Teach Like a Community Organizer is a refreshing guide for educators who want to inspire agency and collaboration in their classrooms. It blends practical strategies with deep respect for students, reminding teachers that idealism and real-world teaching can go hand in hand.
-Carol Burris, Executive Director of The Network for Public Education
Teach Like a Community Organizer is a heart-filled, determined look at teaching students to be active in learning. Jacob Goodwin grounds his unit design in place and investigation, and most importantly, in the students in the room. I inhaled this book like the deep breath you take at the peak of a mountain. Walking beside a teacher who thinks about our work in complex ways and is constantly learning, agitated by his curiosity, empowered me. Dare we teach like this? Let your answer be YES.
- Penny Kittle, author of Book Love, Micro Mentor Texts, and 180 Days
With vibrant anecdotes, thoughtful analysis, and practical exercises, Teach Like a Community Organizer is a book to inspire and guide educators looking to center humanity and connection by building profound community within and beyond the classroom. Michaela Brant, The Progressive magazine
In a time where education has focused increasingly on the individual, Jacob Goodwin's Teach Like a Community Organizer offers an urgent corrective. This book reminds us that education is inherently social and is built on trusting relationships cemented through meaningful action. Goodwin keeps us firmly planted in the "world as it is," as we witness his students assessing their local waterways, problem-solving plastic waste, mapping their communities, and conducting mock trials. With its clear anecdotes and concrete activities, this book offers civic-minded educators a framework for engaging in place-based learning that forges the community of young citizens our world is crying for.Pablo Wolfe, co-author of The Civically Engaged Classroom: Reading, Writing, and Speaking for Change
Teach Like a Community Organizer should be required reading for educators. Filled with tips and tools for cultivating an organizer's mindset, this essential volume is aimed at helping teachers reclaim their agency by reinvigorating the idealism that made them want to teach in the first place. I hear regularly from educators who want to know how they can hold onto hope in a hostile world. Now I have an answer. "Read this book! Jennifer C. Berkshire, author of A Wolf at the Schoolhouse Door and The Education Wars: A Citizen's Guide and Defense Manual
Jake Goodwin writes that our conversations create the world. That wisdom, and this fine book, can help create that better world. Richard Louv, author of Last Child in the Woods and Our Wild Calling
Teaching and community organizing may sound like quite different professions, but both aim at equipping people to work together for a better world. As a practitioner of both trades, Ive long wanted a book that would make the case that Jake Goodwin makes here. Drawing on stories from his own experience, he bridges the gap between theory and practice with a pedagogy I find inspiring. If youre concerned about the future of American education and our civic life, youll find a toolkit for reform and rebuilding between these covers.
Parker J. Palmer, author of Healing the Heart of Democracy, Let Your Life Speak, and The Courage to Teach
Jacob Goodwin's new book, Teach Like a Community Organizer, is exactly what the doctor ordered for those finding themselves trying to teach in uncertain times. Goodwin effectively weaves together stories, practical know-how and ready to use activities that can be used as written or customized with ease. The result is a treasury of ideas that are all at once meaningful, memorable, and genuinely fun. What sets Goodwin's work apart is how he takes readers outside, into the mud, to see the beauty and glean the wisdom that can only come from engagement in real-world messiness. Each section offers us new ideas for creative encounters that spark curiosity and courage for educators and students alike. Goodwin models the iron rule he presents: guiding--not prescribing. He shows educators how to empower themselves and to scaffold the kinds of learning experiences that help students to think and act for themselves.
Annie Rappeport, PhD, Associate Director of Community Dialogue, Yale University
