Ep 75. How high expectations drive student achievement with Doug Lemov
This transcript was created with speech-to-text software. It was reviewed before posting but may contain errors. Credit to Canadian Podcasting Productions.
In this episode, Anna Stokke is joined by Doug Lemov, author of Teach Like a Champion and one of the most influential voices on effective teaching practice. They discuss educational equity and why strong teaching, clear behaviour routines, high expectations, and academic rigor are essential for helping every student succeed.
They also discuss practical classroom strategies, including how to use cold calling effectively, active observation in math class, and building a culture where students are engaged and accountable for learning. Teachers, school leaders, and anyone interested in evidence-based education will find practical, actionable insights in this conversation.
This episode is available in video at www.youtube.com/@chalktalk-stokke
TIMESTAMPS
[00:00:22] Introduction[00:03:06] Teach Like a Champion – is it about social justice?[00:05:36] Why some stress is essential for learning[00:10:38] School culture and how students respond – Asha’s story
[00:16:28] How can you change school culture?[00:23:01] Why behaviour expectations are important
[00:30:28] Why it’s important to be upfront about classroom policies
[00:37:25] Teaching Techniques: Active Observation
[00:45:36] Teaching Techniques: Cold Calling
[00:53:06] The false positives of volunteer responses
[00:58:36] Why having a mental model of how learning happens is critical for teachers
[01:03:48] Final thoughts
[00:00:04] Anna Stokke: Welcome to Chalk & Talk, a podcast about education and math. I'm Anna Stokke, a math professor and your host. Welcome back to another episode of Chalk & Talk.
Today I'm joined by Doug Lemov, author of Teach Like a Champion and an influential voice on effective teaching practice. We start the conversation by talking about equity, what it actually means to give every student the opportunity to succeed. Doug argues that classrooms with strong teaching, clear routines, high expectations and academic rigor aren't just effective, they're essential if we want all students to be successful.
We then discuss some very practical teaching techniques, including cold calling, active observation and how to build a classroom culture where students are focused, engaged and learning. We also talk about why finding ways for students to avoid stress and relying on volunteers when asking questions can actually work against students. There are so many practical takeaways in this episode.
I really hope you enjoy the conversation with Doug as much as I did. Now, without further ado, let's get started. I am excited to be joined today by Doug Lemov.
Doug is the author of several influential books on teaching. His best-known book, now in its third edition, Teach Like a Champion, breaks down effective teaching into clear, actionable techniques. His most recent book with Colleen Driggs and Erica Woolway is the Teach Like a Champion: Guide to the Science of Reading.
It outlines seven key principles for teaching reading post phonics. And if you're into sports, he's also the author of The Coach's Guide to Teaching, which is about teaching and learning for coaches and athletes. Doug's work focuses on studying what high performing teachers do, which informs the practical strategies in his books.
He works with schools to improve instruction and has even partnered with Dusty May, head coach of the University of Michigan men's basketball team, to refine how he teaches his players. And I read a great article about that, which I'm going to link to in the show notes. Doug holds a B.A. in English and an M.B.A. from Harvard Business School. And I'm really excited to talk to you about your work today. Welcome to the podcast.
[00:02:39] Doug Lemov: Thanks, Anna. I'm really happy to be here. I'm a big fan of the show, so it's a, it's a big day for me.
[00:02:42] Anna Stokke: Thank you. I'm a big fan of your work, too. I have your book right behind me on the shelf and I've been reading it.
Let's talk about your book. And, you know, I was quite moved by the opening, to be honest. Let's start by talking about equity and social justice, because you write that Teach Like a Champion is a book about social justice.
What do you mean by that?
[00:03:06] Doug Lemov: I mean that it's a book about better teaching and doing the hard parts of better teaching. I think that social justice is radically better classrooms for every kid, not just for every kid, but for every parent who sends their children to us, hoping that they will help them accomplish all their possibilities, all their dreams. And in many cases, those parents are hoping that school will go better for their kids than they went for them.
I think that it's very easy to confuse who the client is or who we work for. Our job is not to please students. They should be engaged.
They should feel that they're meaningful people in the classroom. But really, we're working for a combination of their future selves who will look back and be glad that we pushed them to do things that they didn't want to do in the moment. That's what school is supposed to do.
And we're working for their parents who are relying on us. Push them and challenge them and hold them to high standards. I just think that sometimes it's easy to lose sight of the fact that part of what school is, is causing people to do things that they would not do left to their own devices.
It means pushing people. Academically, for sure, that's really, you know, a rigorous classroom is a just classroom. A classroom that causes everyone to achieve is a just classroom.
And also, I think in terms of culture and behaviour, students who learn to not self-regulate and to be self-focused and selfish in the classroom and always pursue whatever they want to do in the moment and can't do their own instant desire for the good of the group. Those people don't go out into the working world and suddenly become part of successful teams, accomplishing things and part of successful institutions. Everything that we've accomplished as societies, we accomplish in groups of people working together to achieve goals.
And students should understand that in school and they should practice being part of high functioning institutions. And that sometimes requires individual sacrifice to achieve collective goals. So, I think the great classrooms, just classrooms, are classrooms of high expectations academically and socially.
[00:05:10] Anna Stokke: And you talked about how maybe it feels hard in the moment, but it's going to help students long term. So, for example, you'll hear a lot of talk sometimes about things like exams causing anxiety, if we're tough on kids, that this is going to hurt their self-esteem, that it's going to cause mental health issues, things like that. What do you say to those kinds of arguments?
[00:05:36] Doug Lemov: I think they're fundamentally unscientific. That's the nicest thing that I can say. Look, they're well-meaning.
I don't doubt that the people who make those arguments intend to help kids, but they're wrong. Stress. You mentioned, you know, anxiety and stress.
I think this is widely and wildly misunderstood. Stress is not a bad thing. Stress is a good thing.
It's a necessary thing. Some degree of benign, carefully curated stress is necessary to achievement, to maximize achievement outcomes. There's a great book about this, Kelly McGonigal's book on the upside of stress.
And she writes about it. She makes three points. One, which is she initially was a stress researcher.
And she did presentations for people about how to remove stress from their lives on the presumption that this is a way to sort of, you know, cause people to thrive and be happier and be, you know, healthier. And she said, then I went to the data, and it turns out that actually the people who thrive most in terms of achievement and in terms of mental health don't have zero stress. They have a better mindset towards stress.
And one of the reasons for that is that stress is indelibly tied to meaning. If you want to do things that matter, you will have stress. You mentioned some of my work with professional athletes, right?
If you want to accomplish something as an athlete, you're going to have stress. Right. And so part of it is your mindset of how do you talk to yourself about it?
I was incredibly anxious before every collegiate soccer game that I played. And part of it was telling myself, I'm anxious because I want to do well, because my anxiety is going to cause me to perform well, how to talk myself through it, and then I'm successful. So just to return to Kelly McGonigal, she says that there are like three really big upsides of stress that we overlook.
