For teachers, especially newer ones, Doug Lemov’s work acts as something of a life-saving manual. Where prep programs posture and compete to cite the most esoteric French philosopher in their research—leaving new teachers woefully unprepared for real classrooms—Teach Like a Champion and other Lemov works offer practical advice for educators who have real students arriving in thirty minutes.
Yet many academics and advocates like to kvetch about how his approach fosters mere obedience and subservience, a carceral pedagogy worthy of cancellation. With that in mind, Lemov’s forthcoming book, with his co-authors Hilary Lewis, Darryl Williams, and Denarius Frazier, Reconnect: Building School Culture for Meaning, Purpose, and Belonging is a splendid and damning rejoinder to his critics.
While again abounding in practical advice, the thesis undergirding this book argues that scholarly learning happens best in well-structured environments—the undercurrent of his former books—but also community, critical thought, and other goals, like emotional well-being, that are sacrosanct to progressive theorists.
“Interactions among students, especially in the classroom,” Lemov writes, “must deliberately be orchestrated to build a sense of connection, belonging, and shared scholarly endeavor.” Like it or not, classrooms are socially engineered environments. And within these environments, “orderliness is surprisingly central to belonging.” No child will feel welcomed in a classroom that feels chaotic, unpredictable, or even unsafe. Community requires structure.
Any teacher who has worked in a school with chaotic classrooms will tell you the same. A handful of students enjoy the experience—usually those throwing paper airplanes or competing to make the best farting noise—but the large majority dread entering these environments. They want to learn and so grow increasingly frustrated when their fellow classmates disrupt that goal. In many cases, they come to resent each other. Conversely, when a classroom is well-oriented towards academic achievement, community and belonging result. Learning follows.
C.S. Lewis provides a useful image to explain Lemov’s view of a classroom community: Where lovers tend to face each other, friends stand side by side, absorbed in some common interest. Communities will develop in classrooms that do their core function well. Lemov points to sports teams and churches as examples of tightly-knit communities. In both cases, members grow in their attachments through an endeavor that is outside themselves.
Much of the practical advice that Lemov provides mirrors the advice he gives in his earlier work, but his justification for that advice now differs. Take “tracking the speaker,” for example, the idea that students ought to look at whoever is talking. Tracking benefits students beyond academics. Ritual forms of civility create a sense of belonging—seemingly insignificant gestures like smiling, saying please and thank you, or even just eye contact. “The accrual of these signals” he argues “is almost assuredly more influential than grand statements of togetherness.” Small classroom habits like keeping eyes on the speaker that seem paternalistic to judgmental outsiders ensure that those actually inside the classroom feel welcome.
There is also much new in this book, not only on how classrooms can foster community, but on schools as a whole: communal game areas, family-style lunches, phone bans, and regular pep assemblies to align school culture.
Perhaps what may prove most controversial is his chapter on social and emotional learning, a current political football. Lemov is skeptical, making special note of the paucity of research on SEL. Where improvements are found, they come from student surveys on school climate showing improvements on the scale of a 2–4 percentage point increase—hardly solid enough data to make correlational links, let alone tying specific actions to improvements causally.
In place of kitschy activities and contrived lessons, Lemov argues for restructuring the school itself for social and emotional health. “Most likely to help,” he writes, “is the careful selection of manageable strategic efforts that focus on rewiring daily social interactions and cognitive habits.” Social and emotional health doesn’t come from instruction, but from healthy environments. When schools are well-ordered towards learning, everything else flows from it.
For me, perhaps the most striking sentence in the whole book followed Lemov’s description of a classroom, switching back and forth between silent, independent work and a buzzing conversation. After that description, he concludes that, “students are learning as they deserve to learn.” Lemov’s book is another work that can allow more students to access the learning that they deserve.
