Chapter 5 and 6 Summaries and Graphic Organizers

Chapter 5 and 6 Summaries and Graphic Organizers

Chapter 5 Summary

Chapter five talks about lesson structure. It gives seven techniques to help teachers structure their lessons effectively to meet learners’ needs and expectations. These techniques include;

Do Now

The first technique is Do Now. This short pencil-to-paper activity awaits students as they enter the class, and they should and can start it without any guidance or direction from the teachers. The first step in any great lesson is to use Do Now techniques (Lemov 288). How a class starts sends a strong message to learners about the purpose, expectations, and culture of the community they are entering. Thus, teachers should be intentional about this. The ‘do now’ technique helps students participate in high-quality and productive work that challenges and interests them immediately and over time. This technique, when used in class, should meet three main criteria.

1. It should be done in a safe place daily to be routine for all students.
2. It should take the shortest time possible, five minutes, to complete and must be putting pencil to paper.
3. Students should complete it without any direction, discussions, or materials not carried to class.

Take the Steps

The second technique is to take the steps. Usually, in teaching strong content, knowledge is vital, but it also has a downside. Therefore, experts carry with them the “curse of knowledge.”  A curse of knowledge is a cognitive bias when a person or teacher communicating with learners assumes they have the background knowledge to understand a concept. For experts or professionals, it is hard to understand why things look hard for beginners. However, teachers must remember that what is obvious to them is never obvious to students. Thus, taking the lesson steps accurately is essential for learners to understand the concepts effectively. How can a teacher take the steps? The first thing is to break up new materials into phases and teach and practice them sequentially. Secondly, teachers can use work samples or annotated models rather than rubrics to assist learners in developing an understanding of the complex parts of a task. Finally, teachers should look for any overlooked points that seem obvious yet a source of confusion to learners. Some strategies that can make taking steps effective include using the guidance fading effect. As such, students should be given lots of explicit guidance initially to limit their working memory load, which will help transfer knowledge to long-term memory. Once learners are knowledgeable, that direction is needless and should fade out and be replaced by problem-solving. Also, using work samples instead of rubrics will help take steps.

Board = Paper

The board is equivalent to paper, meaning anything written on the board should be written on the paper/book. This means taking notes in class is a vital but easily disregarded skill that permits learners to review and organize material over the long run and in the short run during class when they are actively taking notes. Note-taking can make students prioritize and focus their attention on learning. Essentially, note-taking is a progressive habit that develops over time from a simple model in the elementary years to a more complex one in the college levels.

Accountable Independent Reading

Independent reading is vital to learner success in every subject. Often, this base operating system reinforces almost every academic endeavor. Therefore, academic Independent Reading (AIR) is a set of tools to ensure independent reading during class is productive and successful. AIR has three central tenets. The first is assigning reading in short periods to make adaptive judgments based on how all learners read initial samples. The second tenet is assessing intentionally. Using observable assignments to decide how effectively or how much of a given text learners can read on their own is by assessing intentionally (Lemov 305). The last tenet embeds the reading within the teaching arc, so it is never a discrete activity but an activity where ideas connect and apply to the rest of the lesson.

Fase Reading

Fase reading is a system for learners to read aloud and optimize the viability and value of this vital activity. This then allows teachers to build students’ fluency and enjoyment of reading. Fase reading aims to remind tutors about the four elements they should try to reinforce when learners read aloud. These elements are fluency, accountability, social, and expressive.

Circulate

The technique circulate defines habits and rules for a tutor’s intentional and strategic movement within the room or class during a lesson. For teachers to execute circulation techniques effectively, they should follow these steps (Lemov 300). The first one is breaking the plane of the classroom by moving around—secondly, full access is required. Once the teacher breaks the plane, they should have full access to the whole room. The teacher must be able to naturally stand near any student within the class without interrupting observation, listening, and teaching. The third step is engaging learners while using the circulate strategy. This can be executed by teaching actively and using frequent nonverbal and verbal interventions such as smiling. The fourth step is moving systematically around the room or class, ensuring all parts of the class are covered and being aware of what is happening everywhere. The last step is positioning for perception, whereby as the teacher circulates within the class, the goal should be to remain facing the class as much as possible. This way, a teacher sees what is happening around the class at a glance and with less transaction cost.

Exit Ticket

The final technique for lesson structure is an exit ticket, which is used to close or finish the lesson. To get a reliable snapshot of students’ thoughts or understanding, Lemov recommends ending the class with a short sequence of questions that expose the degree to which the students have mastered the day’s content (339). This helps teachers identify the struggling learners, what is not understood, and what was understood. Therefore, when teachers collect responses from learners before they leave for home or finish the lesson and review the data, this is known as Exit Ticket. Moreover, exit tickets can help establish an effective practice of student assessment at the end of the lesson and ensure that the lesson ends with information that can be used to analyze students’ progress and even inform future lessons (Lemov 340). Nonetheless, exit tickets must possess the following characteristics: they must be quick, designed to yield information or data, predictable, and make great Do Now (Lemov 344).

