Reading circle

BOOK RESPONSE FORM

Book Title : Teach Like a Champion

Planning that Ensures Academic Achievement

Author : Doug Lemov Foreword by Norman Atkins

Publisher : Jossey-Bass A Wiley Imprint

Date Published: 2010 Number of Pages : 14 pages

Genre : Education Book

• On a scale of 1-10 , how difficult was this book for you? (1= easy,10=difficult) why??

Scale of difficult in this article is 6.Because there are some parts of this article that make I can’t understand well.

Summary :

Planning that Ensures Academic Achievement

The six techniques below have to do with planning – the crucial part of teaching that you do before you step foot in the classroom.

Technique 6: BEGIN WITH THE END -- When Lemov started teaching he admits that he frequently spent the night before a lesson asking, “What am I going to do tomorrow?” This was a flawed approach. First, he focused on the activities for the lesson, not the objective. In addition, he found himself planning each lesson individually rather than seeing the lessons as part of a carefully planned unit that drove students, a day at a time, toward mastery of larger concepts. Great teachers start with unit planning which consists of:

1. Progress from unit planning to lesson planning.

2. Refine and perfect the lesson objective based on the degree of mastery from the day before.

3. Plan a short daily assessment to determine whether the objective was mastered.

4. Plan the sequence of activities that lead to mastery of the objective.

Technique 7: 4Ms – It is vital to design effective objectives. To do so, use the criteria below to determine if your objective is effective:

1. Manageable: An objective can’t be effective if you can’t teach it in a single lesson. Of course you want your students to master larger skills, but this can take weeks so you need to break them into steps your students can master in one period.

2. Measureable: Effective objectives can be measured. This is often done at the end of the period with an exit ticket (a

short activity or question students complete to show they learned the material).

3. Made first: An objective should guide the activities you use in the lesson and not simply be an afterthought.

4. Most important: Choose an objective based on what is most important for students to learn on the path to college.

Technique 8: POST IT -- If the objective is so important, then you should post it. Use language that students understand so they know

what they’re trying to do. Posting it also helps visitors and administrators give more effective and tailored feedback.

Technique 9: SHORTEST PATH -- Teachers have become accustomed to choosing their lesson activities based on how clever, how

artfully designed, how in tune with the latest education philosophy those activities are. Instead, activities should be chosen based on

how fast and how well they get students to master the objective. It’s time to stop thinking of Socratic seminars or lectures as good or

bad. Instead, take the SHORTEST PATH to your objectives in designing activities.

Technique 10: DOUBLE PLAN -- Most lessons focus on what you, the teacher, will be doing – what you will say, do, collect, and

assign. Teachers often forget to plan what the students will be doing. What will students do while you review the causes of the Civil

War? Will they take notes on a graphic organizer? Will they review those notes in a one-sentence summary? To help you see the

lesson through the students’ eyes try creating a T-chart listing what you will do on one side and what the students will do on the other.

Technique 11: DRAW THE MAP -- Teachers often forget to use the physical environment to support the goals of the lesson.

Teachers often seat students in pods facing each other so they can interact more and leave the set-up like this all year. What if the

teacher only wants the students to interact with each other for part of the lesson? Lemov admits that his personal bias is to set up the

classroom in rows of pairs because it is tidy, orderly, and socializes students to primarily attend to the board and teacher. Then if the

teacher wants the students to interact more directly, she can ask students to “track” the speaker (look at the person speaking) or have

students move desks quickly into another formation. Furthermore, rows of pairs allow the teacher to get anywhere quickly.