Teach Like a Champion 2.0

​In 2010, Doug Lemov's Teach Like a Champion quickly became an international bestseller that would revolutionize how teachers refine their craft. Lemov, who teaches instruction and school leadership at Relay and is Managing Director at Uncommon Schools, painstakingly detailed 49 techniques that put students on the path to college. Two years later, Lemov co-authored Practice Perfect, which described how everyone, and especially educators, can improve their performance through relentless and deliberate practice. Today, we’re pleased to share the foreword to Lemov’s latest book, Teach Like a Champion 2.0. It’s written by Norman Atkins, Relay's founder and president. 

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In 1983, a landmark US education commission famously declared that our “nation [is] at risk,” that “a rising tide of mediocrity … threatens our very future,” and that we should consider our woeful K-12 performance a self-imposed “act of war.” With confidence in established educational institutions at an all-time low, various states invited teachers and fellow citizens to offer new ideas, new approaches, and new schools that might help rebuild a broken system. The charter schools that emerged, beginning in 1991, were to serve as a research-and-development arm of public education.

Over the past quarter century, a new generation of idealists has answered that trumpet blast for reform, mostly in cities where the country has ignored millions of children who live in poverty and attend ineffective, inhospitable, unhappy schools. To build schools and classrooms of their own making, these reformers scaled the walls of bureaucracy, and then struggled with the very challenges that plagued their forebears. But, as pragmatic idealists, they didn’t chase educational equity in the abstract. They pursued it relentlessly as instructional problem-solvers in a mission-driven learning community.

Suddenly, classroom doors — for decades, sadly and oddly closed to outsiders and colleagues alike — flew open. Looking for models to learn from and copy, legions flocked to the classrooms of the most skillful teachers, whose students were joyfully engaged, academically focused, working together as teams, and generating jaw-dropping results.

Of those who studied outlier classrooms, one tall, unassuming teacher and leader — Doug Lemov — camped out longer than all the rest. He saw the significance of instructional brush strokes that most of us either missed or didn’t appreciate: how teachers circulated, engaged all students, targeted their questions, framed the positive, worked the clock, waited strategically for, and then stretched out student answers.

Lemov had eyes to see the details of the well-delivered lesson, and a heart to love and celebrate teachers for their impact on students’ life trajectories. He filled volumes of black notebooks with enthusiastic, illegible scrawls that slowly transmogrified into sticky phrases and ideas. Then, before anyone else, he sent cameras into classrooms to capture exemplary teaching practices on video.

After watching the slow-motion replay of instructional moves, he converted his field notes into a taxonomy of effective teaching practices — initially for his private use, then for teachers across the network we founded, Uncommon Schools, and then as the basis for training thousands of teachers and principals nationwide. At a certain point — when he’d produced something like the 28th version — a bunch of us pressed him to publish; any hesitancy on Lemov’s part was born of humility, a belief that his playbook was still in process.

So he was unprepared for what happened four years ago: hundreds of thousands of copies of his painstakingly assembled taxonomy, the first edition of this book, flewfrom Amazon’s warehouse with blazing speed, reaching about a quarter of America’s teachers across all types of schools — public, independent, parochial, urban, suburban, rural. They found actionable, accessible guidance that they could use, not merely to set up their classrooms or plan their lessons, but during the act of teaching. Novice teachers adopted sure-fire routines to manage their classrooms, create a joyful culture, and build a productive platform for learning. More experienced teachers appreciated that Lemov “invented a new language of American teaching,” as Elizabeth Green explains in Building a Better Teacher. His was their language, full of memorable catchphrases, and supplemented by pictures and video of real teachers, that helped them go from “good to great.” In a subsequent volume, Practice Perfect, Lemov and his colleagues encouraged teachers to rehearse techniques and strategies before improvising in front of students.

Meanwhile, more than 18,000 principals and teachers have participated in Lemov’s trainings through Uncommon Schools, and thousands more have learned his approach through the Relay Graduate School of Education, which we founded, in part, to share elements of effective teaching that he codified. I’ve watched his work catch on in Brazil, India and South Africa. The Queen of Jordan commissioned an Arabic translation, while teachers in China, Korea, Australia, Holland, England, and other countries have brought Teach Like a Champion (TLAC) into their classrooms.

A funny thing happened on the way to TLAC becoming a global phenomenon. As teachers have learned from Lemov, he has learned from them. Over the past decade, he has probably visited 10,000 classrooms and watched 10,000 video clips. Since TLAC’s publication, he’s observed countless teachers improve, adapt, and reshape the techniques he’d described. One of my favorite teaching techniques is what Lemov named “the culture of error,” in which teachers make it safe for students to show their mistakes, rather than hide them. By publishing the first edition when he did, Lemov gained four years of feedback that helped refine his thinking, his writing, and his taxonomy. This culture, of course, leads ineluctably to a 2.0 edition, the one you now hold in your hands. Fans of the first edition will undoubtedly find in this one the same core techniques — in even sharper form. What’s new, right at the start of the 2.0 version, is a much deeper, more specific treatment on how to “check for understanding.” There’s also new material on students’ writing life, as well as on shifting the ratio of cognitive work from the teacher to students. In keeping with Common Core State Standards — a promising development that has raised the instructional bar across the land — Lemov’s work, more than ever, pushes teachers to ask rigorous questions and engage students in more rigorous learning.

For all of these reasons, I suspect that a broader set of teachers, with a wider range of styles, voices, and approaches, will see themselves in this book. They will discover new techniques they can employ in their classrooms, and encounter new language that will call them to be better still. At the same time, many will practice, adapt, and invent the next set of techniques that will emerge in the decades ahead. May the circle of champion teachers grow wider, may the community of practice enlarge, and may you be part of the generation of teachers who use and develop tools that will — as we say at Uncommon Schools — change history.

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