Teach Like a Champion: 49 Techniques that Put Students on the Path to College
Product Type: Book
Product Price: $27.95
Manufacturer: Jossey-Bass
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Description
Teach Like a Champion offers effective teaching techniques to help teachers, especially those in their first few years, become champions in the classroom. These powerful techniques are concrete, specific, and are easy to put into action the very next day. Training activities at the end of each chapter help the reader further their understanding through reflection and application of the ideas to their own practice.
Among the techniques:
- Technique #1: No Opt Out. How to move students from the blank stare or stubborn shrug to giving the right answer every time.
- Technique #35: Do It Again. When students fail to successfully complete a basic task?from entering the classroom quietly to passing papers around?doing it again, doing it right, and doing it perfectly, results in the best consequences.
- Technique #38: No Warnings. If you're angry with your students, it usually means you should be angry with yourself. This technique shows how to effectively address misbehaviors in your classroom.
Please note that the kindle edition does not come with a DVD.
Teach Like a Champion offers effective teaching techniques to help teachers, especially those in their first few years, become champions in the classroom. These powerful techniques are concrete, specific, and are easy to put into action the very next day. Training activities at the end of each chapter help the reader further their understanding through reflection and application of the ideas to their own practice.
Among the techniques:
- Technique #1: No Opt Out. How to move students from the blank stare or stubborn shrug to giving the right answer every time.
- Technique #35: Do It Again. When students fail to successfully complete a basic task?from entering the classroom quietly to passing papers around?doing it again, doing it right, and doing it perfectly, results in the best consequences.
- Technique #38: No Warnings. If you're angry with your students, it usually means you should be angry with yourself. This technique shows how to effectively address misbehaviors in your classroom.
Top Five Things Every Teacher Needs to Know (or Do) to Be Successful
Amazon-exclusive content from author Doug Lemov
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A few teachers may be born with an intuitive gift for teaching but I when I watch a great teacher I see mostly hard work and attention to detail. So believe that great teachers can be made. Every teacher can improve by using proven, concrete techniques in the classroom. This question brings to mind two amazing teachers I know—Julie Jackson and Colleen Driggs. Julie and Colleen are always doing things like reviewing their lesson plans on the way to work and talking with peers about how to improve their craft. It’s exciting to me that what we may attribute to natural talent is actually hard work. You can choose to work hard and improve and become exactly the teacher you want to be. What’s the best way for a teacher to start the year with a new class?
It’s important to build systems and routines, as I describe in chapter six, “Setting and Maintaining High Behavioral Expectations” in Teach Like a Champion. The first day of school should be teaching students the right way to do things and practicing this over and over. Learning and practicing these systems and routines allows a teacher and her students to rely on this foundation for the rest of the year. I once witnessed Dave Levin (who is a founder of KIPP schools and a fantastic teacher) begin a teacher training workshop in an interesting way. Dave started by handing a mirror to every teacher in the room. He said, “Your classroom is a mirror. It looks however you make it look. The first step is to believe that your classroom mirrors your decisions. You can control it.” That’s the first step. To accept that as a teacher you decide who you want to be and how you want to create your classroom culture. You own it. Some people do it so you can do it. And that’s a good thing. If you could just change one thing in our nation’s schools, what would you change?
It’s important that we do everything possible to support teachers so that they love their work and can be successful in the classroom. In my opinion, teachers should get paid the same as professional athletes or film stars. This book is largely based on your experience with the group of charter schools you help lead on the east coast, called Uncommon Schools. Please tell us more about Uncommon Schools.
Uncommon Schools is a group of schools that serve low-income populations in urban centers in New York and New Jersey. Across our 16 schools 98% of our students scored proficient in math and just below 90% in English. This means that our schools usually outperform more privileged suburban districts. We’ve been using the 49 techniques in my book for 5 years, with our teachers constantly refining and adding to them. Our experience has proven not only that that these techniques work—and they can work in every school and in every classroom—but that great teachers make them better and more sophisticated over time. And best of all the teachers who practice using them find themselves in control of a happy, rigorous classroom that reflects the motivations that brought them to teaching in the first place. Successful teachers are happy teachers!
