True Grit

Practice Makes Perfect: The Teacher Edition

Dancers rehearse. NFL players practice. But teachers? Not always so much.

That’s a mistake, says Erica Woolway. Like other performance professionals, teachers spend their days in front of an audience. Few, though, practice like dancers or sports stars, despite the fact that research shows practice to be an effective method of improving teaching performance.

Woolway and Doug Lemov, coauthors ofPractice Perfect, have spent hours analyzing videos of effective teachers in action. Those hours allowed them to pinpoint effective techniques, which they then taught to teachers in workshops. But follow-up, in-class observations revealed that the “techniques weren’t translating into the teachers’ instruction,” Woolway says. She and Lemov soon added practice time to their workshops—and found that teacher effectiveness improved.

Teachers should isolate key teaching skills—such as using a strong voice in the classroom—and practice those key skills over and over again. At least some professional development time should be  devoted to practice, Woolway says. Practicing even five minutes of your lesson plan in front of experienced colleagues may improve your classroom performance.