Reimagining the Classroom: Creating New Learning Spaces and Connecting with the World

A practical approach to shared inquiry and exploration in K-12 classrooms

We are in a period of unknowns unlike any in a generation or more. As educators, we need new pathways and ideas that can help us educate children for the world to come. Reimagining the Classroom: Creating New Learning Spaces and Connecting with the World provides practical steps and examples that parents and educators can use to begin to create new learning spaces, approaches, and outcomes. Dr. Richards’ provocative book asks us to reconsider some of our basic assumptions about teaching and learning. It helps parents and educators question and recast these assumptions and practices while providing concrete, tested activities and ideas that will help readers reimagine educational spaces rooted in the notion that classrooms—and the stories we tell in them—are a metaphor for the world we hope to create.

Reimagining the Classroom is divided into two parts. The first offers the intellectual framework parents and educators are seeking; it identifies specific problems with current approaches, offers an alternative vision and set of narratives, and then offers a new pedagogy to satisfy this vision. The second part of the book moves from the theoretical to the practical. Dr. Richards provides tested pedagogical tools for classrooms in science and math; literature and fine arts; spirituality and mindfulness; practical arts; and justice and social-emotional learning.

• Discover practical tools for creating educational spaces that prepare students for the world they will encounter
• Help students express their values and learn to live in community
• Replace or supplement school with at-home learning and activities that will give students an edge for the future
• Learn how the traditional approach to education is failing our kids and leading to an epidemic of depression and anxiety

For educators and parents ready to consider a radical shift in service of our children’s wellbeing, this book explains what, fundamentally, education can and should look like.