Lemov's conclusion is entitled, "The End is the Beginning," so let me start there."Yet when Ben was recently asked how he ensures that his teachers use his material, he observed that he doesn't. He manages his teachers for results and provides these techniques to get them there. They are free to use them or not. ...Too many ideas, even good ones, go bad when they become an end and not a means." (Pg. 310)Lemov likes the word caveat. I'm going to ask someone with a Kindle version how many times th...

The sheer number of concrete, easy-to-employ strategies in TLAC makes it worth a read. Most of Lemov's strategies are common sense, but not always something you think about when you're actually teaching, so it helps to have them explained in detail here. This book doesn't, however, work in every classroom. I tried applying multiple strategies at once and they wound up backfiring on me--but I teach gifted high schoolers, so I think that for them, all the rigid emphasis on management isn't really

I recommend this book to all new teachers without exception. Experienced teachers who are having difficulty with classroom management are also encourged to read it. The techniques are explicitly detailed and most are easy to implement the very next day. Basically, the book gives specific techniques designed to create an atmosphere of respect and cooperation. I will definately get a lot of use out of it...the classroom clips are especially helpful. Things that I especially liked: 1. How to's on h...

Ah, the Charter School Camp. The Standardized Tests Are the Thing Camp. The Business/Military Style in Schools Camp. That's where TEACH LIKE A CHAMPION originates, from a guy named Doug Lemov who is invested in the Uncommon Schools, a group of inner city schools in the northeast that insist on teachers using these techniques. And though the cover says "K-12," most all of the examples cited are from elementary classrooms. Ditto the clips on the accompanying DVD. If you're a high school teacher, y...

This was a strongly recommended read from my administration. I read it somewhat begrudgingly but have to admit that many of the 49 techniques could be very useful. Particularly for new teachers, this book has some good, solid recommendations for how to increase student engagement. Until he gets to the section about reading. The last few chapters felt tacked on and beyond his realm of expertise. The more he discussed his strategies for teaching reading the more he seemed like someone obsessed wit...

Even better than the first book! This one has clear explanations in addition to a plethora of examples of good teaching! I strongly recommend it to any beginning teacher or a veteran seeking to improve their game.

Do you remember that scene at the beginning of Dead Poet's Society where Mr. Keating has the boys rip the J. Evans Pritchard scale for measuring poetry out of their textbooks?This book and its techniques are the equivalent of Mr. Pritchard's poetry scale. We ask whether our actions will result in learning, but this is the wrong question. The right question is whether our actions yield a return that exceeds our hurdle rate. That is, yield more learning per minute invested than does the best relia...

This is an excellent book for anyone who cares about "urban education" and its attendant issues. This books aims at teaching teachers how to develop a classroom culture in which city kids, ( a population left in the ash-heap of national education), can finally make significant progress. The book is broken up into 49 techniques chunked into several groupings, like High Academic Expectations, Lesson Structure, Classroom Culture, etc. About half the techniques have corallary video clips shown on th...

There's a lot of merit in some of the techniques compiled here, but after spending more than a month slogging through, I'm not sure it outweighs the sexism, classism and racism that underpin Doug Lemov's philosophy. From questionable case studies on the (most often female) erring young teacher, through utterly tone-deaf passages on the efficacy of exerting control to force a student (with a benign smile, of course!) to do something "she does not want to", to moralistic judgments of "incompetent"...

Well, the good news is that I'm a champion teacher and I didn't even know it! Turns out I already knew all of the concepts, and most of the techniques, that Lemov examines in his book. Of course, I'm not a new teacher; it's not my first rodeo. It would have been a great book if I were new to the profession, so if you are, I highly recommend it. Quite a bit of it is common sense, such as keeping the students busy from bell to bell, arranging the desks so that you have proximity, and establishing

End carceral pedagogy. This book promotes ideas that deprofessionalize teaching. It is more important to develop an ideology (like in the works of Freire, hooks, or Emdin) or to situate learning in evidence-based practices (like in John Hattie’s works) than to learn discrete skills and police students’ language and behavior. The references section for this is paltry—less than a page. We need a liberatory pedagogy for Black and Latinx students.

Problematic. The techniques are very authoritarian and simplistic. The author relies on behavioralism to a demeaning degree. The video clips that came with the book showing the techniques in action, made me very uncomfortable. I'm surprised the book didn't come with a clicker trainer.

If I could give this book negative stars, I would. Throw this book into the recycling bin if you've made the mistake of purchasing it and pick up a copy of Paulo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed instead. As a teacher of four years, let me say that this is *not* how you manage a classroom if your goal is something other than reproducing whiteness and treating students like robots.

I think this book is a must for pre-service teachers, but only if taught with a critical lens. The author says right off the bat that he does not consider himself a champion teacher, but he has spent countless hours in classrooms and studying tape with other researchers in order to compile what he has determined to be concrete "champion teacher" techniques. I don't agree with everything he says (some of it reads a little ivory tower, and some of the stuff he touches on concerning race makes me r...

Read the book and you'll get some fun tips. Read a little closer and watch the videos and you'll see it's all about controlling kids in high poverty areas, not teaching them.

I wish that Doug Lemov's Teach Like a Champion had been around when I was getting my teaching degree. Most of the books that I read in my graduate courses centered on theory -- not that theory and metacognition isn't important; however, as a brand-new teacher, I could really have used a book like this one, which describes 49 actual techniques you can use to manage your classroom and to encourage attention, enthusiasm, and higher-level thinking.As other reviewers have pointed out, Teach Like a Ch...

Doug Lemov shills ed reform garbage that teaches children "learned helplessness," over-reliance on the adult, and a lack of self-advocacy or creativity. As an experienced public AND charter school teacher who's been trained in 1.0 a zillion times and seen the results, I have nothing to say but to toss this in the trash.**Update: JK. Turns out, I have a lot to say.**What is your teaching experience, and what do you want to gain from this book? I think the strategies are good for a beginner, but m...

This is a pretty good book, over all, for nitty-gritty, try-it-this-way teaching techniques. Whether you're already using them or not, the [mostly] lucid prose and examples provide food for thought for teachers who are seeking to improve their practice. There are several techniques I either want to try out for myself or work to improve on based on what I read.That said, the book loses points for two reasons: 1) There are many parts of it that sound like ad copy for various charter schools. And c...

I read parts of this book several years ago. I hate it. Really and truly. I've been thinking about it a lot as I read other books (For White Folks who Teach in the Hood) and articles about what real learning should be. Teach Like a Champion is the opposite of what real classrooms should look like, and I'm a little bit excited to start talking about that this coming school year.

My current professional development training is based entirely on this book. My first year of teaching was a nightmare. When the new administration took over and asked us to attend their training, I learned more about classroom management in those two weeks of in service than I did in both undergrad and graduate college. I'm in my second year now, and these techniques, paired with active practice, have turned me into a more confident and effective teacher. I had people observe who thought I was