One is that a certain amount of benign, humanely curated stress helps with achievement. Right. If you never had to write a paper or take a test, you wouldn't do your best work.
And stress is an inoculating factor, which is the way that we prepare for bigger stresses is by normalizing small stresses in our lives. We take a series of tests, we get better at taking them, and then we take a big test. And we're like, OK, I've been through something like this before.
I can handle this. I'm not rattled by it. That's a gift to young people.
They should be prepared for difficulty. And then she says that there's a tend and befriend response to stress, which is when people experience mild challenge, anxiety, stress, pressure together, they're bonded together into closer knit communities that have a greater sense of belonging. And you can see this in sports teams.
You can see this in when I went to high school, the wildest party of the year was the cast party after the school player, the musical, because you perform together with people on stage under a stressful situation. You are bonded together in some ways. So, there's a fascinating research about in one study that she describes, a group of subjects are in a room.
They're exposed to a mildly stressful situation. The other, the control group has no stress in the situation. They come out of the room and there's a five-dollar bill on the ground.
And the question is, what do they do with it? And in this study, people are more likely to do the sort of community-oriented thing of returning the five-dollar bill if they've been in a mildly stressful situation. Being under stress together reminds us that we rely on each other, right?
We're a groupish species. I think one of the profound problems, challenges, opportunities, maybe is a better way of framing it in an education is the opportunity to understand the science, to have a better science, a better working model of how people learn and thrive. There's just a lot of misinformation about their tests will stress kids out.
And it's just not true.
[00:09:02] Anna Stokke: Yeah, it might cause you some stress in the moment, but you get better at dealing with that stress over time.
[00:09:09] Doug Lemov: Can you overdo stress? Of course. I think people assume that inputs and outcomes will have a linear relationship, which is like more stress.
Some stress is good. Too much stress is bad, right? That's a nonlinear relationship.
It's like watering your plants. If you never watered your plants, they would not thrive, but you could also overwater them. But if you look at the data on overwatering plants, the conclusion is not that I should never water them.
It's that I need to be in the sweet spot. And I think stress and anxiety are classic examples of that, which is it's a nonlinear relationship. So, I have to be really attentive to constantly using tools to create the right amount of humane pressure and also making sure that it doesn't become too much.
[00:09:50] Anna Stokke: Let's talk a bit about school culture. And you have this story in your book, and it's a really neat story. And it's about a girl, and none of her family has ever gone to university.
And she's in science class, and she really finds herself liking it. And she finds herself imagining that maybe she could be a doctor someday. And she has some idea about DNA.
And she's afraid to raise her hand for a number of reasons that are going through her head. Maybe her peers will mock her because it's just not cool to be smart in her school. And you write that if she raises her hand and conveys her idea, what happens in that moment can shape her future.
So, can you elaborate on that?
[00:10:38] Doug Lemov: Sure. So, in this story, this is not based on an actual student, but it's an amalgam of hundreds of students that I've seen in classrooms. We've got this student.
Her name in the book is Asha. And she had an idea, like something's come to her. Maybe for the first time, she's like, wow, have I just thought of something?
So first of all, she has to consider for herself, like, am I breaking a social norm if I raise my hand here? Like, do I keep it to myself? And maybe she's done that for a long time.
But in this vignette, she raises her hand. And the story that I'm trying to tell is to think intentionally about how the culture of the classroom, what it communicates to her. So let's say she shares this idea and nobody responds.
And she's like, is it possible that this is an important insight that I've just had about the combatant DNA? And she looks around the classroom and all of her classmates are slouched in their chairs, looking out the window or just looking away. And their body language says, I don't give a damn about what you just said.
And nobody follows up to say, “, yeah, I was thinking about that, too.” Or “that's interesting, but I saw it differently.” We're a profoundly social species.
I think that even when we think about evolution, we tend to think about our triumph of evolution to go from prey to predator to the apex species on the planet. We think of that in individual terms. It happened because we have big brains and opposable thumbs.
But for most of our prehistory, we were prey and we had big brains and opposable thumbs. And the turning point for us was when we learned to collaborate in groups. And when we collaborated in groups and our ability to coordinate socially is what allowed us to outcompete other species.
And so, we've evolved. The group formers are the people who survived. And the individualists are the people who, for the most part, perished and the people who couldn't form groups and who could be cast out of the group to be exiled from the group for most of human history with a death sentence.
So, we're incredibly sensitive to how does the group perceive me? Peps McCray writes, summarizing the social science in his book on motivation, motivated teaching. He says, the single biggest influence on the individual behaviour is the individual's perception of the group norm.
If while I'm talking, people are looking at me and they're nodding and they look interested. And afterwards, you know, someone responds to what I said, then I know that the group approved of what I did and I'm more likely to continue doing it. I know that I haven't violated a social norm.
And if the group expresses disinterest or no one responds, then I know that I've done something wrong. This is really, really important for us to think about, which is we say that we give young people the opportunity to achieve and succeed and thrive. And that opportunity is like, requires them to break a series of social norms and be that the one kid in the room who's always raising their hand like that's a really hard ask.
I think all the time about this really great read, Hope in the Unseen. It's by Ron Susskind. I don't know if you've read this book.
But this young man, Cedric Jennings, who grows up in Anacostia in Washington, D.C., it's a really tough part of town. Schools aren't great. Somehow, he gets to Brown.
He's the only kid in his school to go to Brown. And there's a scene where he gets a science award at this assembly and he gets up to get the science award. And as he's walking to receive it, you know, he's just being like mocked by his peers.
Like Cedric, you know, who one kid in a million is willing to risk that level of norm violation to seize the opportunity that I'm sure the opportunity was clearly available to him because he found it. Is that sufficient? Or could we be thinking about doing the hard work of curating cultures?
But this is a social coordination problem. If I can socialize them to understand if we look at each other when we're talking and we just nod a little bit, honestly, just like you're doing to me right now. I'm thinking to myself, is what I'm saying stupid?
Am I talking too long? And you're nodding at me. And that's been like, OK, you're doing OK.
Keep going. If we socialize students to do that, we would have this beautiful alchemy where a pure norm would say like ever upward. Right.
Keep going. When you make that comment in class, Asha, about DNA, like we think that's great. We support you.
We think you should keep going. And that is far more likely to influence her decision making about her relationship to school and her relationship to learning than even the teacher saying, oh, Asha, what a lovely idea. Thank you.
So, what an insightful comment. Thank you for making that. The pure normal influence it much more greatly than the teacher's comment.
And so, so much of our work is about curating optimal social environments. And I think that people are sometimes reluctant to do that. It feels maybe artificial, but there some seem in valor and nudge just make this beautiful point.
There is no neutral environment. There is no naturally occurring environment. They're just more and less intentional environments.
And so, I think that when we talk about a just classroom, a social justice classroom, a social justice classroom to me is a classroom that socializes pushes nudges students to do the things that are educationally optimal for themselves and creates and magnifies the pure norm in a positive way so that I feel like part of who we are in this group to strive for excellence in everything that we do. And that's really hard work to do. There are lots of people who will tell you reasons not to do it.
