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February 23 - November 29, 2018
‘They’re 10 times nicer because Rafe is 10 times nicer. Rafe never yells.’” Chi changed—and so did his colleagues.
They reflected on the same question Rousseau asked himself, about whether the good outweighed the bad, or whether the bad was even necessary—
Discipline was not a black and white choice—tight or loose, structured or joyful. It was, says David Levin, “unstructured structure.”
how to get students not just compliant, but invested; not just obedient, but happy.
The teachers who really got kids to change, they said, were the ones who built strong personal bonds with them.
Teaching discipline required the same amount of mental work as teaching history, plus an extra dose of courage.
By asking more of students, she also gave them more of a voice.
“The absence of misbehavior,” she had realized, “doesn’t mean the presence of high levels of learning.” They’d cracked the code of how to get kids to behave. But they were missing a vital academic ingredient. “Rigor,” they called it.
The implication, the researchers pointed out, was potentially profound. The national trend toward greater school choice might end up exacerbating segregation as parents with different race and class backgrounds looked for different strengths in teachers.
American education was like the story that David’s old friend Lee Shulman told about a rabbi mediating a dispute between two men over the ownership of a chicken. After the first man explained why the chicken was his, Lee said in a talk recounting the story, “the rabbi nodded sagely and stated, ‘You are right. The chicken is yours.’ ” When the second man gave his testimony, the rabbi nodded again. “You are correct. The chicken must be yours,” he said. Confused, the rabbi’s wife spoke up. “My dear, it is impossible for this one to be right, and that one too,” she said. “That’s correct,” the
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a common curriculum suggesting what students should study, common examinations to test how much of that curriculum the students had grasped, and teacher education to help the faculty learn to teach exactly what students were supposed to learn.
thinking about this lack of common language thing, and our inability to communicate in any substance or depth.” But here was a room full of strangers—education professionals of varying levels of experience—all laughing at the same joke. That was the lightning bolt.
The tests set relatively low bars for learning, emphasizing a wide but shallow set of skills instead of a steady progression of deeper understandings.
first having them write out two types of questions, literal and interpretive; then having them go over the questions with each other, getting feedback on how to improve on them; and finally, after they’d finished talking, leading a debriefing of the conversation centered on how they could have gotten even more out of talking to each other.
It was true, as Lee Shulman’s predecessor Nate Gage had discovered, that the science of teaching was not simply the inverse of the science of learning. But the corollary was also true. It wasn’t possible to understand teaching without understanding learning.
architecture: a fantastic design was nothing without the materials to build it. Something complex and beautiful could not be accomplished without first mastering the mundane.
mistakes were not worrisome ills to stamp out on sight, but precious opportunities to begin the longer process of correcting misunderstandings over time.
Magdalene and Deborah, similarly, built their problems of the day around the goal of eliciting misunderstandings that could move the class toward more accurate ideas.
The first, kikan-shido, described the act of observing students’ efforts to solve the problem of the day and, when necessary, intervening to resolve their confusion by offering a hint or an extra instruction. But the second, kikan-junshi, adopted by a contingent of purists, described observing without comment. When a student made a mistake or became confused, the teacher simply noted the error (maybe on a pad of paper or maybe just in her head), nodded, and walked on by.
“Normalizing Error” was Technique No. 49, the last one in the taxonomy. It described how teachers could get students feeling comfortable with mistakes. And so, in Teach like a Champion, on the same page that Doug emphasized the importance of fixing errors “as quickly as possible,” he also called them “a normal and healthy part of the learning process.”
The job of administrators, meanwhile, was not to punish bad performers for poor teaching. It was to give them opportunities to learn. To teach them. And over time, even without direct intervention from the academics, the entrepreneurs’ approach to teaching children was beginning to bear more resemblance to their approach to teaching adults.
Instead of focusing on ways that teachers could eliminate mistakes as soon as they arose, the new document tried to give them tools to use errors as learning opportunities, naming new techniques they could use to help students feel comfortable making mistakes.
The vast majority of kids still learned with teachers who were as unprepared as Deborah had been when she first came to Spartan Village.
