Approaching the Book’s Structure

successfully confront them. Teacher leaders have the power to facilitate the strategies suggested here, and they can bring them to their teachers and disseminate them to their staff and district. This text will be ideal for teacher book groups that meet to intensively explore new strategies and trends in the education profession.

This book’s advice on how to maintain a positive outlook about working in education is both timely and timeless. It’s timely because the research clearly shows that teachers feel overwhelmed by the broadening set of expectations being placed on their shoulders. And it’s timeless because policymakers or the wider public cannot quickly reverse a trend so characteristic of 21st century teaching.

According to journalist Dylan Matthews (2018), policymakers, think-tank researchers, and billionaires have the habit of viewing classrooms as laboratories for social and economic innovation. In brief, many of these well-intentioned educational advocates and entrepreneurs have their hearts in the right place. But their focus is squarely on the outputs of the education system. Everyday teachers, on the other hand, must confront the harsh reality that social, economic, and familial inputs have monumentally changed the way we go about educating students. Outsiders to the teaching profession want schools to transform society, but the reality is that society has transformed schools.

This book is designed to be actionable and convenient. Its structure centers on the five concentric circles of pivotal teacher relationships (see figure I.1, page 5), with each part of the book focusing on one key relationship. The content throughout is intended to inform—and drive the behavior of—educators of all kinds, but the language and prompts are naturally geared toward classroom teachers, who are involved in all the relationships represented by the concentric circles. Many teachers will find all five parts relatable; however, some parts or chapters might not apply to every teacher. Therefore, readers may use each part independently from the others. For example, if teachers want to learn about self-care, they can refer to part 1 and don’t necessarily need to read about combating the tensions that erupt between teachers and administrators in part 4. On that note, because administrators are key players in the relationships that part 4 covers in depth, this part is unique in that some recommendations are written with them in mind and directed at them specifically—so administrators will not want to skip it. Each of the five parts is divided into two chapters. The first chapter in each part will answer the question, Why is there tension in this relationship? I will describe the