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|  | Author: Doug Lemov
Publisher: Jossey-Bass
Category: Book
List Price: $27.95
Buy New: $15.73
as of 9/9/2010 09:31 EDT details
You Save: $12.22 (44%)
New (45) Used (15) from $15.73
Seller: indoobestsellers
Rating:  69 reviews
Sales Rank: 124
Languages: English (Unknown), English (Original Language), English (Published)
Media: Paperback
Edition: 1
Pages: 352
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.4
Dimensions (in): 9.4 x 7.2 x 0.9
ISBN: 0470550473
Dewey Decimal Number: 371.3
EAN: 9780470550472
ASIN: 0470550473
Publication Date: April 5, 2010
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Condition: BRAND NEW
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| Customer Reviews:
Showing reviews 21-25 of 69
 Awake, Practical, Empowering July 4, 2010
Robin Ramos
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
This book is written by someone awake to the reality of what we urban educators face. He gives excellent, practical techniques. The 5 principles of classroom culture are key understandings that I have never read clearly presented. What is the difference between "discipline" and "management"? Understanding this can keep many of us hard working, sincere, intelligent teachers from leaving the classroom in frustration: just one example of a simple understanding that can empower us to make better choices and stand by them, knowing why they are essential to our students' success. This is a book I would recommend to all teachers. It validates my experience of what works but takes it to more depth and more precision in its analyses. It brings JOY back, too.
I love this book June 29, 2010
Emmett Major (Mississippi)
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
As a fairly new teacher I heard and wanted to convey high expectations to my students but had no real idea of how to do that. This book will help implement specific practices that hopefully put you closer to your objective. I started several of the techniques explained and demonstrated with the enclosed dvd, and got immediate return on my investment. Engagement improved, and students responses, because I was better able to scaffold questions, were at a higher DOK.
 Not Just for Teachers June 20, 2010
Ken Rider (East Coast)
4 out of 5 found this review helpful
I'm not a teacher but still thought this book was terrific. AS A SOCCER COACH for 7 and 8 year olds whose attention wanders at practice, I've been able to adapt some of these techniques to help keep the eyes focused and to reinforce some of the things they're learning in ways I wouldn't have thought of before this book. It's helped make practices more fun and useful for everyone!
The book also gave me ideas for my work. I'm a RESEARCHER and really appreciated the intro, which explains how the author (Lemov) used standardized test data from schools to track down outstanding teachers to learn from. His approach can likely be adapted for other areas. Here's what he did. Using school testing data, Lemov was able to identify particular schools (and classes within these schools) that did much better than expected compared to their peers. Lemov then visited these "pockets of excellence" to understand what was happening and why. As a result, he met some top teachers and ended up chronicling their skills with various teaching techniques. The approach that Lemov has outlined can be adapted to data analysis in other organizations (for example, workforce surveys) to help find high-performers and identify good practices in unexpected places.
BOTTOM LINE: while this book may not generalize to every situation, I found it helpful on several levels...even without being a teacher.
Worth every penny, every moment, every word read June 18, 2010
Happy Teacher (Virginia)
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
I bought this book at Barnes & Noble and paid $30. I'm now utterly dejected that I didn't check the Amazon price first.
HOWEVER, this book is worth EVERY penny. If you want to be a champion teacher, if you want to give your students the best that you have, start here.
There are no vague theories, nothing you can't walk away with confident to try out. In the very first chapter, finally--FINALLY--Doug Lemov and his team of champion teachers set out to explain to me what "high expectations" really means I should be DOING and SAYING daily in the classroom.
I didn't have many great teachers as a kid, but I found success anyway (thank you, mom & dad!). But my hope is to be a great teacher. Doug tells us in the introduction that "Great teaching is no less great because the teacher mastered specific skills systematically than is David a lesser reflection of Michelangelo's genius because Michelangelo mastered the grammar of the chisel before he created the statute." I'm betting he's right. Champions can be made. As dozens of reviews on this book tell you, there are plenty of teachers ready and willing to put in the effort to be champion teachers. There's hope yet for education!
 Fools will be led by fools June 15, 2010
Rabid Rodney
5 out of 9 found this review helpful
4th critique: The more I think about this book and the more research I do, the more I get annoyed. Search "Dan Meyer mathematics" and you will see the major source of your troubles. It is how curriculum and textbooks are devised. I'm not saying throw the baby out with the bath water. There is some good advice in here. In an interview this author said he tried to analyze Beatles songs, which failed. Sounds interesting enough, but there are a lot of questions behind that. What kind of Title I student wants to analyze a Beatles song? What do the students need? The black girls in my class were rapping songs degrading black women. Shouldn't that be the starting point to questioning themselves and then seeing there are more and better possibilities? These people seem to be of the Michelle Rhee ilk: Quick fixes, acceptance, no questioning. AOL will fund if you follow. The author must write a book on curriculum and its justification, otherwise this book is pure hash.
3rd critique: I finally finished the book, but I'm really frustrated by people who write books like these. In a way, they are dishonest. If they said up front, the structure of the public school system curriculum along with textbook structure is one of the major causes for failure, but these techniques are the way you can deal with these faults in the system, I might say ok, this guy is for real. I just read this article on Keith Devlin's website(Look up a Mathematician's Lament by Paul Lockhart) about teaching geometry and this is EXACTLY what happens to me when I teach geometry.
I also got to learn this summer from Exeter math high school, the top private school in the nation. They don't even set objectives. They create a need for the math! This is what high standards really means. Genuine need, genuine inquiry, and genuine pursuit. Genuine and genius seem to have the same etymology. And because of how curriculum is designed and tested along with the structure of textbooks in public school, it would take a teacher eons to try to develop a true high standard curriculum. Why do only people in private schools get the best education when it is such an easy fix for public schools?
I won't throw the baby out with the bath water, but I just left the curriculum library at my local college and realized there are so many books like this. They all say the same stuff, but never go for the jugular. I will add that this guy has written a superb book for the public school system.
2nd critique: This book is superb. The only thing I don't feel comfortable with is can this work in the hood where I'm teaching. It's not a charter school. The woman who processes the referrals gets stacks so high it's impossible to send all the necessary culprits to the dean when needed. Although this author promotes dealing with kids in the step procedure proposed, I've seen many teachers at my school do the same with horrible results, and these are excellent veteran teachers. I'm against "rolling" with the students as one big former ghetto hall monitor does in my school, "You want to roll with me, I'll roll honey!! Bring it on!!" But the most effective teachers I've seen at management in this school are the ones who come back hard and "roll". There's nothing about "rolling" in this book. I feel like I might be laughed out of class if I try SLANT. But other than those kinds of questions, this book is remarkable.
1st critique:I am very excited to have read this book and to have a chance before the school year begins to apply some of the author's techniques. But the fatal flaw in this book is that the author accepts current curriculum in public school. In the chapter describing the technique "without apology", he assigns fault to teachers for saying "they" and blaming the system for being forced to teach in a boring manner. He then gives a story of a professor who fully inspired him in a subject that appeared boring. I can imagine that professor had an incredible amount of freedom to develop a very sound and connected curriculum that gave insight into the significance of what is being learned at each step. In high school, both post and pre-standardized test days, this has never been the case. Curriculum in public school has always been about coverage. The author writes a very unsettling sentence saying, "A better way to address it (the problem of high school curriculum) is to assume it's part of the curriculum for a reason and start by reflecting on that rationale." In all my years of education, no one has been able to give a "justification" for the way curriculum is set up across the United States with its goal of coverage instead of teaching for meaning, which is the way all the geniuses have approached their learning, and which can be done at a graspable level for every student. The only justification I've heard is industry and governors have gotten together and said you have to learn this. No rationales, no whys, only secret meetings. The ideas of Kieran Egan, McTigue and Wiggins, or even the Kahn Academy and the website Better Explained (See also Dan Meyer on TED for an excellent critique of curriculum), which help us see significance of a topic, which the author's favored professor was probably able to show him, are almost impossible to implement in public school. Instead, this author should explain how archaic and damaging our curriculum is especially in mathematics and ask teachers and students to rebel like hell against current curriculum, or he should address this in another book. Otherwise, what this author is proposing are only better ways to become more highly adapted to a system that can't help you understand what "genuine" learning really is, and how to become truly independent in thought.
On the other hand, there are some good aspects of this book. The techniques are excellent and would definitely help my students master even a very falsely constructed curriculum.
Showing reviews 21-25 of 69
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