But to me, that's the core of school culture, which is if Asha gets positive reinforcement for her peers and a sense of approval when she strives, she will keep striving. And if she feels like she's violated a social norm and people are like whispering about her disapproval of what she'd done, you know, one kid in a million will persist in the face of that every day.
[00:16:08] Anna Stokke: I think maybe a lot of people think or maybe even teachers think that you can't change that kind of culture. But you argue that actually you can. So how would you change that culture?
Like what should happen in that moment and going forward that would help to change that culture?
[00:16:28] Doug Lemov: If someone was skeptical, the very first thing that I do would be to show them a video of a classroom where it's working, right? To just prove that it's possible. I think that this is a big challenge, which is a lot of people might be asked to do this without having seen a model of how it works.
So, first thing I do is show you a model of Denarius Frazier's classroom where kids are having an incredible conversation about the difference between reciprocal and inverse. And as students are talking and they're looking at each other and they're nodding and they when someone comments, the next person goes says, yeah, I agree with what Vanessa said. And I'd like to add when the next person who speaks validates you by just referring back to what you said, that's really empowering versus let's say Vanessa makes a comment and the next kid says, what I was going to say is that is very subtly a way of saying like I don't care if and I'm going to say what I was going to say before Vanessa spoke, Vanessa just said is irrelevant to me.
So how do you do this? One, it's helpful to see a model. Two, I think you need shared vocabulary, which is like, let's name these things.
The habit of referring to the person who went before you in conversation to make them feel meaningful and so they understand that you listen to them and you care about their ideas called habits of discussion. And the idea of socializing students to look at each other and make their best effort to look interested and establish eye contact, which causes them to learn and causes the people who are talking to feel supported. Let's call that habits of attention.
So now we've got a name for it. And now let's make a pathway. If I want students to practice talking to each other instead of past each other, I should start the year by saying one, it's really important to do it.
Two, I should put on the wall poster. Here's some phrases you can use when you're discussing in class to make reference to the person who went before you. I agree because I disagree.
I saw it differently. Here's another piece about it. It's just like no group of people, nevermind students, will naturally default to this kind of optimal setting, especially in the age of social media where people are just socialized to the lowest and least productive intersocial behaviours.
So let me build a pathway and then let me just start to reinforce it and practice it. So, after I call on you, let's just say habits of discussion, who can build off of Anna's idea, please trap Tevin, right? That just reminds you, tells Kevin, as you're speaking, make sure to make reference to what Anna said and show that your ideas are connected, practice talking to each other.
And then there's that, please trap Kevin, reminds everyone else, like do your best to look at Kevin, give him some eye contact, make him feel like he's important. And maybe I want to explain to students, I'm going to ask you to track each other in the classroom and that will cause you all to feel supportive and do your best work. And it will help you to pay attention.
You pay attention to what you look at. And so, you'll learn more and there will be days when you're tired, when you don't really want to do it, you don't feel like it. And I'm going to ask you to do it anyway, because if we can all do this the great majority of the time, we will have a classroom where we can accomplish great things, and everyone feels supported and safe and belonging.
I promise you that you will love it when you have that classroom. I'm going to ask you to make this small sacrifice of being attentive to your body language when you don't really feel like it. And the result, I promise you, will be tremendous.
And then they need to make sure that students actually feel that difference and they actually feel that the classroom is a place where they're happier and they're learning more. So see an example, name it, describe it so we can talk about it, chart a path. And then I think, like, especially with older students, I should probably explain to them the why that we're doing it.
And then just let's just reinforce it constantly beginning of the year. I think that so much of culture building is about habit building. Right.
When I have a habit, I do something without thinking about it. That's optimal. And that allows me to both like, I don't have to choose to do it.
And it allows me to be thinking about other more important things.
[00:20:17] Anna Stokke: Yeah. I mean, essentially, you can train any sort of behaviour, right? You can train people to behave in a certain way.
And that's what you're talking about. I know this is possible because, for one thing, you know, I teach at the university level and students in those classes do tend to be more proud of their ideas and they want to share, etc. But, you know, I have colleagues from different parts of the world where the important thing in those cultures is really to be good at academics.
Whereas you might see in the Canadian culture, there's a bit more, it's about sports and jocks are kind of the people in the classes that are put up on a pedestal. I have colleagues from Bangladesh, Pakistan, Nepal, and really their kids, they are focused on academics and they're proud of it. And it makes them happy.
I know it's possible to train culture. And I do think it's worth it for teachers to think about training that sort of culture where we aim for high academic standards and everybody is sort of working together to achieve because it will really benefit the kids in the long run.
[00:21:32] Doug Lemov: Yeah. And people are not especially good judges of what will make them happy. The kids might, if you told them about that, you're going to go into a classroom where your teacher is going to ask you to make eye contact with the person who's talking and to be attentive to whether you refer to their ideas after you talk, you know, and like, can we think about your body language?
A lot of teenagers might think like, I don't want to do that. But of course, once they're in that classroom and they feel the support and the positivity, that actually they are surprised to find that they like it. There are all sorts of fascinating pieces of research about people are not especially aware when they're learning.
People are not especially aware of what will make them happy. And so sometimes we have to push young people to do things that don't immediately occur to them as being pleasurable that actually will cause them to be happier in the long run and more successful in the long run. I think it's a great example of it.
If you take 50 kids from your town or your city, if they were born in the area of Bangladesh that you're talking about where they would respond to that culture, and they would internalize the norms of that culture. And so, we can, you know, I just think schools are first and foremost cultures. They communicate wittingly and unwittingly the relationship that students have to learning in the institution and the institutions of society.
And it's really important that we think intentionally about what those norms communicate.
[00:22:49] Anna Stokke: And so along those lines, you also advocate, I think, for high expectations in terms of behaviour. So, what does that look like in practice and why is it important?
[00:23:01] Doug Lemov: Well, so why is it important? I think it's important academically, just the amount of time that is wasted, potential learning time in both high level and low level, you know, off task behaviour, huge factor. And I think students have the right to be in a classroom that feels safe and supportive and provides them not just the opportunity to learn but nudges them to do things that that will cause them to be successful in the long run.
And it's not even a gift. If I have 29 kids who are on task and trying to learn, and I have one kid who's sitting in the back row making fart noises because he thinks that they're hilarious, it's not okay to let that student persist in disrupting the learning of 29 people. It is not a gift to that young man to allow him to persist in that kind of non-productive, non-social behaviour and make him think that it's okay and that I'm not doing him a favor if I allow that to continue.
And so, I also think this is just part of how we teach people to be part of society and its institutions. So, I think it starts with routines. I think this is one of the great ironies of building school culture, which is teachers say things, well, I don't want to spend my time talking to students about behaviour.
[00:24:07] Anna Stokke: Good.
