Doug Lemov is back. Since the publication of his first book Teach Like a Champion 10 years ago, Lemov has become a renowned, though sometimes controversial, figure in education.

He is the co-managing director of Uncommon Schools in the US, and spends his time designing and implementing teacher training. Many teachers will know his techniques - based on methods of high-performing teachers in the US - really well. Indeed, practices like “cold calling”, “no opt-out” and “call and response” have been adopted in classrooms across the world. 

But Lemov has more teaching tools up his sleeve. In the third edition of Teach Like a Champion, Lemov adds more than 10 new techniques and builds on several existing ones. The reason for doing so, he says, was to recognise the “cognitive revolution” that has occurred in education. 

“We’ve learned more in the last 15 years than we did in the previous 2,500 combined, and yet we’ve been slow to take those ideas and put them into practice in the classroom,” he says. “A lot of the tenants of cognitive science, like retrieval practice, or working memory, have always been implicit in many of the techniques, but I think their readers now justifiably demand explicitness.”

So what are the new teaching techniques Lemov wants you to know about?

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• Long read: Can Doug Lemov’s pedagogy fix coastal schools?
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• Tes talks to … education guru Doug Lemov

1. Habits of attention

Followers of Lemov will be somewhat familiar with this first one: in previous books, it was called “Slant”. 

“Habits of attention is about helping students to build internal habits to focus their own attention. We know that you learn what you pay attention to and ‘selective attention’ is the cognitive term for this,” says Lemov. “This technique helps to socialise students to engage in positive behaviours that cause them to be more attentive during key moments in class, and encourages them to send positive prosocial nonverbal signals to one another.”

A student may be hesitant to raise their hand in a class discussion, even when they know the answer, because they worry about what their peers will think. This is completely normal: research shows that humans care deeply about the social cues our peers send us, says Lemov. Often, he adds, children are in a room of people whose body language tells them: “I don’t give a damn about what you’re saying right now.” 

Teachers, therefore, need to be explicit and tell their students to use eye contact when their peers are speaking, to nod along with their ideas, to smile at them. 

“Any room is a culture that either is agnostic about what happens there or asks people to shape their behaviour to create positive outcomes for the sake of everyone else,” he explains. “That’s what habits of attention is.” 

2. Exemplar planning 

More and more, teachers are taking the working memory capacity of students into consideration when they are planning, but what about the working memory of the teacher? You’re asking students a question, responding to them, thinking about what needs to come next, attending to the needs of all the students in their class all at the same time, while trying to be present. That’s a lot of hard work, Lemov points out.

Exemplar planning, he says, frees up some working memory capacity. Take time before the lesson to consider what the most important questions will be, and what answer you want students to give. Write out an exemplar answer and keep it in your sight. 

“If we’re talking about a book chapter, and I ask them ‘How is the main character changing?’ in my head, I will roughly remember the key ideas - but if I take a minute to write this out on a clipboard or something where I can glance at it, it’s easier to remember,” he explains. “Then I’m not trying to keep all this information in my head while students are talking and I can glance at it to refresh my memory, which then frees my working memory to do everything else.”

You don’t need to do it for every question, he stresses - just for the key ones, perhaps around two or three. 

3. Delivery moves

Teachers should also take time before a lesson to think about their “delivery moves”, suggests Lemov. This is about asking who you are going to ask questions to and how?  

A lot of teachers, he says, ask their class questions without telling students who they want to answer them and how. When this happens, you get students who are reluctant to answer, or a few who will call out the answer off the top of their head. 

Instead, teachers need to signal to students at the start of the lesson how they want them to respond. Should they turn and talk to their partner about it? Or take 10 seconds to think about it, and then be prepared for a cold call? Or write down what they know in 30 seconds? 

The decision you make about which technique to use will be different for each class, Lemov says. Your third-period class might be really quiet, so you’ll use the chat-to-your-partner technique, whereas your fifth-period class might be really loud, so you’ll ask them to jot their answers down as a calming technique. 

This is all about building the most engaging and thoughtful environment for your students, says Lemov: “Being intentional with students about how you want them to answer questions is critical to any great classroom, and yet it’s routinely overlooked.” 

4. Phrasing fundamentals 

This technique also centres around questions. So often, Lemov says, teachers unintentionally shut down a questioning environment by asking binary questions, or questions with an obvious answer.

For example, if you ask a child “Should we take it off the flame, or should we continue heating the solution?” the answer might be obvious. Instead, teachers should ask: “What should we do next?” 

“The importance of questioning is often overlooked in classrooms,” he says. “My daughter told me about one of her teachers who asks obvious questions. She says no one answers them, because they are so obvious, but then he thinks they don’t know the answer, so he asks even more simplistic questions, and there’s a death spiral going on because his questions aren’t hard or challenging enough.”

