Doug Lemov's book Teach Like a Champion, which puts forth a detailed instructional taxonomy for teachers, flew off the shelves when it was published in 2010. For the Albany, N.Y.-based educator, that suggested one thing: Teachers are hungry for help in mastering the techniques of their craft.
Five years later, the interest in "practice based" teacher preparation has grown, in no small part due to journalist Elizabeth Green's well-received best-seller Building a Better Teacher which profiled Mr. Lemov's efforts and those of several other teacher-educators.
Now, with the release of Mr. Lemov's update to his taxonomy—and with promising developments in university-based attempts to deconstruct the craft of teaching—proponents are facing the challenge of incorporating the use of practiced-based methods into teacher preparation writ large. ...
Scaling up the adoption of practiced-based ideas into methods classes so far appears to be a relatively slow and unsteady process.
"There has been much more response from districts and from people directly working with schools, than from schools of education," Mr. Lemov said about his taxonomy. "There, it has been more moderated."
One possible reason for the Teach Like a Champion book's popularity among already-practicing teachers is that the taxonomy provides some techniques that are immediately applicable in classrooms—pushing students to explain why and how their answers are correct or make sense, for instance.
But some content-specific techniques of the sort not directly addressed by Mr. Lemov's book, such as leading the discussion of a poetry text or novel, take repeated practice to master, noted Peter Williamson, the director of the secondary teacher education program at Stanford University. And that means giving prospective teachers plenty of structure and time to learn them.
Ideally, he said, teacher-candidates could go straight from rehearsing such teaching practices with their professors to testing them with pupils in a K-12 setting, and receiving near-immediate feedback.
"That's a wonderful model, but it requires a great deal of capacity—the right kinds of schools, and people who can move between university and school settings very fluidly," he said.
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