Doug Lemov Quotes

We’re socialized to believe that warmth and strictness are opposites,” Doug Lemov writes in his book Teach Like a Champion. “The fact is, the degree to which you are warm has no bearing on the degree to which you are strict, and vice versa.” Parents and teachers who manage to be both warm and strict seem to strike a resonance with children, gaining their trust along with their respect.

How All Teachers Can (and Must) Be Reading Teachers

Will we be content to cruise along on autopilot or will we scramble and suffer to get better?

We are fond of saying “practice makes perfect,” and indeed the title of this book plays on the connection between practice and perfection. But it is more accurate to say that practice makes permanent.

there are teachers who without much fanfare take the students who others say “can't”—can't read great literature, can't do algebra or calculus, can't and don't want to learn—and turn them into scholars who can.

When you want them to follow your directions, stand still. If you're walking around passing out papers, it looks like the directions are no more important than all of the other things you're doing. Show that your directions matter. Stand still.

One of the problems with teaching is that there's a temptation to evaluate what we do in the classroom based on how clever it aligns with a larger philosophy , or even how gratifying it is to use not necessarily how effective it is...

...we spend a lot of time defining behavior by the negative "that was inappropriate." These commands are vague and inefficient...Telling students what to do in a way that is specific, concrete, sequential and observable refocuses us on teaching.

One (problem-solving) is generally slow and the other (decision-making) is often fast. Decision-making is the cognitive process players use more frequently during a match, but problem-solving is important in developing associations that ultimately support faster thinking during the game. Speed might seem like a relatively trivial point on which to focus, but of course it isn’t trivial to an athlete. When we talk about “instincts” and “game sense” in an athlete, we are usually talking about decisions that are made faster than we can consciously think, a skill that requires its own processes.

Our nation’s schools, having more than doubled their annual per pupil expenditures since 1970, have achieved precious little improvement against previous performances—a reduction in outcomes, in fact, if you ask the makers of the SAT.

In writing this book, I want to emphasize that the art is in the discretionary application of the techniques.

From the moment students arrived, the teachers worked to shape their perception of what it meant to make a mistake, pushing them to think of “wrong” as a first, positive, and often critical step toward getting it

pushing them to think of “wrong” as a first, positive, and often critical step toward getting it

Teach students how to do things right, don't just establish consequences for doing them wrong.

Kids too often change from the outside in. They see themselves being enthusiastic and start to feel enthusiastic. They see themselves lost in their work and start to think they are productive, contributing members of society and begin to believe and act accordingly more frequently.

Culture of Error has four key parts: expecting error, withholding the answer, managing your tell, and praising

using the content you teach to take all kids, not just inner-city kids, outside their own narrow band of experience is critical. This means challenging them with ideas outside their experience. Pandering to kids by substituting lyrics for lyric poetry or referring to a corpus of movies for examples of literary devices instead of a corpus of novels is easy in the short run but insufficient in the long run.

There is no such thing a boring content. In the hands of a great teacher...even if as teachers we doubt that we can make it so...this doubt puts us at risk of undercutting it: watering it down or apologizing for teaching it.

...insisting that you control the topic of behavioral conversation ensures accountability by students...

Knowledge forms the foundation of all higher order cognitive functions including critical thinking, problem-solving and decision-making.

Speed of consequence beats strength of consequence pretty much every time. Give feedback right away, even if it’s imperfect. Remember that a simple and small change, implemented right away, can be more effective than a complex rewiring of a skill.

Please stop talking to me, Coach—I am trying to play.

Around the world, people who studied parenting usually divided the various styles into four basic categories: Authoritarian parents were strict disciplinarians, the “because I said so” parents. Permissive parents tended to be indulgent and averse to conflict. They acted more like friends than parents. In some studies, permissive parents tended to be wealthier and more educated than other parents. Neglectful parents were just how they sounded: emotionally distant and often absent. They were also more likely to live in poverty. Then there was the fourth option: Authoritative. The word was like a mash up of authoritarian and permissive. These parents inhabited the sweet spot between the two: they were warm, responsive, and close to their kids, but, as their children got older, they gave them freedom to explore and to fail and to make their own choices. Throughout their kids’ upbringing, authoritative parents also had clear, bright limits, rules they did not negotiate. “We’re socialized to believe that warmth and strictness are opposites,” Doug Lemov writes in his book Teach Like a Champion. “The fact is, the degree to which you are warm has no bearing on the degree to which you are strict, and vice versa.” Parents and teachers who manage to be both warm and strict seem to strike a resonance with children, gaining their trust along with their respect. When researcher Jelani Mandara at Northwestern University studied 4,754 U.S. teenagers and their parents, he found that kids with authoritative parents had higher academic achievement levels, fewer symptoms of depression, and fewer problems with aggression, disobedience, and other antisocial behaviors. Other studies have found similar benefits. Authoritative parents trained their kids to be resilient, and it seemed to work.