Doug Lemov

Doug Lemov grew up in Washington, D.C., the son of parents who treated the dinner table like a seminar: social policy, ideas, and the shape of the world were regular conversation. He was born in 1967, and his early years in the city ended when his father was held up at gunpoint — the kind of event that clarifies what matters quickly — and the family moved to the suburbs. His older sister Becky was part of that household, and between the family's intellectual culture and the disruption of city life, Lemov came of age with a sharpened sense of what communities owe each other and what institutions can either do or fail to do for people. Education, it turned out, was where he would plant his flag.

He went to Hamilton College, where he played soccer — by his own account, he was "the worst player of the decade" on the men's team, which did nothing to diminish his love of the game or his fascination with what separates good coaching from great coaching. He earned his BA there, then an MA in English from Indiana University, and eventually an MBA from Harvard Business School. That combination — literature, ideas, and organizational rigor — is visible in everything he has written. He met his wife Lisa Hayes at Hamilton; she graduated in 1992, and the two built their life together, eventually settling in Delmar, New York, in the Albany area, where they are raising three sons.

He began his career as a teacher and school principal, working at the high school and middle school levels before co-founding Uncommon Schools, the network of high-performing schools in underserved communities that became a model for what urban education could look like. Out of that experience came the insight that would define his career: that great teaching is not a mysterious gift but a craft, made up of specific, learnable techniques that can be observed, named, practiced, and refined. He spent years watching the best teachers in Uncommon schools, cataloging what they actually did, and turned those observations into *Teach Like a Champion* — now in its 3.0 edition and used in teacher preparation programs and schools worldwide. His subsequent books — *Practice Perfect*, *Reading Reconsidered*, *Teaching in the Online Classroom*, *Reconnect*, *The Teach Like a Champion Guide to the Science of Reading*, and *The Coach's Guide to Teaching* — all extend the same core conviction: that excellence is built through deliberate practice, not talent alone.

The sports thread has never been separate from the teaching thread for Doug — it runs right through the middle of everything. He consults with Major League Baseball teams and serves as an instructor for U.S. Soccer professional coaching licenses, bringing the same analytical rigor he applies to classroom observation to elite athletic development. He lives, as he puts it, at the intersection of sport and education, and he is genuinely obsessed with both — not as metaphors for each other, but as parallel disciplines that illuminate what it truly means to help someone get better at something hard.