An Open Note to the Future Reader...

Imagine you are an American first grade teacher. 

You arrive early to your classroom every morning, take pride in your lessons, care for your students, and solve hundreds of small and not-so-small problems every day. You read the newspapers and blogs that bemoan the American school system and compare it unfavorably to schools in other countries, and you may agree with some of those concerns. Those articles talk about system-wide differences like national curriculum and funding allocations or cultural differences like work ethic and language homogeneity– all interesting and important stuff but quite outside the realm of your capacity to implement change in your own classroom. 

Of course, you are not a passive actor in the game of education. 

You make many decisions about teaching and learning in your classroom: how to best facilitate learning by organizing time and space, how to arrange your physical environment  and how to orchestrate movement through it, how to pace your day within the constraints of broader school scheduling, how to speak to your students, how to approach discipline in positive and sometimes negative ways, how to solve conflicts among children, how to transition from high energy recess time to focused learning time or from a messy art activity to differentiated reading instruction, how to greet your students and families in the morning and how to say goodbye at the end of the school day. You must make decisions about these things. So you pay attention to what works and revise accordingly, you ask colleagues, you buy books like “Classroom Management That Works” or “100 New Ideas for Morning Activities”.

If you saw a book about classroom organization around the world – a book full of unfamiliar ideas for solving those day-to-day problems over which teachers have control – you might use it, in the same way that you try new ideas from those spiral-bound, teacher-directed resource books. And by trying some of those ideas, you might solve some of your classroom problems and improve student learning. You might tell your first grade students, “We are going to try something that first-graders do in Japan” and see what happens. 

Your students are growing up into a future with unimaginable global opportunities, and as a teacher you are part of a professional network of educators who are facing the challenges and opportunities of teaching in this international future together. You don’t need more top-down mandates and you may not have the time and access to pore through academic journals; you need tools.

I am writing this book for us.