[00:24:08] Doug Lemov: I would much rather you spend your time talking to students about chemistry or history. And if you want to do that, then you have to invest time at the outset, building a series of norms and habits that will cause students to choose positive behaviours by default without even realizing that they're choosing them. I just need to build a lot of routines into my classroom right at the outset.
I think the most basic routine of all is following directions. This is beneath the threshold of narrativity. You might say, which is like, do schools of education teach their teachers how to give effective directions and ensure follow through?
For the most part, no, they do not. How many potentially great teachers have I seen crash out of the profession who had so much to give because they couldn't get the kids to follow through on directions and either their class became disorderly or it was just so frustrating to them to not be able to talk to kids that they gave up and went and did some other job. I remember watching one of the schools that I ran sample lesson.
We'd have teachers who potential teachers come in. They teach a sample lesson. And this teacher, he brought in a bucket of pond water.
And the lesson was to like scoop out little bits of the pond water and look under the microscope for microorganisms. It was such a beautiful idea, this lesson. He knew so much about it that he could have given those kids, but it was really complex.
Get a group full of seventh graders. There's a lot that can go wrong with a bucket of pond water and microscopes and slides. And all those things went wrong because he couldn't get kids to follow directions.
That's the story of American education. So, directions should be what to do directions, which is they should be concrete, observable, given in small chunks. And then I should have a system that I use for following up.
So, the first thing I need to do is I need to give a direction. Microscopes in the upper right-hand corner of your desk. Pencil down.
Eyes on me waiting for next instructions. So that's really clear. I can see whether you follow directions.
So, I know whether you've done it. And then the next thing I should do is I should be seen looking, which is I should crane my neck a little bit and maybe scan the room like this just to show students that I'm looking to see whether they follow through. I think this is called the Hawthorne effect, which is when people know that they are observed, they change their behaviour.
So, if people know that I will notice whether they are following along, they're less likely to see gray area and exploit it. And then maybe I just need to let people know. Thank you for being ready, Anna.
Thanks, Bob. Thanks, James. Appreciate that.
I don't want to praise for following directions because that shows that excellent. You follow directions. That undercuts my directions.
But I just want to acknowledge. Thanks. Appreciate that.
And then I'm going to have to correct some students a little quicker. Please, Anna. Sarah pencil down.
Perfect. Thanks. And maybe I even just like drop into a whisper pencil down just to allow myself to correct her reliably without her feeling put on the spot.
So, if I have a set of tools for this and I just practice this practice giving really great directions, I practice looking for follow through. I practice reinforcing students who do it and I practice correcting right away when students are slightly behind before. It's a big thing right now.
I'm building the habit of following through and now actually don't get big things going wrong in the classroom because I catch it early. One of the phrases that we use in training with teachers is if you're mad, it probably means that you waited too long. Right.
Sometimes teachers think when there's a small behaviour, an off-task behaviour, they'll let it go and it will fix itself. But it's usually it's a missed opportunity because a small behaviour can be fixed with a small intervention, which is that's a gift. And usually it goes the opposite direction, which is that it becomes big and then I have to respond in a bigger way that can affect my relationship or at the minimum like disrupts class and everyone has to stop learning while I correct the student.
I don't think this happens in most teacher training. I should spend time practicing giving directions and managing the after, which is the phrase for just like ensuring the habit of follow through. And if I do that for a couple of days and a couple of weeks and kids can start to see the normalcy of like when Mr. Love gives or gives a direction, pretty much everyone follows it. And if they don't, he'll notice it and, you know, respond to it. Then in three weeks we have a habit and now I don't have to talk to kids about, you know, now all we're talking about is content because I've made this core habit. But I think the core of building great classroom cultures is habits.
And the first habit is following directions. I think for the most part, young people want to know where the limits are. And oftentimes what they're doing is testing the limits and they feel like some even like social pressure sometimes to test the limits.
This happened. I think a lot of like for things that I think about and are related to experiences that I have as a student. But I remember being in middle school in the back of the classroom.
I was sat next to Stevie B, who was super cool. High status guy, Stevie B. I was not high status, by the way.
This is a big opportunity for me to sit next to Stevie B and show him how cool I am. One point I have a rubber band on my desk and I was like, wouldn't it be cool if I showed Stevie B that I was dangerous and I had this idea. I'm going to pull back the rubber band like this.
I'm going to shoot it at someone in the classroom. And really, I like the teacher definitely did not want to have this teacher call my dad and be like, guess what young value did in school today. So, I kind of wanted to show him how cool I could be, but I did not really actually want to fire the rubber band across the classroom.
So, I pulled back the rubber band and Stevie B said, do it. This is an intense amount of social pressure. And just at that moment, my teacher kind of craned her neck and looked at me and established a bit of eye contact.
She saw me and I was like, she sees us. I don't know if you noticed the clever us language there. When you know that you're observed.
Now I was like the accountability of the social environment made it easier for me to make the right choice and not make a bad choice. In fact, it was a choice that I didn't really want to make just kind of testing limits in a way that I think students do all the time. The more that I can create incentives to keep limit testing small to allow students to test limit and then find like actually that is the limit.
You will not do that in my classroom. Thank you very much. It's a gift to them.
[00:29:59] Anna Stokke: And I mean, I know you as someone that's at the front of the room, if you feel like you're being disrespected after a while, you start to get really angry about it. This has happened to me with the cellphones, for example, because it's hard for students to stay off their phones. So, you have to have a strict policy.
Even in post-secondary, you have to have a strict policy, no phones, because the students aren't listening. And then you're distracted. And then you start getting really angry about it because you know you're being disrespected.
It's just better to be strict about it from the beginning and not let anything go.
[00:30:28] Doug Lemov: A hundred percent. And especially then if I know they want to do it from the beginning, I can make it not personal. When we do workshops with adult teachers, we ask them to put their cell phones away because it's really distracting.
A cell phone out in the room distracts other people, right? There's really clear data on this. And it's really hard if you turn and talk to a colleague and it turns out that they're on their phone, you get a lot less out of the workshop.
I'm stunned by how even well-meaning adults, it's really hard for them to manage their cell phone. It's a product that is designed to be addictive. You know, like cognitive scientists would probably disagree with the actual word addiction, but it's pretty close to an addiction.
So, I think at the outset, if you say, look, cell phones will distract you and will distract the people around you and cause you to learn less. We will connect more and learn more as people. If you put your cell phones away, please make an effort to do it.
If you're an adult, if you have to make a phone call, if somebody comes up, please just step out of the room to do it. If you give a little rollout speech explaining the norm, obviously with young people, I would not say you can step outside of it and they could just say, we're not going to use cell phones here. And it will cause you to learn more and you'll feel more connected to your classmates.
And if I see your cell phone, I will take it and your parents will have to come and get it from you that evening. And if it happens a second time, I'll keep it for a day or two. And I'm sure you won't like that.
