Finally, a Way to Teach Teachers How to Teach!

Are good teachers born or made?  This question haunted me as I struggled at several points in my early teaching career.  I believed, after wanting to succeed so badly in my teaching career, that because I was having difficulties, I just wasn’t cut out for the classroom. Of course, I discounted the times when I had wonderful successes.  I was unable to reflect back on those times to analyze what I was doing right.  It had been too unconscious, too instinctive because I hadn’t actually learned what constitutes good teaching .  Thankfully, I didn’t give up.  I watched, read, practiced, and learned effective classroom management techniques.  If you have read Freakonomics, you will probably agree with me that one of the most comforting themes in that collection of studies, is the idea that most people who are outstanding in their field do not possess some magical innate ability. These people have simply worked incredibly hard, practicing what works over and over again.

 I recently was assigned to read a NY Times article in my Mimio (interactive whiteboard technology) training class.  Our instructor’s goal: helping us to understand what good teaching looks like.  Having this foundational knowledge would certainly inform our own trainings when helping teachers to integrate technology into their classrooms.  All the best technology on the market isn’t going to improve a classroom with inherently bad teaching. The article featured Doug Lemov ( who happens to hail from my area, Albany, NY) and other educators who have done important research into what it is that teachers do to create well-managed classrooms where kids behave and learn a lot.  While helping to lead Uncommon schools, a Charter school network in New York and Massachusetts, he and his team of teachers came to a simple and powerful conclusion:  “ what looked like natural-born genius was often deliberate technique in disguise”.  Their observations of what techniques the best teachers use has been distilled into what is now called Lemov’s Taxonomy.  This list is also in a just-released book version “Teach Like a Champion: the 49 Techniques that Put Students on the Path to College”.  The taxonomy is accompanied by 700 video clips of teachers demonstrating these effective strategies.  Incidentally, the teachers who were lauded as “most effective” were identified based on higher student test scores.  That criteria, even if limiting, does indicate general classroom success.

Yes, perhaps some gifted teachers figure out these techniques naturally like some people discover their own mental math tricks. Most of us, I suspect, benefit from instruction and mentoring.  If I could have studied Lemov’s Taxonomy in my early days of teaching, I undoubtedly would have wasted less time doubting myself and spent more time perfecting specific techniques.


Take Care,
Nicole