5. Everybody writes

Teachers may already be familiar with Lemov’s “everybody writes” technique, but in his new book, he emphasises the difference between formative and summative writing. 

Summative writing is when a teacher asks a student to write about something they know the answer to. For example, “How does Jonas change in chapter 10? Give me two examples.” Formative writing, however, presumes that the student doesn’t know the answer, and uses writing to explore possible answers. For example, “Why might Jonas have acted in the way he did?” Adding the word “might” tells students that they don’t have to know the answer to begin writing, and Lemov argues that this is why formative writing should be prioritised over summative. 

“One of the main purposes of writing is to decide what I think, not justify what I think. And it’s much more accessible to students because it lowers the barrier to entry,” he says. “Students often don’t want to write because they don’t feel like they know the answer.” 

6. Silence solo 

In conjunction with “everybody writes”, Lemov also proposes “silent solo”, which gives students multiple opportunities to write formatively for a minute or so, before then having a whole-class discussion.  

“It’s a very mundane and basic habit, but it gives students the opportunity to write with thought and intentionality. Many teachers don’t do this, because it’s really challenging. You are likely to have five children who say ‘I don’t know what to write’ or someone who pretends to have forgotten their pencil,” he says. 

The key is to start small, and make participation as simple as possible: get the children to write for 30 seconds, and stress there are no wrong answers, so the student can be successful the first time around. Make sure you move around the room and encourage students, too. 

“Use the word ‘go’ - you want students to see their peers jump to life. The classroom should crackle to life,” he says. 

7. Private individual correction 

When students need a bit more of a push or need correcting on something, it’s important to do it in private, stresses Lemov. He calls this technique “private individual correction” and other children shouldn’t be aware you’re doing it. 

Approach a student’s desk, crouch down and talk to them quietly. You may say: “We’ve had three silent solos here, I’ve asked you to do some writing and you haven’t written once. I know you have things to say, and so I’m going to ask you to come back at lunch.” It’s difficult, but make sure you ground it in praise, too, he adds. Use the same body language and tone for the whole conversation and remember to smile. 

“It’s about phrasing it as purpose, not power,” he says. “The moments when we’re setting expectations and limits are the most important to communicate to students that we care about them. And so it’s not like ‘I asked you to write and you’re not writing’, but ‘I asked you to write and writing is really important. It will help you develop your thoughts.’” 

8.  Fase reading 

This technique was once called “control the game”, and it’s connected to reading aloud in the classroom. Lemov is passionate about the role that reading fluency has in academic success, while acknowledging that books are “in a death struggle” with smartphones. 

“Teachers reading aloud to students, and then students reading aloud to each other, is an overlooked and incredibly powerful tool,” he says. 

He argues that reading needs to become a social function in classrooms, and children need to laugh out loud together, or gasp together as they have the shared emotional experience of reading a book together. He stresses that this needs to happen in every classroom, not just in English classrooms.

In a science class, for example, teachers could choose an interesting article, and read it together with their class. Here is where pre-planning comes in: read the article before, and decide which parts you’ll read, and who you’ll call on to read other parts. 

If you have a struggling reader, give them an easier passage to read to make sure they succeed, and if you have an excellent reader, give them a more complex one. But crucially, don’t prepare them for this - it has to at least appear random to make sure all students are engaged with the text throughout. 

9. Retrieval practice

Retrieval practice is a common technique, and Lemov offers advice about how to do it well.

In a nutshell: if you ask students to recall what they learned yesterday, they will strain to remember, but if successful, that struggle will deeply encode the material in their long-term memories - in other words, they will remember a little more and forget a little less quickly. 

Retrieval practice, then, is the practical solution to the problem of forgetting. But it has to be about more than just the occasional review; you need to use retrieval systematically and regularly, Lemov stresses.

You could dedicate a chunk of your lesson to it: a time you design with the explicit purpose of causing students to recall important things in strategic ways, using cold calls. This needs to be something all the children take part in; don’t ask for hands or just let a few contribute.

However, it doesn’t need to be a simple recall. Lemov highlights a teacher called Christine Torres, who uses it to review vocabulary words with students. Torres asks students to apply the vocabulary words they learned in a different lesson, in different ways and in new settings.  

10. Knowledge organisers 

Lemov has developed a similar technique to the traditional knowledge organiser. His approach places more emphasis on knowledge that students should know at the beginning of the unit to fill the knowledge gaps that might prevent them from understanding the unit. 

He says that knowledge organisers should be one-page documents (or double-sided if it includes imagery such as maps), and include such categories as key terms, important figures and a timeline of important events. They don’t need to be complex, he stresses, but how they are used is as important as how they are designed.

They should be used frequently for retrieval practice and quizzing, and if not every day, then several times a week. Building a knowledge organiser also builds up your own content knowledge - which matters for teachers, too.