Teaching Lessons: Creating a Cultural Infrastructure for Great Schools

Tomorrow's global economy belongs to innovators who can devise cutting-edge solutions for the needs of a complex, ever-changing world. Our children will not be among those bright minds—unless our educational system transforms its approach to learning. What will it take to create world-class schools whose graduates can compete at the vanguard of the worldwide market?

Drawing on his thirty-five years as a classroom teacher, Joseph Willis shows why our nation's schools are failing and why current educational reform is the problem, not the answer. There is an answer: We must change our cultural infrastructure to make learning and teaching a primary value. Teaching Lessons offers a fundamental change in how we view knowledge and learning in our society.

Teaching Lessons reveals

• how standardized testing ruins real, vital learning

• why educational policy and politics are a disastrous mix

• why we must refocus on the classroom as the hope for our children's—and our nation's—future

. . . and much more.

If this book's insights disturb you, the solutions it proposes offer hope. There is a way forward. Our teachers have known it all along. So can you—and take steps to make it happen.