Welcome to The Lost Debate, a show for Politically Ecclectics. I'm Ravi Gupta. And back when I was first

starting a school, I had this fellowship with this organization called Building Excellent Schools,

and they flew me out to Boston, where I started learning from a series of experts who had run

high-performing schools throughout the country. And early on in the experience, they brought in this

guy named Doug Lamov. And he had been early on in the experience, they brought in this guy named Doug LaMov.

And he had been profiled in the New York Times as this guy who was like re-envisioning teaching and all this.

But I didn't really know that much about him. And he proceeded to walk through this presentation about what he called the taxonomy of effective teaching.

And essentially what it was is Doug

had been a school principal and then a managing director's kind of like a superintendent of a network

of charter schools. And through all that experience, he started just bringing video cameras into

schools, videoing the highest performing teachers, what you would call upper right quadrant teachers,

teachers who both had high percentages, like 90 plus percent of students who are economically

disadvantaged, but also like 90 plus percent proficiency on state exams and reading math

and other subjects. When he said, what's going on on those upper right quadrant schools,

let me video those teachers and then watch it like a coach does and say, let me break down. What are the moves that these teachers are making? And I have to say, of all of the bodies of work, ideas, practitioners that I utilized, read, adapted for the schools that I ran. Nothing was more important than this

series of techniques and videos and trainings that Doug created that eventually became a book called

Teach Like a Champion, and then he's now written a whole bunch of other books like reading,

reconsidered, et cetera.

And now he's been coaching professional sports on how to improve their teaching and coaching practices. And nothing affected me more than this body of work. I've been to so many of his

trainings and his techniques became the bedrock of the schools that I ran and so many other successful schools around the country and now successful sports programs, including USA soccer, youth soccer, and even some like Champions League soccer teams are using his techniques.

Doug and I have been collaborating on a podcast called Sweat the Technique, which is here on the branch network, where we periodically interview experts on coaching and learning. And we started a podcast

episode where he interviewed me, he said he wanted to interview me about my experience and learning.

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