Every August, before school started, he would telephone each family to build what he called “relationship capital.” He continued calling throughout the year, making sure to vary the kinds of conversations so that he didn’t always bear bad news. The Match training program, in turn, required that each of its teacher candidates practice six different types of phone calls, from the “praise quickie” to the “powwow.” The curriculum also required several hours of calls to different parents each week: one hour a night each weekday and two hours each weekend.
So, in addition to modeling, leading discussions, and eliciting thinking, the nineteen high-leverage practices included “engaging in strategic relationship-building conversations with students” and “communicating about a student with a parent or guardian.”
if a teacher was going to spend her time on something, it would best be spent on one of the high-leverage practices.
education spending didn’t matter unless it was paired with expectations,
“From the moment our children step into a classroom,” he said, “the single most important factor in determining their achievement is not the color of their skin or where they come from; it’s not who their parents are or how much money they have. It’s who their teacher is.”
there seemed to be no way to predict whether a teacher would succeed until he or she actually taught.
earlier: if all the variables currently used to hire, fire, and reward teachers were useless at predicting student achievement, then they should not be used at all.
steering the best teachers to the neediest students
try a lot of teachers, keep the best, fire the rest—
But they also worked on recruitment, selection, incentives, material resources like textbooks and tests, and professional development.
They intended to improve the teacher pool by weeding out the bad ones.
the idea that evaluations could serve not as sorting tools, but as diagnostic tools. By knowing how they performed, teachers could figure out what they needed to do to improve in the next year.
she immediately “started doing things differently in my classroom.” She’d always prided herself on her charisma with the students. Her “Pharaoh Game” lesson, in which she dressed up as an Egyptian monarch and theatrically mimicked knocking down the students’ paper “pyramids” when they weren’t sturdy enough, got students hysterical every year. Her writing lessons helped even her many students for whom English was a second language craft decent persuasive essays. But PLATO stretched her ideas in new and helpful ways.
students should learn not just to identify evidence, but to discover ways to collect it (by highlighting and making deliberate annotations) and explain it (build it into an argument by describing its importance). Lorraine designed specific lessons about each strategy.
“It wasn’t just you have to have poetry in your soul,” she said. Any student, properly taught, could make words sing.
Think, she told people, about all the ways good teachers need to depart from normal human protocol. In everyday life, when conflict emerged, the polite approach was to smooth it over, smiling away differences of opinion or pretending not to notice when a friend made a mistake.
sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.
knowing the content was simply not enough. I also needed to know the students.
Discussions are wonderful in theory and eyeball-yankingly difficult to facilitate in a live classroom.
In the second period, Andy and I decided to give up the discussion entirely. It was simply better not to try. Not surprisingly, the class went much more smoothly, and I spent much less time freaking out. Maybe the lesson simply didn’t call for discussion. Or maybe, like so many teachers, I took the path that felt best: easier, but not necessarily better.
Learning in school happens over weeks and months, not periods of sixty minutes.
Many times, Doug Lemov had earnestly explained to me the importance of love in teaching. Good discipline, he told me, required that teachers work with the students “from love.” When Doug said this, I always nodded. But it wasn’t until I taught Andy’s class that I understood what he meant.
You have to look at them with love in your heart. Once they know that you care about them, then they can relax a lot.”
Better teachers . . . 1 . . . are as curious about wrong answers as they are about right answers—and they encourage students to make mistakes.
Great teaching, in other words, requires more than simply knowing a subject very well. To help other people understand, teachers also must reverse-engineer students’ mistakes, mapping through the likely thought patterns and misfires, and then figure out how to untangle them. Just as important, they have to create an atmosphere in which making mistakes is not only comfortable, but encouraged. Otherwise, they have no way to peek inside students’ minds and learn what they don’t yet understand.
2 . . . override accepted social codes.
The best teachers, Doug explained to me, resist both intuition and standard etiquette. Instead of politely leaving room for ambiguity, they eradicate it. They also do everything they can to paint the outcome they want to see, rather than the problem that first grabs their attention.
