My good friend JR Atwood recently posted a piece about the Uncommon Schools project, and the Taxonomy of Effective Teaching Practices that the Uncommon Schools’ founder, Doug Lemov, has developed.

As the New York Times piece on this points out, Lemov came up with the idea when trying to discern what made some teachers more effective than others.

What he realized was that the good teachers were following very specific rules about how they interacted with their classrooms. The Taxonomy is a catalog of those rules.

Watching the videos, I couldn’t help but think that these rules are not merely “teaching” rules.

What, after all, is “teaching?”

I think, at base, teaching is about communication. In fact, it’s one of the most explicit, and most frequently-engaged-in, forms of communication we engage in as human beings, in our current culture.

As such, the lessons to be learned from this taxonomy can (and I think, should) be learned by everyone!!!

Check them out and see if you agree.