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Class Struggle
By Jay Mathews

Explosive book for a new teacher generation

A storm is brewing in teacher training in America. It involves a generational change that we education writers don’t deal with much, but is more important than No Child Left Behind or the Race to the Top grants or other stuff we devote space to. Our urban public schools have many teachers in their twenties and thirties who are more impatient with low standards and more determined to raise student achievement than previous generations of inner city educators, having seen some good examples. But they don’t know what exactly to do.

This new cohort is frustrated with traditional teacher training. They think most education schools are too fond of theory (favorite ed school philosopher John Dewey died in 1952 before many of their parents were born) and too casual about preparing them for the practical challenges of teaching impoverished children.

So they are welcoming a new book. Much-underlined versions of it have been passed around like samizdat literature. Its title, “Teach Like A Champion: 49 Techniques That Put Students on the Path to College,” sounds phony. But the origins of this 332-page paperback, plus DVD, suggest education schools, and local teacher evaluation systems like those in D.C. and Montgomery County, are going to have to deal with it or wish they had.

The author, Doug Lemov, 42, is a managing director of Uncommon Schools, one of the high-performing public charter schools networks leading the charge against school district bureaucracies and old ways of training. He has watched and videoed the moves made and the words spoken by the most successful classroom teachers he knows, then written down the techniques they share.

There is much detail. I was exhausted just reading it. First of the 49 techniques is “No Opt Out,” what you do when a student says she can’t answer your question or doesn’t respond at all. You move to other students, and when you get the right answer return to the first student and insist she repeat what she just heard, proving no one can excuse themselves from your class. Number 38 is “Strong Voice,” speaking clearly and forcefully while standing still in a way that makes it difficult for students NOT to hear what you are saying. Number 49 is “Normalizing Error,” responding to a wrong answer with a quick and non-judgmental effort to get the right one, so students realize that making mistakes is just part of the learning process.

For an technical book aimed at teachers, “Teach Like a Champion” is getting big play, including a March 7 cover story in the New York Times Magazine by GothamSchools.org editor Elizabeth Green. Whether that will produce big results is not so clear.

Many education schools are taking steps in this direction, particularly with video. But Lemov provides more detail than many of them are comfortable with. One professor told me education students can’t be motivated to embrace such methods until they are in a rough classroom fighting to survive. The ed schools give them theory and practice in digestible form, and send them off. If they don’t get a good mentor teacher, they are in trouble.