Proven Practices from Teach Like a Champion

Over the past year, more than a 300 teachers in the region have learned and practiced the techniques from Doug Lemov’s Book entitled Teach Like a Champion.  It is about the tools of the teaching craft. It describes the tools necessary for success in all classrooms, particularly those with the most challenging student populations.

Teach Like a Champion is about the belief that the solutions to education challenges exist in the classrooms of real life teachers, that exceptional practitioners of the art of teaching are the true experts. Our job is to find them, study them, and share what they do, so others can copy, steal, practice and adapt it to their own teaching.

Many local teachers are learning and applying the techniques of champion teachers:

Setting High Expectations, Technique 1: No Opt Out, A sequence that begins with a student unwilling or unable to answer a question ends with that student giving the right answer as often as possible even if they only repeat it. 

Technique 18: Check for Understanding, Gather data constantly on what students can do while you’re teaching and act immediately on that knowledge to inform what you do next and how you do it. 

Technique 22: Cold Call, In order to make engaged participation the expectation, call on students regardless of whether they have raised their hands. 

Technique 23: Call and Response, Use group choral response – you ask; they answer in unison – to build a culture of energetic, positive engagement. 

Technique 36: 100 Percent, There’s one acceptable percentage of students following a direction: 100%. Less and your authority is subject to interpretation, situation, and motivation. 

Teach Like a Champion techniques put students on the path to College and Career readiness, check out Doug Lemov’s book and watch for upcoming trainings in the region on the various champion techniques.    


 By Tessa Levitt, CA BOCES and Whitesville Central School