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. …
My colleagues and I are in Westchester today talking behavior and culture with 160 or so educators. One participant brought up the perennial question that looms large in the minds of those who train new teachers: which technique(s) should we start with? When you’re discussing something as complex as teaching, there are obviously no right or…
One of the most effective activities we do with teachers–both at Uncommon Schools and in our trainings–is planning for error (Plan for Error is Teach Like a Champion 2.0 technique #7). The idea is that if you spend a few minutes before your lessons anticipating 1) what your students are likely to get wrong or misunderstand…
Had a great day Monday talking Check for Understanding with school leaders at RELAY GSE’s National Principal’s Academy. We were talking about observing carefully during student independent work, and particularly the topics of Standardize the Format and Tracking Not Watching–techniques 3 and 4 in TLaC 2.0. If you combine these with Everybody Writes (technique 37) and…
Technique #1 in the new Teach Like a Champion 2.0 is “Reject Self Report.” The idea being that we should listen for the moments when, having just taught something or explained a task, we ask students questions like: “Everybody understand?” or “Everyone got it?” These questions, we should realize, are functionally rhetorical. There is only one…