they interfere with the function of enzymes in the mitochondria. This results directly in the inability of the cell to… A) Store…