And I'm sorry, that's what I have to do. But that's what I have to do. I think if you give a rollout speech, explain the rationale for your norm, hold yourself a little bit accountable.
You make it clear to people within you have to follow through that it's not personal. It's a group expectation. And at least people understand the why.
They may not like it in the moment, but in the long run, they'll understand the why. I did a podcast a couple of years ago with my, I have three kids. And at the time I did the podcast, my two older kids had gone off to college.
And so, I interviewed them about my parenting, well, mine and my wife's parenting, but they got to review it. And I was lucky. They're wonderful kids.
The first question was, do you think that we restrict parents? And the answer was, yes, we think you restrict. And there were funny stories about it.
But they said in the end, we're glad that you were strict. We didn't like it in the moment a lot of times, especially the area that we disagreed the most with cell phones. I didn't like your cell phone.
One of our cell phone rules was you can't have your cell phone in your room after 10 o'clock at night. And this was really, really hard for my son told a story about texting a girl that he was interested at 10 o'clock and being like, I have to put my phone away. My parents are really strict about that.
In the moment, I'm sure that was, he said it was embarrassing for him. But now in retrospect, he said, I understand why you did it. I wasn't happy at the time.
I'm glad you did it. I will probably do that with my own children. I think that when people understand the why behind something, even if in the moment, they're like, I don't really like it.
But in the end, they get it. And afterwards, they understand that high expectations are a form of caring. Just think if you look at young people, how often the influential people in young people's lives are like sports coaches.
They love to tell the story of how demanding the coach was and how many sprints they had to run. They're telling you the story and they're kind of complaining like, oh, he works us so hard. I hate soccer practice.
We have to run some minutes. But they're also kind of proud of themselves for thriving in this high expectations culture. And in the end, it does build.
They're happy and they're proud to have met high expectations and to have adults hold them to that when they waver in the long run. I think that there are a lot of examples of that, but I think no one is happy. My kids weren't happy.
When you spend an evening scrolling on your cell phone, scrolling through TikTok videos or YouTube videos, you're not happy at the end of the evening that you did that. Like you wish you'd played guitar or read a book or gone for a run. You want the environment to discipline you against your impulsiveness.
Just hard.
[00:34:16] Anna Stokke: High expectations. That's what it's all about. And I'll back up on one thing before we move on to teaching because you mentioned something there that someone told me that when I first started teaching that I always think about if you can anticipate all the problems you're going to have or could have, it's better to lay those out right at the beginning because then you're talking to the whole group and you don't have to single out individuals.
A good example is a cell phone policy or something like that. Just make it very clear from the beginning. Instead of having to say partway through, oh, John, get off your phone.
[00:34:52] Doug Lemov: I think there's so many situations like that where if I tell people in advance what's going to happen, we can prepare. I'm prepared for it. But other people can prepare also that I think maybe in more of a middle school context.
I said, if you break a rule in this class, there will probably be a consequence. There might be a time when you're upset about the consequence that you get. It's even possible that I would have made a mistake and you would want to explain to me what was happening and I've misperceived it.
Let's talk about how you should handle that situation now. Should you in the middle of class slam your pencil down on the table? No, you should come to me after class and say, Mr. Lamont, I think you misinterpreted what happened. I don't think that was fair. And of course, we will talk about it. But if I can anticipate it, should be able to anticipate the things that are wrong.
I can explain to students in advance. And then if I see a student starting to have emotional response, I might just whisper to them, Kevin, remember we talked about how I can see that you're upset. We talked about how to handle it.
You know what to do. You will come to see me after class for now back to work. And so now he knows that we have a system for this, that it's going to be fair.
But the expectation right now, the optimal way to handle it productively right now is not to have a temper tantrum in front of the classroom or during class, but it's like to get back to work. Do you, you know, if I've misinterpreted it, show me your best intentions by getting back to work right now. Thank you.
And so I think that that's your point about anticipating the things that can go wrong is really, really important in culture building.
[00:36:11] Anna Stokke: Yeah. Or ask your colleagues who have worked there longer than you, who have more experience. They'll have ideas for you about what problems to anticipate.
But let's move on to teaching techniques because there are a couple I really want to talk about today. And the first one I want to talk about is what you call active observation, which I think is something that is particularly important for us to talk about today because I do focus on math. And I think most people who teach math do a version of this.
And I mean, I do this. I'm lucky enough to have small classes and we have weekly labs and I attend the labs and it kind of looks like this. The students are working on problems and I go around and I check their work.
I have a different name for it. I call it quality control, but it's kind of, kind of a joke. You had some great points about this because I've experienced this too.
In the moment, I'm positive I'm going to remember what that mistake is that most students do. And then next year I forget and then it happens again. So let's discuss that.
What are your ideas about how to make this process go better for the students and the teacher?
[00:37:25] Doug Lemov: The first and most important thing to do is that like have a place to write things down, write down your observations and the things that you notice both during class, but actually things before class. If you don't mind, I just want to step back and link this to cognitive science, which is one of the things we know about people, not just students, but people is that working memory overloads are really challenging. One of the things we have to think about most in education, we can really think consciously, we can hold one or two thoughts in our head at a time.
And if we try to hold more thoughts in that in our head at a time in our conscious thinking, we will forget, we will misperceive, our perception will be degraded and it will be anxiety producing. And teachers deal constantly with the threat of working memory overload. I've given my 30 students in my class two problems to solve with four steps each.
And now I'm walking around the classroom and I'm trying to hold in my head, what is the answer I should see on their papers? Who's getting what wrong? What's the emotional status of all my different?
When I was a teacher, I was an English teacher, but I would walk around observing my students working on something. And what I would tell myself is I'm taking mental notes. And I just think that that is psychologically impossible.
In an environment that complex, there is no such thing as mental notes. So the first thing I should have is a clipboard where I can write things down like, oh, Anna had a really unexpected solution. So, when we come back to talk about this problem, I should call on Anna.
And in fact, I used to do this as an English teacher. I'd walk by the Anna's in my classroom. I'd say, Anna, great idea.
I'm going to call on you. And then I'd walk around and I interact with 30 other students and see 30 other things. And my working memory would be overloaded.
And by the time I got to the front of the classroom, I would have forgotten that I was going to call on Anna and she'd be waiting for like, are you going to call on me now? And I would like never come to her and she'd be like, did you mean it when you said that you liked my idea? What just happened there?
But I think like once you have the beauty of a clipboard is you can use it to refresh your working memory. One of the things that I think is really important to do is to write out or let's say if you're a math teacher, the two most important problems of the day, you should write out the ideal solution. I call that an exemplar.
And one of the benefits of that is that as I'm walking around the class watching students work, I can be much more efficient in evaluating their work because I can compare what they've written to what I've written. These are the two or three things that I need to see. There's a lot of research behind this, but the fundamental principle is the law of comparative judgment that humans are better at comparing two concrete things than evaluating the abstract one thing.
