Teach Like A Champion: Classroom Culture

Teach Like A Champion whilst being a little American is a superb practical book about effective teaching. Lemov concentrates on the quality of teaching, rather than teachers, and forensically explains how  a teacher can behave in a way that is effective.

Lemov is apologetic stating “Many of the techniques you will read about in this book at first may seem mundane, unremarkable, even disappointing,” yet this is the strength of the methods – anyone can use these to improve their practice.

One of the things he talks about is establishing a framework for establishing social norms in classrooms:

Five principles of classroom culture

• Discipline
• Management
• Control
• Influence
• Engagement

Discipline

• what does discipline mean
• “ doing something the right way”
• Instructions given to a disciple.  Order necessary for instruction
• Need to explicitly teach students how we want them to be
• Manner, tone, belief systems – is directly related to our success

  Management

• management is the rewards and consequences
• set from the outside

Control

• how you get students to do what you want regardless of any management system
• Characteristics
  • Strong voice – economy of language, intolerance of interruptions, refusal to engage and facing up
  • Presence
  • What to do very explicit with instructions etc
  • “with it ness” ( awareness watching the class having good vision)
• 100%  (not settling for partial compliance)
• Redirection techniques
• Teachers who do not have control overly rely on management system

 Control techniques 100%

• ignoring behaviour is a disaster
• have non verbal techniques for settling a class
• avoid marginal compliance
• all in calm and positive

Redirection

• non verbal
• positive group correction
• anon group correction We need two people to have eyes on me

 Influence

• students behave because they believe in the school
• become default setting

Engagement

• interest and positive interaction
• students want to use instead of no
• making lessons interesting

3 types of engagement

• behavioural engagement
• affective engagement – lesson is fun
• cognitive engagement – are students thinking hard? (most difficult)

Well worth reading.

Teach Like A Champion, Doug Lemov