Reviews
Rating: 5 / 5
Date: 2010-08-27
Summary: "Incredible!"
I chose to read this as part of a professional development course and I really gained much more from it than I had ever imagined. The text was invigorating and the ideas were really teacher friendly, easily adaptable and thought provoking. I plan on reading this a few more times so that I can continue to develop new teaching strategies.
Rating: 5 / 5
Date: 2010-08-25
Summary: "Teach Like a Champion provides good insights for all teachers"
The book was nicely laid out and challenges the thoughtful reader who is interested in assessing their teaching style. Not all of the advice is special or insightful, but the entire focus of the book provides a good framework for some thoughtful self-reflection.
Rating: 5 / 5
Date: 2010-08-19
Summary: "The Section on Teaching Reading is Fantastic"
I enjoyed this book and am excited to implement many of the 49 techniques in my classroom (some of them won't, I don't think, work for my inner city 11th graders, a point made in other reviews). Just based on the 49 techniques, I might have given the book four stars, since I think a bit of discussion of age-levels might have been useful (the DVD is almost all, or all, middle and elementary school).
But almost half the book presents material beyond the 49 techniques, including very useful discussions of lesson pacing and teaching reading. The latter section was like an entirely other book, and was among the most interesting discussions I've read on the topic (and since I'm a high school English teacher just finishing up the Johns Hopkins teaching Masters, I've read a fair bit on it).
Two of the insights that I need to discuss with my school and investigate further, and which have HUGE potential ramifications:
1) He advocates homogeneous grouping (by ability) for maximum student achievement (I wish he'd said more about this and provided references). If he's right, he could make a huge positive impact by pushing this harder; my school does the opposite, as do many schools, and I've thought it's a big problem, but there's not much willingness to challenge it; the science is, I thought, against my instincts...
2) He spends quite a bit of time dissing the standard method of teaching reading that uses comprehension strategies. He is especially disdainful of "visualization," but isn't kind to any of them other than summarizing. He's convincing, but again I'd have appreciated citations. My school is using Strategies That Work, and while his arguments make serious intuitive sense, I would have enjoyed a bit more reference to studies and/or elaboration on his points.
Overall, this book will improve my teaching significantly, and will thus have a positive impact on the lives of the few hundred kids I'll teach this year. It must feel good to be Doug Lemov.
Rating: 3 / 5
Date: 2010-08-14
Summary: "important, useful, and poorly produced"
This is undoubtedly an important and useful book. The author takes basic ideas and strategies, then presents and develops them in a way that classroom instructors of any level can successfully incorporate them into her/his teaching. Although written for teachers in K through 12 classrooms, college and university professors can find a lot that is helpful here.
Unfortunately, the book is not especially well written--the prose is occasionally dense and hard to follow--and the production values are, at best, excruciatingly bad. One page, one paragraph, two examples. On page 18, in a discussion of the importance of high expectations and what will later be identified as the "language of opportunity," we read: "He had passionately engaged the topic with strong ideas, couched in prose that at times occluded his meaning or wounds itself into syntactical knots." Huh? Occluded-wounds. Somebody was asleep. Later in the same paragraph, Zora Neale Hurston, about whom the student's paper had been written, is referred to as "Huston."
If these were the only instances of problems with expression and proofreading, I wouldn't point them out here. They aren't. The book is filled with examples as egregious as this, including: sentences that don't end with a period; sentences that don't begin with a capital letter; use of the indefinite article "a" before a word that begins with a vowel, e.g., "a approach." The logic of the layout is also elusive, with sidebars that don't have any clear reason for being separated from the body of the discussion.
As was remarked of the student paper discussed on page 18, errors such as these "allowed the professor to avoid discussing the content of his argument." I fear that this book will be dismissed by many as one more example of teacher-talk or education-speak, when, if more care had been taken, and the author had been able to write consistently in his own voice, it could have served as the basis for many meaningful and rich discussions of the purpose of education and the tools needed for teachers and students both to excel, in the classroom and in the world.
Rating: 4 / 5
Date: 2010-08-09
Summary: "Teach Like A Champion"
The book gives excellent strategies that new teachers and veteran teachers can use to have strong classroom management in their classroom and a successful school year.