So, if I have the example I've written on my clipboard, I can glance down at it and remind myself, what are the things I'm looking for in this problem? And interestingly, the more I know about math, the more there is to hold in my working memory, the more benefit I get from actually writing it out. The more expert you are, the more useful it is.
Oh, you forgot step three. You forgot step four when you do step four, right? So it allows me to give better feedback more efficiently.
And then I think another thing that you can have on your clipboard that's really powerful is to anticipate error. What are the things that students might get wrong on this problem? Maybe they get their remainders wrong.
Maybe their regrouping is problematic. And if I think through in advance, what are the things that might go wrong? I'm more likely to see them.
And if I write them out, then I can actually just make like a little histogram as I walk around the classroom. Oh, there's another remainder. There's a regrouping.
There's another remainder. There's another remainder. And now I know after five minutes of letting the students solve and I say, pause, let's talk a little bit about this problem.
I should actually talk about remainders and not regrouping because eight students made remainder errors and one student made a regrouping error. So, I think there are three key elements for me to active observation. Well, maybe four.
One of them is just like circulating and walking around and watching carefully. Just remembering that watching and observing is a really important part of teaching. One is I should recognize that the data that I see in any group of students will be more than I can hold in my working memory in my head.
So, I have to have a place to write it down and track it. I have to treat it. I have to respect it and treat it like data.
And that implies to me something like a clipboard. As mundane as it is, I think it's a game changer. Sometimes I jokingly say the most important piece of classroom technology you can have.
Then I should have an exemplar. What do I hope students will write or say about this problem? So, I can just remind myself of what a good answer is and what quality looks like.
And then if I have time, I should anticipate a couple of things that I'm likely to see go wrong so I can notice them more. I can track them. I can know how to, I can even have thought in advance how I will intervene if this mistake occurs.
I think if you do that, you're much more likely to understand what's happening to your students and to be able to respond productively. And ironically, and strangely, this feels like such a technical data wonky kind of approach. I love your name quality control for it, but it's also a relationship building tool because it allows me to walk around the classroom.
And in just a few seconds, say, great work out of there. Just next step will be to do this. Kevin, think about this.
Oh, Charles, you've got an issue with your remainder. Just go back to our notes from yesterday to explain that to you. If I can give every student efficient feedback like that and make them feel seen and important to the progress of the class, I have the capacity to help them.
Then suddenly they feel successful or more likely to be successful and more known and you're more important in it. It's relationship building in a very subtle way that I think far more important and pervasive than a lot of things that teachers try to do to build relationships, like high-fiving kids and talking like, what movies did you see? Great.
The way to build relationships is to make someone better. Thanks just to teach them well and let them know that their progress is important to you and you have the capacity to help them get better.
[00:43:09] Anna Stokke: And the other thing you can do too, and I can get through 40 students in a very short period of time. And I'll say, I'm going to be checking this one particular problem, which is representative of what I'm looking for. And here are some things I'm going to be looking for.
If you don't have equal signs, I'm going to tell you, I'm going to ask you to redo that. That's not the quality of work that I would expect from you. And I'll come back.
And you just go around, you just check. And, you know, especially if they know that what you're going to be looking for, they'll try to do a good job for you.
[00:43:44] Doug Lemov: This is such a good point. I would describe that as like shaping attention. Students can really be thinking consciously about, you know, they're doing a lot of things and they're solving a problem, but I can really like insert one idea into their active consciousness.
So, if I say, as I'm coming around, I'm walking, I'm looking especially at your remainder. Even before I've given anybody any feedback, I'm driving their attention to focus on their remainder, right? Which hopefully causes them to be more successful because I haven't chosen that at random.
But then it also makes me more efficient, right? Then I'm just looking for one thing. I think it's so impressive that you can get to 40 students.
The only way you can get to 40 students is if you narrow what you're looking for, you know, and you're really precise about it. So, I think that all learning starts with attention. You can only learn something that we're paying attention to.
So anytime teachers are attentive to attention, I think that's a good thing. When I can shape student attention, even before I've given any feedback, I think it's such a powerful teaching move and just very easily overlooked.
[00:44:41] Anna Stokke: The moral of the story is here, keep doing the circulating, but get a clipboard, tally the errors, think about this in advance, what you're expecting, what you want the students to do, the errors that you're anticipating. And if you notice something is commonly done, that's a time to reteach. I think it'll really help people reduce that cognitive load.
I think we think that we're going to remember more than we do. So, the clipboard idea is a great idea. We should talk about cold calling though.
Cold calling is one of your most well-known techniques, but a lot of teachers might feel uncomfortable about cold calling. So, can you give us a pitch? Give us a pitch for cold calling.
[00:45:36] Doug Lemov: Sure. I think it's one of the most profoundly important techniques in the classroom. It's a powerful tool.
It's possible to do it wrong. Let's talk a little bit of how to do it well so that it's successful. First, let me, I'll just make the case for it, which is cold calling, which is calling on students, whether or not they've raised their hand, allows me to do a lot of really powerful things as a teacher.
I give students a problem to solve and I ask them, what's the first step in solving the problem? Three or four kids raised their hands. The first thing I should be aware of is those three or four kids are much more likely to know the answer than 27 kids who have not raised their hand.
And if I only rely on those kids to answer the question, I'll always get a false positive. Oh, Annabelle got the right answer. And then I assume that everyone in the classroom got the right answer.
Very unlikely. So, it's really powerful to me if I can say, David, what'd you get? David, what did you think the first step was?
It's just going to be a much better data point for me as a teacher. But also I think there's a real important idea that we should consider as teachers, which is voice equity, which is students wonder all the time, whether they should speak in class, whether they're important to the class, whether they're the right to, but are they breaking some kind of social norm? And I think that cold calling done well, tells a student you're really important here.
And of all the people in the room, I'd like to hear your opinion right now. I'll just give you a piece of data and then a story to support this idea. The best piece of research on cold calling, I think is done by Dallimore and colleagues.
This study was done in Northeastern University. There were groups of, I think it was freshmen business classes and half of them, the teachers cold called reliably and the other half, the teachers did not cold call. And with the first thing that happens is that in the classrooms that don't cold call, it's two or three people who participate and everyone else doesn't participate.
And the cold calling classrooms, everyone participates. But the second thing, and there's really clear, this is called the self-generation effect in cognitive science, which is like the process of having to talk about and explain your answer and verbalize and externalize your thinking causes you to learn better. There's a really fascinating study from the Czech Republic.
They tracked the progress of Czech students, but they disaggregated them by their motivation, their behaviour in class. And this left them with a group of students that they called diligent students who were highly motivated to learn and never spoke in class. And what they found was that the diligent students often lagged behind more verbal students, even slightly less motivated, more verbal students, because you really need to talk it out sometimes and externalize your answer and express it.
It's hard work. You don't want to do it. Very few people have the self-discipline to cause themselves to think as actively as you have to think when someone says, tell me how you'd start solving this problem.
That classroom where everyone has to participate, where everyone is expected to participate, are more rigorous. It's a great way to create that sort of benign pressure that we talked about before. So cold calling is a way to ensure voice equity.
