There are a few education books (and a lot of tweets about pedagogy) floating around that get a lot of criticism for essentially stating the bleeding obvious, and a lot of that criticism comes from people I respect very deeply. And I get it. But I think some of the criticism is perhaps misplaced.
Take the Teach Like A Champion technique - Pastore's Perch. For those who don't know, Pastore's Perch is a technique used to enable the teacher to see the whole class. As experienced teachers, we know to go stand in a corner or wherever it is in your room you need to be in order to see the whole class. We probably don't need a book to tell us that. But a novice teacher, who is just starting out? This might not have occurred to them yet. I'm not saying it won't occur to them, but why not just tell them? Why leave them to figure it out like we had to?
A lot (most?) of the now-63 techniques in TLAC are very normal, everyday things. I'm not sure any one of the techniques is particularly revolutionary. The book is, after all, a compendium of things Lemov and his team saw from so-called "champion teachers". Now, I'm not going to argue that every technique is fantastic and that we should be implementing every single one of them in every single lesson - there are, to this day, recommendations I'm not sure I agree with, but none of the techniques, to my knowledge, is made-up. They're all things that teachers actually do, things that have actually been successful in classrooms. They didn't make anything up. They just gave it a name.
As an aside, specifically about TLAC: it is useful to have a shared language.
If you have a shared language it makes giving feedback much quicker, which means you can dedicate more time to the useful bit of feedback - how to improve.
Compare the following:
"You didn't ask the students to put their hands up, and you instead targeted a question at a particular student to ensure the whole class was fully engaged for as long as possible. When the student didn't quite get the answer correct you pushed and prompted them to give you an answer that was fully correct. These were good things to see"
versus
"Good cold call and use of right is right."
Both these things transfer the same information, assuming the person delivering the feedback and the person receiving the feedback have that shared language. Yes, it takes time to learn the language, but the cumulative time saved is larger in the long term.
This isn't a blog about TLAC though. This is a blog about all the basic, entry-level pedagogy and classroom management books.
I have read an awful lot of books about retrieval practice (who knew there were so many??) And some of these books are very good, whilst others are frustratingly basic. Some of these latter books are held up as being fantastic, and I didn't get it. I wondered if it was because the author(s) were so personable, I just didn't get why people raved about these really simple books that don't say anything new. I literally didn't get it. Until I took off my "teaching for six+ years" hat and put on my ECT goggles. And suddenly I got it. To me, these books are frustratingly basic. They do walk you through ev-er-y thing. But that's because I already know a lot. For a novice teacher they are great. They don't make the assumptions that some other books do - that you know what CLT stands for, that you know what working memory is and the limitations it has.
Now, I'm not saying that TLAC is perfect, or that every book on classroom applications of research should be aggressively simplistic, no siree. What I am saying is that it's good that we have these books. As a reasonably well-read, fairly experienced teacher, these books and tweets aren't for me. They're for people who are just starting out, the ECTs, the novices. Some teachers need to check the manual here and there. And that's fine.
(If I was feeling particularly controversial, I might imply its not just ECTs that could do with having the basics explained that to them, but it's far too early to be stirring that pot!)