Is Teach Like a Champion Authoritarian?
In this video, Dr. Justin Baeder pushes back against critics who label Doug Lemov's Teach Like a Champion techniques as authoritarian, distinguishing between structure and authoritarianism.
Key Takeaways
- Structure isn't authoritarianism - Clear expectations and consistent routines are good teaching, not oppression
- TLAC techniques work - The practices in Teach Like a Champion are grounded in effective instruction and produce results
- Critics confuse discipline with cruelty - Having high expectations for student behavior is not the same as being authoritarian
Transcript
is Teach Like a Champion, Douglas Mauve's book, now with 63 techniques in the third edition.
Is it authoritarian in its approach?
A crazy thing happened on Education Twitter this past week, and especially on British Education Twitter, where a number of people were raising concerns about Teach Like a Champion, a book that has helped thousands and thousands of teachers and millions of kids by giving really practical strategies for classroom management and especially for academic engagement, intellectual engagement.
The two strategies that seemed to make people the most upset were cold calling and what Limov calls no opt-out.
And it's the idea that if you want kids to actually learn in class, you have to make sure that they participate.
and not just have a few kids raise their hands and call in the kids that raise their hands, but get everybody to participate, get everybody to be actively engaged.
And when you call in a kid, they're not allowed to say, I don't know, they need to actually try.
This to me seems so eminently reasonable that the only way that somebody could have a problem with it is if they don't really understand what it means to be an adult in the classroom.
They don't really understand what it means to have an authoritative presence or to be the authoritative adult in the room.
If you remember that three-part formula, authoritative, authoritarian, and permissive, it seems like a lot of people have forgotten that authoritative and authoritarian are two different things and they're combining them together.
And what that leaves them with, if they reject authoritative slash authoritarian, is permissive.
And as I read lots and lots of comments on this, especially from British educators who thought that Teach Like a Champion was too authoritarian, it really seemed to me that they didn't have a good alternative.
They didn't have a vision of how an adult should be in charge of and responsible for students.
And they had this view of authoritative teachers that really was like nothing short of slander.
Like if you are the adult in charge of the room, no matter how much you care about your kids, no matter how engaging you are, no matter how respectful you are of your students, no matter how much you think of them, no matter how much voice and choice you build into your classroom, if you use these techniques, you are a bad guy.
And some of it got so ridiculous that there were even like inappropriate World War II references in some of this opposition.
This is like nothing I have ever seen so my question for you is are you seeing people forget about the distinction between authoritative and authoritarian are people melting melding those together merging them together blending them together and forgetting the difference because like to me it is a very big difference whether someone is authoritative and respectful and in charge of their class and not you know open to just allowing whatever students want to do to ruin the lesson and actually responsible for student learning or Authoritarian is very different.
It's very alarming when someone is authoritarian.
Kids can tell, adults can tell.
Something is off when a teacher is authoritarian.
Let me know what you think, and let me know what you think of Teach Like a Champion.
Like any set of techniques, it's the kind of stuff that if you're a very experienced teacher, like I became a teacher before this book came out in 2010.
I was already out of the classroom by 2010 and didn't use these techniques.
I think they really would have helped me as a new teacher and, you know, given me some specific things to aim for because these are really well explained techniques.
The other thing about techniques, though, is that they go through your personality, right?
Like if you are an authoritarian kind of person, well, you're going to use Teach Like a Champion techniques in an authoritarian kind of way.
If you're a jerk, you're going to use these techniques like a jerk.
If you're nice, you're going to use these techniques in a nice way.
And I think that's just true of any technique.
But let me know what you think.