Graphic Organizer Chapter 5

Chapter 6 Summary

Pacing

Chapter six talks about pacing. It describes pacing as students’ perception of progress as one teaches, which is the illusion of speed. This means it differs from the speed used to cover content and is not essentially about methodology. Notably, teachers with strong pacing create an opinion of rapid progress when learners are expected to feel as if they are following the concept or moving (Lemov 352). Therefore, they must balance perception with time and determine whether learners desire a more reflective and slow pace or a fast and non-reflective pace. Hence, the chapter provides ways to manage and capture the momentum needed in a class. It then offers various activities and techniques to improve pacing while teaching these techniques to include.

Change The Pace

The key to successful pacing in class is changing the pace. Change the pace is the technique of accurately switching activities while ensuring students keep thinking about the same idea yet engage it in diverse ways (Lemov 356). Therefore, changing the pace helps teachers achieve the correct balance of the flow so that it is not too slow or too fast. The author offers six types of activities teachers can engage learners in to help simplify a topic. They include integrating knowledge directly from sources like reading text, participating in guided practice, and applying skills without tutor support, commonly called independent practice. The other activities are discussing ideas with classmates and independent reflection on an idea that can be in the form of deep thinking or quietly, mostly in writing. The last activity is reviewing the just concluded lesson material to help encode it in long-term memory, commonly called retrieval practice.

Brighten the Lines

This is the next technique that makes the lesson pacing so powerful. The quality of transition that starts each activity makes pacing so powerful (Lemov 367). This means how a lesson starts and how the teacher transitions from one activity to another matter significantly. Therefore, brightening the lines is when a teacher takes the bold step of making a crisp and visible start and end of activities. Therefore, brightening the lines technique is vital because by calling attention to class activities, teachers ensure that learners can clearly perceive mileposts and make it simpler for them to notice and get attracted to new activities. This harnesses their innovation bias creatively. This technique can be achieved using two steps. One is the ‘start,’ which entails starting the lesson with statements such as ‘Okay, ready. Go!’ These statements kick-start learners’ brains and ready them for the lesson’s activities. The second step is a clean finish. Lemov insists that teachers should be able to end an activity reliably on cues, not just minding time (378). The lessons or class activities should end clearly and crisply to help student encode their information to long-term memory.

All Hands

Another technique to enhance pacing is all hands, which means raising hands. Raising hands is an act that needs some reflection, even though it looks straightforward. Raising hands can draw learners further into a lesson and transform them from the outside to the inside (Lemov 380). While hand-raising seems contagious whenever other learners see their mates eagerly raising their hands, a norm is developed that the class is an engaging and safe place other people desire to be part of. This act of participating spreads across the class. Therefore, the all-hands technique helps teachers manage aspects of learners raising their hands to maximize the advantages of its influence in engagement and pacing and shape learners’ perception of whatever is happening within the classroom. Even hands down, it can also be used in the same way to improve pacing.

Work the Clock

Work the clock is another technique used to enhance pacing while teaching. Normally, individuals measure stuff because they are important. This means time is the most significant resource any classroom tutor must manage. Therefore, strategically, purposefully, and visibly calculating the time is vital for shaping learners’ experiences within the classroom. Therefore, the act of accurately and strategically measuring time in class is a work-the-clock skill. A teacher can implement this technique by showing the clock, making it visible to students by showing them how the lesson time has been allocated, and indicating how much time each activity will take. This helps learners understand that the teacher values time, eventually teaching them to stay attentive.

Another strategy is using specific odd increments when discussing time allocation in class. It is essential to be specific about the exact time students will engage in an activity, whether four minutes or two seconds, it should be specific. The other strategy for effectively implementing work the clock is using countdowns effectively. Countdown means the desire to execute something within an explicit time frame while having some dos and don’ts. Most importantly, a teacher should not stretch the countdowns at all costs (Lemov 388).

Every Minute Matters

Teachers should respect learners’ time by using every minute intentionally (Lemov 390). Thus, the first step in this technique is a psychological one, which means thinking about the expectations by thinking about how well the 30 or 40 minutes of the lesson can be used. This is achievable by implementing occasional planning. In addition, teachers can have back pockets. Back pockets are thematic questions and activities aligned with what is being taught (Lemov 390). This helps make a difference and shows that every minute of the lesson is effectively used.

Chapter 6 Graphic Organizer

Work Cited

Lemov, Doug. Teach like a champion 3.0: 63 Techniques that Put Students on the Path to College. John Wiley & Sons, 2021.

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Teach Like a Champion -read Chapter 5/6, and write a summary & graphic organizer for each technique.

Book link:  Yuzu Reader: Teach Like a Champion 3.0