Teach Our Children Well: Essential Strategies for the Urban Classroom, by Helen Maniates and Betty Doerr with Margaret Goldman (Heinemann 2001) is a wonderful rediscovered treasure sent my way recently–one that’s well worth spending a few hours with over the holidays. I guarantee you’ll come away with at least half a dozen sparkling new ideas for your classroom practice, whether you teach in an urban, rural, or suburban setting. From the introduction to the end, just 105 pages later, I kept thinking, “good things come in small packages!”

The authors, education colleagues who have worked with teachers in the San Francisco Bay Area for twenty years, bring the concrete best practices from dozens of classrooms front and center on nearly every page. Those of you who know the work of the Developmental Studies Center or who use Responsive Classroom^® practices will find the authors’ balanced attention to classroom climate and academic rigor both familiar and refreshing. No matter what grade you teach, you’ll gather great strategies to help you integrate and balance these two aspects of your teaching.

Chapters center on “Rapport,” “Traditions,” “Pride of Place,” “A Sense of Belonging,” “Personal Best,” “Engagement,” and “Support to Independence.” Check out the My Name Is Special activity from K-1 in “Rapport” or the “opening school” traditions in that chapter. Read how a teacher dealt with the age-old tricky questions around “high and low” status students in a classroom and how she turned what is often a problem on its ear to build a classroom of high-status, high-functioning students (it’s in the chapter on “A Sense of Belonging”).

In addition to the scores of amazing teaching strategies in this book, there’s also a core message throughout. In the chapter on “Personal Best,” the authors link the ability of teachers to make learning explicit and transparent to increased student cooperation, collaboration, and achievement. “These teachers,” they note, “show students how what they are learning will further the purposes of their lives. Students respond well to being treated with respect, to not being patronized, and to not having the learning process or curriculum made mysterious to them.”

As I read this book, I couldn’t help but be brought again and again into your classrooms. I would come across an idea I hadn’t considered before and see myself walking right in your classroom door saying, “I just read about this great idea for Morning Meeting or for Buddy Readers or for reaching out to parents this year–you’ve got to hear this!” And then I’d tell you.

So I have! Happy Holidays!