Know any aspiring teachers? Send them a copy of this book ASAP

When I was in college, several of my courses
required the purchase of what the professors indicated were canonical texts.
Calculus required Apostol’s Calculus Volumes
1 and 2.
Electricity and magnetism used Jackson’s Classical
Electrodynamics. Computer science used Sedgewick’s Algorithms. 

In the field of teacher pre-service training,
Doug Lemov’s Teach
Like a Champion 2.0: 62 Techniques that put Students on the Path to College
(TLAC) should have similar stature.

Lemov and his team have built a taxonomy of
champion classroom practices by carefully observing (and recording) real teachers
who regularly achieve outstanding results for their students. A significant
update to the first edition (which we reviewed in
2010), TLAC 2.0’s revisions and organization—grouping the techniques into four
main classroom focus areas—challenge the (uncharitable)
opinion that it represents nothing more than a “bag of tricks.” It’s true that
Lemov has a bias to action: he introduces the text stating he “(has) tried to
describe the techniques of champion teachers in a concrete, specific, and
actionable way” with a focus on next-day implementation.  And it’s true that 62 techniques are detailed
in the text. But these techniques represent an early, on-going effort to
define, illustrate and develop the fundamentals of effective classroom
instruction. Rather than a “bag of tricks,” these are foundational skills, much
like arithmetic is a necessary precursor to algebra. 

An example is illustrative. Check for
understanding was a single technique in the first edition; it’s now a
critical area encompassing two chapters of the book (collecting data on mastery
and acting on the data/establishing a culture of error) and ten separate
techniques. One of those techniques—plan
for error—outlines specific planning a teacher can undertake in
anticipating and correcting student misunderstandings during instruction and
practice. For example, in planning for a lesson on the slope-intercept form of
equations, a teacher (in this case, Bryan Belanger from Troy Prep Middle
School) included more than 50 practice problems of increasing complexity: more
than any class could get through in a period. However, the expectation was not
that any single class would be able to get through them; rather, after
teaching, Bryan would give problems to the class as practice and decide to skip
ahead or loop back in the list of problems depending on his observations of his
students.

Lemov’s description of planning for error includes
two more ways of doing so: planning for specific errors (that is, thinking
through the most obvious misapprehensions for the most important points of a
lesson and specifically figuring out, beforehand, how you would respond) and
planning re-teach time (that is, setting aside blocks of time to loop back to
areas where your students are struggling or, happily, move ahead if there are
no such barriers to understanding).

The book also clearly mirrors the respect and
admiration Lemov has for the teachers he has observed and with whom he has
collaborated. This is not the work of an academic isolated from practice; this
is the work of someone with a deep respect of practice and practitioners, a
work written about, by and for them.

It is telling that we found the first edition of
Teach Like a Champion in the
classroom management courses in 7 of 122 programs in our 2013
report on classroom management .  To
be clear — that’s not a commentary on the text; rather, it’s an indictment of a
field that avoids the creation of a coherent theory of instruction, favoring
instead the idea that each teacher must find her own way with her
particular students.