And I think just to go back to the Dallimore study, the really interesting thing about that study is not only did more students participate and were they more successful, but students were more likely to raise their hands in high cold calling classrooms. And I think you can think of a lot of reasons why this might happen. Maybe I'm worried about participating and I get cold called and I'm successful.
And then I'm like, oh, it's OK. Actually, I can raise my hand in this classroom. Fine.
Maybe it's because by being cold called, I feel important to the classroom, like the teacher cares about me. And so, then I'm like, I feel more central to the culture. Maybe I think I'm going to get called on anyway, so I might as well raise my hand when I know the answer.
There are lots of reasons. But the fascinating thing about this is that students are more likely to raise their hand in an environment where there's cold calling. And the outcome of this is voice equity, which is everyone feels accountable to talk and think.
And they're an important part of the classroom. I sometimes share what I would describe as like a recipe to successful cold call. And the first step is that I think if I'm going to cold call people, I should let them prepare in advance.
A cold call is not a gotcha. I'm not trying to cause someone to recognize that they were tuned up. I want them to be successful.
They won't always be successful, but I want them to be successful. So, if I'm going to cold call, I should let people prepare in advance. So, I should say, take 30 seconds to think about what is the first step we would use to solve this problem.
I'll give you a couple of seconds. I'll give you that time to think. And then I'll ask some of you what you thought.
So now they know they might be called. They're prepared. Or I might say, turn and talk to your partner for 15 seconds.
What's the first step? Why do we make that step? Go.
Then I'll call some of you or jot down your first thoughts. What do we do here first and why? So, then I can say something like, Anna, what'd you write about?
Or what did you and your partner talk about? So that's like a, everyone's prepared. Then I think the language that I use when I cold call someone is really, really important.
And it should be what I would describe as formative, and it should lower the stakes. So if my question is, what's the first step? If I say something like, Anna, what did you and your partner talk about?
Or Anna, what were you thinking? Right? There's really no wrong answer to that question.
As opposed to, I mean, it's fine sometimes to say, Anna, what's the first step? But if I say, Anna, can you get us started thinking about this? I just think that instantly lowers the stake, which as long as you contribute something positive, you are still successful.
And I think it makes me a little bit more likely to cold call if I do it in that sort of warm formative language. And I think one other thing that I can do, if everyone's writing or turn and talking before the cold call, I can actually walk around and listen in on the conversations or look over a student's shoulder and say, Anna, you did something really interesting in solving this problem. Do you mind telling us about your first step?
And that all suddenly makes you feel like, oh, I did something interesting and positive that it's a good thing to be cold called. And then I think the last thing is, you know, we talked about social norms. When I cold call a student, I should set out to make them feel like they've done something good when they've answered.
So, if I call on you and you say, well, what were you thinking here? What might be an approach to solve the first step in solving this problem? And you say, well, I think we should, you know, do X, Y, and Z.
Interesting. I see a lot of people nodding, right? Then I'm just amplifying for you the norm of approval.
Like I see people writing that down. I'm just helping you to see more clearly that your peers approved of what you did. And now if you're like reluctant and a little bit nervous about participating in class, right?
I've caused you to be more likely to be successful, caused you to see that your classmates thought you were successful. And now I think you're going to be much more likely to raise your hand. So, you know, those four steps again are let students prepare.
Use formative, low stakes language when you cold call. Can you get us started here? You know, what were you thinking?
You know, that kind of thing. Try to sometimes hunt for positive examples and let students just appreciative. Like I thought I heard you use the word exponent.
Love that you said that. Tell us about that. And then afterwards, just be attentive to magnifying the sense of approval from.
And I think if you do those things, it just lights the classroom on fire and students feel important and they feel like they matter and you care about their opinion. And they also feel lovingly accountable, which is I can't check out because my teacher might call on me. And so, I have to be locked in and more attentive and that causes them to learn more.
And that's our job.
[00:52:43] Anna Stokke: So, you want to create the environment that helps students to be successful in cold calling, keeping in mind that when you're asking for volunteers, you're going to get false positives, so to speak. What you get is not representative. It's not a representative sample of what is going on in the class, right?
Statistically, it just isn't because you're asking for volunteers.
[00:53:06] Doug Lemov: Yeah. And it's always going to give us a false positive. But can I also say something also about that?
When we do workshops for teachers, we always cold call. And I think at first people maybe feel a little bit of anxiety about that. I hope that's good.
Anxiety causes you to be more attentive. There's clear he and gals study from 2020 when there's a little bit of causes you to pay better attention that helps you to learn. But the other thing is, if you didn't cold call in a day long workshop of 80 adult educators, what would happen?
What happened would be there would be the same two or three highly verbal people who talk a lot, who would answer all the questions. No one is happy in that environment. You don't think you want to be cold called until you see the alternative, which is either nobody raises their hand and then it's stultifying and boring and passive.
Or it's the same two or three people. It's the people who are inclined to talk too much anyway, maybe who are talking all the time. And that's not great either.
So, voice equity is really, really important. Everyone should be talking. Everyone should know that it's important when they talk.
And it's actually a lot more interesting for everyone in the room when they feel like everyone's opinions are going to be shared.
[00:54:13] Anna Stokke: And I just want to relate this back to math, as I like to do, because I will say that, you know, having taught math for 20 years, you always have the students in the class who love to show off. They want everybody to think they know everything about math. They're really smart.
And, you know, sometimes they do know, sometimes they don't. But one issue is you have the student that's kind of sitting at the back of the room and they have a lot to contribute, but they're really quiet. And sometimes they can get quite intimidated by these loud students who want to show off how much math they know.
You know, the cold calling is one thing. Even just some unison response, like choral response or response cards, anything like that that helps those other students to have their voice heard, I think is really important in a math classroom.
[00:55:05] Doug Lemov: It's really interesting because I do some training with medical educators. These are people who teach in medical school. Medical school is a pretty different environment from the typical middle school.
You have a lot of these people who are out to show that they're the smartest person in the room. They're overachievers. They have a fairly crass term for it in med school.
I think it's called pimping, which is like, I'm just constantly trying to show how smart I am to the professor. That's a problem, right? And it's my responsibility as a teacher to break that cycle and cause everyone to answer and to feel like they're important participants in the class.
Well, I have a colleague who taught and trained teachers in the Peace Corps, and she was stationed in this northern part of Ghana, where apparently what she tells me is that in this part of Ghana, girls are socialized not to speak in class. It's just the norm is for them to be passive. It's not a rule.
No one tells you not to do it. But generally speaking, like the girls internalize this notion that I should be quiet in class, and obviously that's not productive for them educationally. How do I do that?
And what they found was the best way to get them to knock down that nonproductive norm was to have the teacher break the norm for the student and say something like, Asha, what are you thinking? It's not now the student hasn't broken the norm themselves. The teacher has done it for them, and they say something smart, and then you're like, oh, very insightful.
