The benefits of using Cold Call in the classroom are pretty clear. It helps ensure that students are always mentally ‘on’ during a lesson and it allows teachers to question quickly and efficiently, especially to make sure that students know what they need to know—to Check for Understanding. These ideas are critical in a coaching…
Dani Quinn is a math teacher at the Michaela School in London. We recently video-taped her lesson and, in watching, I was struck right away by her Check for Understanding. She constantly used Show Me (technique #5 in TLaC) to assess students as she taught and she used that data to guide her lesson. And she…
Had a pretty amazing day in Chicago on Wednesday, talking teaching with a group of (mostly) MLS professional soccer coaches who are enrolled in US Soccer’s new Pro License course. The group includes guys who I admire as coaches and who I followed as players. I was a little bit starstruck… but I got over that…
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…
One of the most important skills for any teacher or coach is observing during independent practice. It’s one of the keys to Checking for Understanding. Joaquin Hernandez, Jen Kim and I put some new framing on this critical topic in the 2.0 version of the Teach Like a Champion Field Guide, which comes out in September. …