Doug Lemov's field notes

Reflections on teaching, literacy, coaching, and practice.

11.14.23 The Bug That Didn’t (Disprupt Dayla Bedford’s Lesson): A Mini Case Study

  Our weekly team meeting gives us the chance to do what we love most: study great teaching. This week, we had the privilege to study Dayla Bedford of Emma Donnan Elementary School in Indianapolis, IN. Dayla joyfully and skillfully executing a phonics lesson with her first-graders. [We’ll share a longer video of Dayla’s impressive phonics…


05.31.23 Simple Tools Ben Katcher Uses To Keep The Big Group on Task (So He Can Work With a Small Group)

  Watered down instruction is a problem in American classrooms. TNTP’s 2018 white paper, The Opportunity Myth describes the scope of this problem. The average student “spent more than 500 hours per school year on assignments that weren’t appropriate for their grade and with instruction that didn’t ask enough of them—the equivalent of six months of wasted class time…


08.09.21 New Video: Jill Murray Models What To Do, Anonymous Individual Correction and Radar

Schools and classrooms are opening across the country in the coming weeks and amidst the uncertainty about masks and the like, there’s the enduring question that takes on double-weight after pandemic disruptions: How do we create vibrant positive and productive classroom cultures that harvest attention and help students succeed? With that in mind I’m happy to…


03.26.20 Online Lessons: George Bramley Wins the Battle of Hastings

As you probably know I’ve been trying to share useful video and analysis of successful approaches to online learning on this blog. One of the big challenges is that synchronous lessons are challenging–challenging to run; limited in terms of how much students can do in a day–while asynchronous lessons are hard to make interactive. As I…