You know, thank you. What a great insight. I see lots of people nodding.
I see people writing that down. That changes. The student has broken the norm successfully.
Nothing bad happened. In fact, good things happen, but the teacher kind of takes responsibility for building the norm. And I think that like this happens all the time.
There are students sitting in the classroom, and they're asking, Am I legitimate? I'm worried that I barely got it and that I barely got into med school. Should I talk?
I'm worried that my English isn't perfect. Should I talk in the classroom? Maybe it's my job to keep my mouth shut.
I sometimes tell this story about Cole calling my own daughter. I think it gets at why Cole call is so important. When this story happens, I have three kids.
Two of my kids are in high school, and they're having a debate at the dinner table about a science teacher at the high school. And my daughter thinks she's not prepared for lessons. And she was mad at her.
And my son is like, actually, give her a chance. She's really good. I think you're misinterpreting the situation.
They're just debating like very actively. Why am I in the science classroom? Like, what's a good science classroom?
And I'm looking at my little daughter down at the end of the table, and she's in middle school. When the story happens, she's like in sixth grade. She's just having the first science class she's ever had in her life.
She's very silent. And she's probably thinking to herself, like, I have no legitimacy in this conversation, right? I've barely taken a science class.
I'm not allowed to. It would violate some kind of norm if I spoke right now. So I said like, Willow, what do you think?
What are your science classes like? And do you think that they're better when X happens or when Y happens? And that invites her into the conversation and tells her that she's a full member of the community.
And I just think that, like, we overlook how powerful that could be to say to a student, what do you think? Of all the people in the room right now, your opinion really matters to us. That tells a student that they belong.
And I think, you know, you can read people saying all kinds of very negative stuff about like cold calls, a form of violence. Don't believe that. I think it's like the most inclusive, caring thing you can do to tell someone that in this room, your voice and your opinion matter.
Please tell us what you think.
[00:58:25] Anna Stokke: Let's close off with this question. You've suggested that it's critical for teachers to have a mental model of how learning happens. So why is that so important?
[00:58:36] Doug Lemov: Well, I think a mental model is how experts make effective decisions under pressure with time constraints. And I would describe a mental model as like a simplified representation for how complex phenomena happen. And this is what elite performers in lots of high-pressure professions do.
I once watched a soccer match sitting next to a guy who played 12 years in the Premier League as a soccer player. And we're sitting there chatting. We're like in one of those like luxury boxes.
So, you're not really facing the game. We're sitting, having a sandwich, talking to each other. And suddenly he says to me, the right back is out of position.
The right back is literally 100 yards away from it. It's the size of an ant. I'm like, what?
Which right back? As I turn to look at the field, a player in the opposition hits a pass through to the right back's man and he scores. I'm like, how did you do that?
He predicted in advance what would happen on the soccer field. Did you do that? And he said, well, I have a mental model in my mind of what the back four are supposed to look like.
And they're supposed to be shaped like a saucer, and they tilt to face the direction of the ball. And I just glanced out of the corner of my eye. What I saw there did not match what I, my model for what I'm supposed to see.
And that caused me to look closer and be like, well, what is the problem here? The problem is the outside back. This is how experts make decisions.
They have a picture in their mind of what is supposed to look like. And when you have that, when everything is going fine, you don't have to look very carefully. But when something clangs and it's like it doesn't fit my model, then I can look more deeply, and it allows me to notice things that are wrong.
If teachers have a mental model, how should learning happen? That working memory is very important. That higher order thinking is dependent on background knowledge, then that automaticity with which I can recall the knowledge of my long-term memory is a driver of how deeply I can think that like facts and that higher order thinking and factual knowledge are not in competition.
They're not opposites. That knowledge serves higher order thinking. If I know those things about how human cognition works, I'm likely to understand what's happening in my classroom and make good decisions.
And in particular, I'm likely to make good decisions with a technique like cold call. If I understand that one of the purposes of cold call is to cause everyone to think in anticipation of answering, then I know that when I cold call, I should give them time to prepare because the preparation is the time when they're thinking. That's actually the most important part.
And it should be predictable because if people can predict that they're unlikely to cold call them, then they will think harder and they will be more attentive. So, I just think that I'm more likely to apply a tool correctly when I have an overall model of how it should work and how learning happens. And when I don't, then I'm more likely to use a tool poorly or, you know, make people sometimes use the word lethal mutations, which I'm using the technique, but I'm using it incorrectly.
You know, I look at like what's happening in England. England is doing fantastically well on an education front, but like on international tables, England is flying through the roof in math at exactly the time that U.S. and I'm not sure about Canada, but like the U.S. is tanking. And I think one of the reasons is that there's been really a sea change in England in the last 10 years.
Head teacher said to me, it's almost hard to find a newly qualified teacher who doesn't understand the importance of retrieval practice, background knowledge, working memory. They have a mental model of how human cognition works. And so, when you start talking about things, they're like, how does this relate to working memory?
When they apply it, they're thinking about working memory. And in the United States, people's mental model of learning involves learning styles, a myth. And so, when you think that learning is learning styles, instead of working memory, when someone gives you a tool, you are inclined to misapply it because that is the one of the fundamental problems of why American education is where it is, is because teachers don't reliably.
And this is not on teachers. It's the responsibility of ed schools and institutions around them. Like you should have professional knowledge of how cognitive science describes the thinking and learning functions of human beings.
And when you do that, and when you understand working memory overloads, you're likely to be smarter about how you use active observation and cold call. You make better decisions under duress. And that is just why I think mental models are incredibly important and wildly overlooked in the US.
[01:02:49] Anna Stokke: So just to follow up on that, two good reasons. Number one, if you understand how learning happens, you're less likely to misapply a technique. Number two, you're less likely to be duped, I would say, right?
Because if someone tells you something like, oh, memorizing times tables doesn't matter, or you can just Google it, you're going to know that that is not true because you know a bit about cognitive load theory, for example.
[01:03:17] Doug Lemov: And the people who knew those things, you know, five and 10 years ago were raising doubts about the like, I won't name the name, but like there's a prominent, you know, math advocate who said exactly that, which is times tables, a fact, factual knowledge is irrelevant. We should only be teaching higher order thinking. And if you read what cognitive scientists say, they say higher order thinking is impossible without fluid factual knowledge.
It should have rang alarm bells, did ring alarm bells for some people, but it should have rang alarm bells for everybody much sooner.
[01:03:48] Anna Stokke: I think we'll end here. It was an amazing conversation. And it's been an honor to talk to you today.
So much to take away from this conversation. So, thank you so much.
[01:03:59] Doug Lemov: Well, thanks for having me on. Also, just thank you. I've learned so much from your work on math and math teaching, and it's been invaluable.
So just glad to have had the opportunity to connect and just want to say thank you for all your work as well.
[01:04:11] Anna Stokke: Oh, thank you for saying that. And I've learned a lot from you too. So, thank you so much.
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