Doug Lemov's field notes
Reflections on teaching, literacy, coaching, and practice.03.22.14 Putting a Bow On It: A Brief Note on Text Selection
03.13.14 Rue Ratray and “Sensitivity Analysis” in Reading Classes (Video)
When we teach math we try to develop number sense- a broader intuition for how numbers work, an affinity for the logic of how they fit together. When we set out to teach ‘number sense’ one tool we often use is a simple version of “sensitivity analysis.” We ask students to evaluate the effect of changes…
03.10.14 Reading Check Boxes: Little Things With Big Muscles:
Little Things Have Big Muscles: On the Teach Like a Champion team, that’s our motto. Aliquam magna est res musculi in Latin, apparently. First draft of the Coat of Arms below. Comments welcome. But seriously, in analyzing the classroom materials of teachers at Leadership Prep Bed Stuy Middle Academy the other day we found one of…
01.06.14 Doing More with Less: On Short, Intensive Embedded Non-Fiction and The Giver
Rue Ratray, an English teacher at Boston’s high-performing Brooke Charter Schools, sent me a note this morning to ask about embedding non-fiction. He’s reading The Giver with his 6th graders, and anyone reading The Giver pretty much gets my immediate attention. (It’s my favorite work of youth fiction, as I discussed here.) Rue was wondering about the…