Teach Like A Champion

The Queen Rania Teacher Academy (QRTA) recognizes the powerful role of the teacher and is dedicated to providing teachers with the knowledge, skills, and support necessary to enhance the quality of teaching and the effectiveness of teachers in Jordan’s classrooms.  

Among those resources is the “Teach Like a Champion” (TLaC) book authored by Doug Lemov, which includes thousands of hours of recorded classroom observations of the most effective teachers that have the potential to produce dramatic improvements in students achievement especially in their national tests results.  

Queen Rania Teacher Academy has obtained the right of translation for the 1st book "Teach like a Champion" 49 techniques and the accompanying videos and became a distribution center for the Arabic version of the book. In 2012, the Queen Rania Teacher Academy launched a training program based on the book "Teach like a Champion" that deals with a series of applicable foundational and organizational techniques that support teachers. In establishing a learning environment that actively engages students and raises the level of academic and behavioral expectations in the classroom, which enables teachers to achieve quality and efficiency in their teaching to improve students` achievements. By the end of 2017, the number of trainees in the program reached about 3,000 from public and private schools in Jordan and the region (Palestine, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, Oman and Sudan). 

 

Evolving with Time 

Based on the success of the first-edition training program, QRTA translated the second version of it, "Teach Like a Champion 2.0". TLaC 2.0, deeply examines a number of the key concepts and techniques introduced in the first edition by refining the original 49 techniques and expanding the number of techniques to 62. The new techniques of TLaC 2.0 promises to adjust the classic teaching techniques to be even more effective for teachers. The TLaC 2.0 edition also calls for the application of entirely new techniques that keep students on track and engaged during lessons. In the development of the second edition of the book, the author adopted an approach based on what he called "the virtuous cycle: “give teachers a good thing and they make it better, smarter, faster”.     

The book, in its second version, preserves the approach of the first book, providing explanations accompanied by video clips of classroom situations allowing teachers to observe teaching experiences in a practical, analytical and participatory ways. 

 

Objectives 

The training techniques aim to achieve the following key objectives: 

1. Setting high academic and behavioral expectations 

2. Structuring and delivering excellent lessons 

3. Engaging students in the lessons  

4. Creating a strong classroom culture 

5. Building character and trust 

6. Improving the pace in the classroom 

7. Helping teachers connect to their current classroom practices and harness the power of these techniques to make their teaching better 

 

Teach Like a Champion 2.0 is a brand-new structure that emphasizes the most important techniques and step-by-step teaching guidelines.  

 

The program is built on five main modules: 

 

MODULE 1: CHECK FOR UNDERSTANDING 

 

Ensuring students 'understanding and comprehension is the backbone of every lesson, thanks to which students' strengths or weaknesses are diagnosed, which allows for the improvement of the educational process. As for the classroom level, continuous checking of students ’understanding enables the teacher to identify“ the moment when the student’s understanding has stopped, ”which enables the teacher to evaluate the effectiveness of their teaching and educational practices, the degree of student achievement, and the extent of his control over educational competencies. 

Ensuring students' understanding is a process that must accompany all stages of the educational learning process and is not limited to the formative or final evaluation that ends with giving the student only marks. The techniques presented in this part of the book and the accompanying training will help teachers: 

• Continuously assess students' understanding during the lesson. 

• Frame data collection techniques through questioning, observation, and building a culture of error in the classes. Which calls for immersing them as basic activities in the daily practices within the classroom.
• Changing the function of checking for students' understanding to become therapeutic and not only at the limits of evaluation, which means judgment, in order to make only the final mark. 

Check for understanding (CFU) and its techniques are presented in a sufficient actionable, concrete, everyday guidance ways. It makes teacher realize that the most crucial task of teaching is to distinguish “I taught it” from “they learned it.” The techniques are on how the teachers are going to make sure their learned and understood and how make the teachers pinpoint the moment their students` understanding stopped. 

 

MODULE 2: ACADEMIC ETHOS 

Distinguished teachers always work hard to create an environment that is expected to have the highest levels of academic rigor, training and value. This academic spirit is one of the most important things that distinguishes distinguished classrooms. 

But there are many different factors that contribute to determining the type of academic spirit that occurs in high-performance and distinctive classrooms, from the content the teacher chooses to the depth he chooses to dive into. In order to achieve this, there is a series of concrete and actionable steps that teachers must take to establish both expectations and the desire to achieve academic excellence. 

