Doug Lemov - Teaching in the Online Classroom

Doug Lemov and the Teach Like a Champion Team

Copyright 2020 by Doug Lemov. All rights reserved.

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FIRST EDITION

Doug Lemov and Erica Woolway

There are a few tiny, beautiful moments in one of Eric Snider's remote English lessons with his students at Achievement First Iluminar Mayoral Academy Middle School in Cranston, Rhode Island. The class is reading Rita WilliamsGarcia's One Crazy Summer, and Eric asks if anyone is willing to try to answer a question that they know is difficult. Eric has already told them, calmly and without judgment, that many of them misunderstood a key passagethat the question they've been asked to answer is a hard one. Many of the students are undaunted, and they volunteer. Thanks, James. Thanks, George. Thanks, Jaylee, he says as each hand is raised. He's showing students that he sees them embrace the challenge. Soon, there are more volunteers. Wow, ton of hands here. I appreciate it.

It's a great moment, because it reminds us how important it is for people to feel seen. Telling someone how much you appreciate what they do in the face of challenges can help bring out their best, online as much as in person.

This moment also reminds us that the act of observing others can influence people's behavior. We becomeor can becomemore like what we choose to observe. The human body has about 11M sensory receptors, James Clear writes in Atomic Habits. Approximately 10M of those are dedicated to sighta small change in what you see can lead to a big shift in what you do. Good models are powerful.

The clip ends, as you will later see, with a student answering the difficult question beautifully and compellingly, from the back seat of her family's car. It's a difficult world right now, but she's managed to adapt, and she's brought her A game.

Teachers, too, have been asked to do what they know is difficult: to shift, without warning, to an unfamiliar universeone where we interact with our students remotely, as if through a tiny keyhole in the classroom door. Each of the young people we care about now appears as a small image in the corner of our computer screen (sometimes not even that).

Nearly everything about teaching has changed for teachers over the past few months except the fact that students need us. And so it's incumbent upon us a profession to learn new methods to reach them as quickly and effectively as possible.

This book is about applying the lessons of that moment from Eric's classroom to teachers. In it we'll show you, with appreciation, tiny moments from the classes of real teachers working online. We'll share insights and discuss principles from those examples to help you adapt as successfully as possible to our New Normal of remote teaching or some combination of remote and classroom education. And in doing so we hope to show our appreciation for you and for the teachers whose work we share.

No one asked for the world to change this way, but it has. As teachers, that means there's work to be done. If you're reading this, you realize and embrace that fact. We're grateful to you, and our goal is to pay you back for that commitment. And the good news is that it's not just that teachers have jumped in, in the face of difficulty, and done the work. It's that they have done the work and begun to find solutions to the difficult daytoday challenges of remote teaching. Whenever difficulty presents itself, there is always some teacher, somewhere, who finds a solution.

In facing new teaching challenges, it's important to remember that while so much of the work has changed (we all now know what Zoom is, for example), much also remains the same. The fundamentals of teaching and the relationships that we know from our previous lives still very much apply. Sometimes we just have to look harder or in different places to see it. As one friend described her life under quarantine, it is a New Normaltotally different but with at least an echo of the familiar.

Since this New Normal began, we've witnessed plenty of challenges in the classroomglitchy internet; good internet but some children lacking a device to access it; students participating from hallways outside their apartments; teachers leading classes with their own children in their lapsbut we have seen even more of a cando attitude, a problemsolving embrace of situations outside our control. There is less looking back over shoulders and more turning to face the future fullon.

It's important to underscore the urgency of this attitudethe absolute necessity of getting better at what we do now, no matter the circumstances.

A recent blog post by Brown University economist Emily Oster used data from her colleague John Freidman's research to show how critical the next months and years of our teaching lives will be. Friedman took data on student progress from the online math platform Zearn, charted it longitudinally, and disaggregated it by income level. Here's the chart: