“Teach Like a Champion” for the Classical Classroom, Part 2: Teacher-Driven Professional Development

There are two general approaches to professional development in education, one that is supervisor-driven and the other that is teacher-driven. In the supervisor-driven approach, the principal or dean is the primary driver for teacher development. The principal sets the goals, schedules observations, provides feedback, and identifies future growth areas. The strength of this approach is that it puts the responsibility of developing teachers on administrators, field experts who have been on their journey as educators long enough to develop a general sense of best practices to pursue and pitfalls to avoid.

The notable weakness of the supervisor-driven approach is that it is…supervisor-driven. Growing as a professional entails two crucial components: increasing in one’s knowledge of the particular field and increasing in self-awareness of one’s performance in that field. As long as the principal is setting the goals, observing teachers in their classrooms, and giving feedback, the teacher remains a largely passive rather than active participant in her professional development. 

In this blog series, I am exploring insights from Doug Lemov’s Teach Like a Champion 2.0 for the classical classroom. Lemov is a field expert in the charter school movement and has worked tirelessly over the years to bridge the achievement gap in inner-city schools. While he may not be operating with a classical education framework in mind, at EdRen we have found many of his techniques to be beneficial for the classical classroom all the same. In this blog, I will examine Lemov’s insights on professional development, especially the importance of a teacher and data-driven approach that allows teachers to own their own development.

The Desire to Grow

In Part 1: An Introduction of this blog series, I began by clarifying some key concepts. I explained that classical education is intent on making better humans; it is, therefore, a humanizing education, one that views students as persons and not merely economic producers. Humans have minds, hearts, souls, and bodies, and each of these components need educating. As important as job training is, it does not sufficiently prepare someone to live a deep and meaningful life. Students need significant servings of truth, goodness, and beauty to feed their hungry minds, nourish their souls, and guide their decision-making. Kevin Clark, a thought leader in the movement, goes so far as to say that he views his chief job as “to lead souls with words.”

If classical schools are going to strive for such a laudable aim, then professional development is crucial. The heartbeat of any school is its faculty and, in particular, the ability of the faculty to teach. By “teach,” of course, I don’t mean merely the dissemination of information. I mean the conscious act of leading students to pursue wisdom through cultivating virtue and engaging in disciplined mental and physical training. This is no easy task; it requires a unique combination of tact, resolve, confidence, empathy, and, perhaps most importantly, a desire to grow personally. 

You see, a teacher won’t get very far in leading his students to pursue wisdom if he himself hasn’t set off on the journey. Like Frodo Baggins in The Fellowship of the Ring, students need a mentor to imitate. Someone older and wiser. For Frodo, of course, it was his Uncle Bilbo. When Frodo was twelve-years old, he went to live in Bag End with his uncle, following an unexpected family tragedy. During those formative years, Bilbo taught Frodo the Elvish language and much of the lore of the Middle-Earth. But most importantly, Bilbo and Frodo lived together, giving Frodo the rare opportunity, especially for a hobbit, of doing life with someone who had been on an adventure. When the time came for Frodo to set out on an adventure of his own, Frodo already had an image in his mind of the way forward. Although neither Bilbo nor Frodo realized it at the time, their many years together forged the very path on which Frodo would one day tread. 

Like Frodo, students need to experience life with older and wiser men and women who are on the pathway of virtue. These mentors, called teachers in school parlance, embody the growth mindset and desire to grow personally even as they help their pupils grow.

Field Experts and Master Craftsmen

But in order for teachers to embody this growth mindset and truly desire to grow personally, they need to be supported to drive their own development. The supervisor-approach is insufficient for this aim. I am not suggesting, of course, that teachers should operate autonomously. They need mentors themselves to lend support, provide feedback, and formally evaluate progress gained. But the administrator-teacher dynamic should always be oriented toward empowering the teacher to drive her own development.

When it comes to developing classroom instruction in particular, Doug Lemov demonstrates in Teach Like a Champion 2.0 that the data-driven approach, culled by the teacher, is superior. He argues that this approach, “…considers teachers not just as recipients and implementers of the field knowledge, but as creators of it–problem-solvers, entrepreneurs, generators of the professional insight. It makes teachers intellectuals” (8). Imagine with Lemov if teachers viewed themselves as field experts in the craft of teaching. This self-understanding would lead to all sorts of exciting possibilities for driving one’s personal growth.

Another analogy that is helpful here is that of craftsmanship. In Cal Newport’s book So Good They Can’t Ignore You, Newport argues that in a knowledge economy, a successful professional must adopt the mindset of a craftsman. Rather than subscribing to the modern myth of “follow your passion,” knowledge workers should focus their time and attention on cultivating rare and valuable skills. They should obsess over how they can add value in a particular industry. Imagine again if teachers took on this mindset. They wouldn’t feel comfortable passively waiting for the next classroom observation. They would constantly be on the hunt, looking for the next best resource or technique that will enhance their effectiveness as teachers.

Ideology-Driven Guidance

As I mentioned in my first article, Lemov suggests that there are generally three drivers of advice that administrators give to teachers. The first form is ideology-driven. This advice tends to focus on some predetermined vision of what a classroom should look like and is often manifested by a checklist for teachers to follow. While this approach to coaching teachers can be helpful, ultimately, we must acknowledge that it is supervisor-driven. Too quickly, the teacher can become overly focused on teaching to please an administrator, rather than teaching for the growth of her students.

In the classical school movement, we can too easily settle for this kind of advice. We articulate our vision for a classical education, distill it into a checklist, and visit different classrooms to cross the items off. “Teaches Latin for forty minutes. Check. Leads a discussion on C.S. Lewis. Check. Asks questions rather than dominates through lecture. Check.”

The problem with this approach to teacher guidance, Lemov points out, is twofold. First, it puts the supervisor in the driver seat. The checklist is a thought product created and implemented by administration with no meaningful contribution offered by the teacher. Second, it unnecessarily privileges ideology over outcomes. To be clear, both our necessary, and ideology-driven guidance unduly neglects the latter.

Research-Driven Guidance

The second driver of advice tends to be research. Lemov ranks this approach higher than ideology-driven, but acknowledges that it, too, is not without its problems. He provides a litany of concerns about blindly following research:

“If research supports a particular action, does that mean you should always perform that action, to the exclusion of everything else, or should you combine it with other things? How often, in what settings, and with what other actions? And how do you meld them?…There’s a lot of research out there of varying quality, and even useful parts are interpreted with a mix of good sense, cautious fidelity, outright distortion, and blind orthodoxy. This can result in ‘research’ justifying poor teaching as easily as good.” (7)

Research is helpful, but only when it is analyzed and adapted by professionals to achieve a specific goal. All too often we hear “Research states…” and we are expected to blindly assent, especially in light of the scientistic world we live in. The reality is that research is conducted in a particular time and place, and therefore any principles gleaned must be implemented and studied in its future applied context. Like ideology, research can be disconnected from outcomes, and lead to ineffective results.

Data-Driven Guidance

The third driver of advice for teachers and the one Lemov ultimately endorses is data-driven guidance. This approach is based “…not on what should happen but on what did happen when success was achieved” (7). For Lemov, success is determined by state test scores controlled for poverty (14). After identifying the schools who performed exceptionally well on these exams, Lemov and his team visited these schools to study how those teachers approached teaching, relationships, lesson-planning, and so on.

Now, as classical educators, we are right to bristle at this notion of success. We understand that success isn’t reducible to a state test score. To a certain extent, even Lemov agrees with this, which is partially why I find his writing so refreshing. Lemov’s point isn’t state test scores. It is data. Lemov writes,

“Even if you disagree with my conclusions, whether you are a teacher or a leader in charge of a school, a school district, a state, or a nation, you can use a data-driven approach to take your best shot at measuring the outcome you think is most valuable, finding its best practitioners, and inferring guidance from their work” (8). 

As classical educators, we need to hone in on the outcomes we think are most valuable and then follow Lemov’s advice to identify and study the master craftsmen in achieving those outcomes. We did this a few years ago at the school I work at. We noticed that year after year one particular teacher helped her class perform excellent poetry and scripture recitations, regardless of the perceived strength or weakness of a particular class. We studied her technique and asked her to catalogue what she believed contributed most towards the excellent result.

The final product was a training document full of techniques that we now use year after year. And as a side benefit, the process of analyzing and discussing what made for a strong recitation coaching lesson led to a unique spirit of camaraderie amongst the faculty. Lemov himself confirms this benefit, writing, “Teaching, as it turns out, is a team sport, where teachers make each other better fastest by building robust cultures where they study and share insights about their work” (14).

Conclusion

In my next installment in this series, I’ll begin to examine the various techniques revealed through Lemov’s data-driven approach. Interestingly, one of the fascinating observations about many of the techniques is how simple they are to implement. To this point, Lemov offers this caution:

“Many of the techniques you will read about in this book may at first seem mundane, unremarkable, and even disappointing. They are not always especially innovative. They are not always intellectually startling. They sometimes fail to march in step with educational theory. But they work. As a result, they yield an outcome that more than compensates for their occasionally humble appearance.” (10)

By “educational theory,” of course, he means modern educational theory. He has in mind the sorts of theories dependent on the premise that education practices must be hip, innovative, quantifiable, or techy for them to be effective. But as Lemov himself pointed out, that’s not the direction the data points. Instead, often the data pointed toward practices of simplicity, ones that simply call on students to do the work of learning. These practices include forms of retrieval practice, akin to narration, as well as instilling finely tuned classroom routines, akin to elements of habit training.

At the end of the day, as teachers set out on the path of owning their own growth, may they be driven, not by test scores, hip techniques, or even simplicity, but Lady Wisdom herself.

Questions for Classical Educators 

Doug Lemov has given us a lot to think about. I would love to hear responses from readers and even invite you to brainstorm with me some answers to the following questions:

• How should classical educators measure success and successful teaching?
• What practices are consistently present in successful teaching?
• How do we equip teachers to be field experts, the generators of knowledge and professional insight on successful teaching?

Thanks for reading! Please respond in the comment section below!