The techniques discussed in this section focus on raising the academic ethos in the classroom. By adopting the importance of research at the highest level of academic rigor during the different stages of delivering lessons. The training in this class provides techniques that help teachers track the main tools and decisions that are made in each lesson and also provide appropriate techniques for each stage in order to add academic spirit to the subject: that is, what makes it acceptable and attractive, starting from prior planning and effective lesson design, making it move In the right direction. 

 

By the end of the workshop, participants will be able to: 

 

• Recognize techniques for planning lessons effectively.
• Introduces to techniques of increasing the pace of lessons in the classroom

 

MODULE 3: RATIO  

 Module Three is on building ratio—getting students to do as much of the cognitive work as you can. Techniques for Ratio are through three approaches—questioning, writing, and discussion; differentiate the two critical types of ratio that teachers seek—participation ratio and think ratio. It argues that you cannot successfully cause students to do a great deal of rigorous thinking unless you are also serious about delivering and having students learn lots and lots of content knowledge. Knowledge is what you analyze and think about.  

 

The training offers three paths that teachers can take to increase ratio: questioning, writing and discussion, with a full explanation of effective techniques that contribute to increasing ratios in each of these areas. This is to enable teachers to encourage their students to do as much cognitive work as possible, such as writing, thinking, analyzing and speaking "effectively. 

 

By the end of the workshop, participants will be able to: 

Know ways to increase the amount of thinking in the classroom. 

Know the methods of increasing the participation rate in the classroom 

 

MODULE 4: PRINCIPLES OF CLASSROOM CULTURE 

Part Four focuses on behavior and culture. This topic is one that is incredibly useful because positive culture makes such a difference in everything that happens in a classroom—not least of all academic achievement—yet there is so precious little guidance on how to build it. And the costs of poor culture are massive.  

The training tries to frame two critical points teachers must understand in  building classroom culture: first, that the purpose of order in the classroom is to promote academic learning; second, that there is a difference between the power of keeping things from going wrong (which is good) and the benefits of making our classroom a place where things go right—where culture and expectations are positive, joyful, productive, and caring. Put more succinctly, the two key framings are: (1) order is necessary but not sufficient to learning, and (2) great culture entails doing far more than just eliminating disruptions. 

Of course, culture and behavior are not always about control and accountability.  

During the training, techniques of managing students ’behavior will be presented by linking them with the emotional intelligence of the teacher and the learner together, which allows teachers to view these behaviors from another perspective to deal with and contain them instead of resorting to other methods such as punishment. Simple techniques will also be presented to help the teacher manage his anger and tension in the classroom, which will allow him to manage student behavior within the established classroom culture, this will lead students` engagement in the educational process. 

 

MODULE 5: MANAGING VIRTUAL CLASSROOM 

This unit deals with techniques for managing virtual classrooms in distance learning.  

The unit focuses on 3 main topics that we must take into consideration when designing and implementing distance learning lessons, namely: 

The external environment of the learner: It refers to everything that surrounds the learner from external matters that may affect his learning. 

Participants will be able to: 

1. Understand the importance of building routine in virtual classrooms
2. Introduced to the techniques for building routine in virtual classrooms

 

 The internal environment of the learner: It refers to the internal motivation that drives the learner to work. 

Participants will be able to 

1. Recognize the meaning of motivation and its importance
2. Introduced to techniques for building motivation among students

 

Accountability for learning: How to create accountability and make students responsible for their learning. 

 

Participants will be able to 

1. Understanding the meaning of the approach and types of learning responsibility.
2. Introduced to techniques for building students' learning accountability.

 

ASSESSMENT  

 

Participants are going to be assessed using one or more of the following ways: 

• Observing a real or virtual classroom while applying the techniques
• Designing a plan in which the participant demonstrates the techniques he will be using and the way of applying them
• Participants write a reflective paragraph in which they demonstrate successes and challenges they faced while applying the techniques.

 

DURATION 

 

Each module is 3-day workshop training. 

 

Training will include interactive activities carried out by groups of trainees. Videos and real-life case studies from classrooms will be presented and analyzed by the trainees and then collectively discussed. 

 

DELIVERY APPROACH 

 

Training is provided face-to-face, remotely and can be blended. 

 

TARGET AUDIENCE 

  

All educators for all grades