Understanding Teach Like a Champion
I'm currently in the process of reading Teach Like a Champion 2.0. I'm reading it because it is one of the "go to" books shared via Relay Graduate School NYC, and unfortunately, their work is being spread far and wide here in Colorado in many of our districts, including mine. We are at a very precarious time in public education - our work as educators is being stripped from our schools and replaced by non-educator think tanks who pride themselves on high test scores. Teach Like a Champion 2.0 is written by Doug Lemov. I'll let you read more about him here. Ultimately he is not an educator, but has great experience within the world of charter schools. He has two degrees in English and one in business. He is a corporate education reformer. Period.
To be honest, after reading over 100 pages of the book (there will be a follow-up blog when I finish reading the entire book), I have to say it's incredibly shallow and simplistic - yet the scary part is the dictatorial demand to keep everything shallow, uniform and simplistic. And as mentioned above, Lemov's beliefs about "teaching like a champion" are beginning to co-opt what true educators really understand about teaching, child development, and engaging learners. This book is a great primer for reducing learning to uniform and robotic student behavior which is easy to "track" (Lemov's word - not mine) and manage, in order to get the results that you want. And the results that they want are high test scores.Lemov is clear in stating that this work is gauged via state test scores.
True learning is incredibly messy, but with an inherent structure in place to support the Peg with Pen: Understanding Teach Like a Champion:
