When ZIP code isn’t destiny
Doug Lemov is obsessed with finding out what makes teachers sparkle. “Teachers do the most important job in the world, and one of the hardest,” author and educator Lemov told a packed audience Thursday evening in the Harvard Graduate School of Education’s (HGSE) Longfellow Hall. In his hourlong talk, “Good, Better, Best: Teachers, Teaching, and School Reform,” Lemov described some of the concrete techniques that he believes can transform good teachers into great ones. Necessity was the mother of Lemov’s approach to teacher development. When he started as managing director of the nonprofit group Uncommon Schools, Lemov (who earned an M.B.A. from Harvard Business School in 2004) said he encountered obstacles. “Books about teaching [methods] didn’t help,” Lemov said, nor did the other professional development resources he tried. They were too abstract for his teachers to apply in their classrooms, he said. An undaunted Lemov, using data from standardized tests as his criteria,...