"Teach Like a Champion" Revisited

I had an interesting conversation recently regarding Doug Lemov's book "Teach Like a Champion." My colleague introduced me to a criticism on the book: it is too formulaic. My knee-jerk response was to be defensive, so I took a moment to think. My reply was fairly non-committal: New teachers need strategies to use in the classroom. This book provides strategies.

Then I started to really think. Was I defending the book because I liked it when I first read it and haven't taken a critical look at it since? Is it in fact, too formulaic? So I reflected and hoped to come up with a really complex provocative response. Instead, I ended up with this: Doug Lemov's book "Teach Like a Champion" provides teachers of all ability levels with tools to use organically as they work to create the classroom culture that empowers all students to succeed.

It's up to us, the teachers, to use these tools as we see fit and to remember to vary our approaches to increase student learning. That's a formula for success!

Is Twitter Powerless Against Spam?

An interesting thing has happened to one of the weekly educators' Twitter chats that I attend: We've got SPAM! Over the past two or three weeks, what started as just a smattering of spam has turned into an all-out onslaught of off-topic, lewd, and derogatory images and tweets. However, we are educators - which means we love to solve problems. Our (awesome) moderators quickly chose a new platform, Google+, and those who already had an account were able to switch over easily.

Obviously, these incidents raise a few questions from the people involved, myself included:

• Is Twitter powerless against spammers? 
• Is Google+ a viable platform alternative for weekly professional development chats? 
• How can we merge the professional learning network developed on the original platform with Google+?
• Will we eventually have the same spam issue on Google+?

I am so excited to have an amazing professional learning network and am in awe of the work that they do. They will not be derailed by spammers. They will continue to meet weekly. They will continue to collaborate online. The only question is, which platform will we use?

Get it together, Twitter. We've got our eyes on Google+.

UPDATE: After weeks of intrusive posts by spammers, the most recent #satchat was nearly spam-free! So, the answer to my first question, is Twitter powerless against spammers, is no! Twitter has the power to stop the spam. I am interested to learn how it was addressed, and how much effort our moderators had to put into the effort. As far as the other two questions regarding Google+, I am still exploring how it can be used to continue my efforts to grow my professional learning network.