Professional development and coaching delivered on demand.
How Learning Tapestry built the digital training platform behind Teach Like a Champion, turning Doug Lemov’s bestselling classroom techniques into video-based professional development, and then deploying it for free to every educator in Texas.
The Problem: The Gap Between Knowing and Doing
There is a moment in every new teacher’s career, usually within the first few weeks, when the months of planning and years of preparation fall short. Teachers study child development. They write lesson plans. They read about engagement strategies and differentiation and formative assessment. And then they stand in front of thirty students and realize that knowing what good teaching looks like and being able to do it are two entirely different things.
Doug Lemov saw this gap between knowing and doing and decided to close it. As Managing Director of the Teach Like a Champion team at Uncommon Schools, Lemov spent years inside classrooms. Not designing curricula or writing standards, but watching. Watching the teachers whose students consistently outperformed expectations, especially in high-poverty schools. He watched what they did with their hands, their voices, their eyes. How they started class. How they called on students. How they responded to wrong answers.
What he found was 63 specific, concrete, replicable techniques that could be named, taught, practiced, and refined. He published them in Teach Like a Champion, which became an international bestseller and reached more than 700,000 teachers worldwide. The book changed the conversation about teacher preparation. Great teaching is a craft, and like any craft, it can be learned.
But there was a problem.
You cannot learn to Cold Call a classroom by reading about Cold Call. You have to see it done. You have to practice doing it yourself. You have to get feedback. Books can inspire, but they cannot train.
63 techniques. 700,000+ teachers. No way to practice at scale.
The Solution
The TLAC Online platform that Learning Tapestry designed and maintains is a video-based professional development environment built around a four-step learning cycle that transforms passive content consumption into active skill-building.
Teachers watch real teachers executing techniques in real classrooms. These are not actors in staged scenarios, but actual educators in actual schools, demonstrating the nuance that makes each technique work across grade levels and subjects.
Teachers then record themselves executing the technique on camera. This is where the platform diverges most sharply from a traditional online course. Users are not watching passively. They are doing the work.
School leaders and instructional coaches assign modules to teachers, track progress and completion across a building or district, review practice recordings, and provide structured feedback and coaching.
In 2020, when COVID-19 closed every school in America, the problem of scaling teacher training became an emergency. In-person workshops vanished. Coaching visits stopped. Classroom observations were impossible. And teachers, millions of them, were suddenly teaching through screens, using pedagogical approaches designed for physical classrooms.
Because Learning Tapestry built the platform to deliver professional learning on demand, the TLAC team was able to respond immediately. They developed new modules for remote teaching, adapting their techniques for the virtual classroom. They made their Cold Call module available for free, recognizing that engaging students in remote settings was the most urgent skill teachers needed.
The Impact
The Texas Education Agency saw something in TLAC Online that aligned with its statewide priorities for teacher quality and mentor training. TEA funded a dedicated instance of the platform, Texas TLAC Online, providing free access to TLAC training for every educator in Texas.
This was not simply a bulk purchase of accounts. Learning Tapestry built a separate deployment of TLAC Online specifically for the Texas market, hosted at a distinct URL, integrated into Texas’s mentor teacher training pipeline, and configured for statewide access without individual payment barriers.
The scale is significant. Texas is the second-largest public school system in the United States, with approximately 370,000 teachers across more than 1,200 school districts. A statewide, state-funded deployment means that TLAC techniques, techniques that emerged from careful observation of the best teachers in the country, are available to every teacher in Texas at no personal cost.
An entire state decided that its teachers deserved access to the best training methodology available and funded the technology to deliver it.
Every time a first-year teacher in Houston watches the Establish Formal Register module, practices the technique on camera, and gets feedback from her instructional coach through the manager dashboard, that’s the platform working. Every time a veteran teacher in Albuquerque revisits the Analyze & Act module to inform his teaching for tomorrow, that’s the platform working. Every time a mentor teacher in Philadelphia completes her training through TLAC Online and then models those techniques for a beginning teacher in her building, that’s the platform working.
Doug Lemov proved that great teaching can be codified. TLAC Online proved it can be digitized. Learning Tapestry built the infrastructure that makes it scale.
References
- Lemov, Doug. Teach Like a Champion 3.0. Jossey-Bass/Wiley, 2021.
- Teach Like a Champion, “Teach Like a Champion,” teachlikeachampion.org.
- TLAC Online, “TLAC Online Training Platform,” tlaconline.com.
- Uncommon Schools, “Uncommon Schools,” uncommonschools.org.
- Texas Education Agency, “Texas Education Agency,” tea.texas.gov.
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