Inspired by this NYT article on building a better teacher, I’ve just started Doug Lemov’s Teach like a Champion. And so far so good. Haven’t even begun to get on the 49 techniques but he makes this point in the intro: if you get the basics right you save time. It may seem boring but it frees up time to learn.
The example he uses is a teacher called McCurry. McCurry spends part of a lesson at the beginning of the term training kids how to hand out books properly. He aims for 20 seconds. At first sight, it’s boring, uninspiring, drill, drill drill.
First, though, the kids like it. They like being able to improve.
Second,
Assume that the average class of students passes out or back papers and materials twenty times a day and that it takes a typical class a minute and twenty seconds to do this. If McCurry’s students can accomplish this task in just twenty seconds, they will save twenty minutes a day (one minute each time). They can then allocate this time to studying the causes of the Civil War or how to add fractions with unlike denominators. Now multiply that twenty minutes per day by 190 school days, and you find that McCurry has just taught his students a routine that will net him thirty-eight hundred minutes of additional instruction over the course of a school year. That’s more than sixty-three hours or almost eight additional days of instruction—time for whole units on Reconstruction or coordinate geometry!
I need to focus more on my routines!