Purpose

The authors purpose in writing this book was to offer a guide in creating and building cooperative and inclusive communities in the classroom. Mara SaponShevin gives real life scenarios and follows with advice on how to form a community within your classroom in different ways. The overall message that you receive from this book is that teaching matters, and not just the content of the core subjects. The way you conduct yourself, the way you lead your community of learners, and the important ideas and messages you bestow upon your students is what matters. Building a community in your classroom really can make a difference in a students life.

Key Ideas
This book is directly related to many different topics within the social studies realm of education. Through our conversations, we have found many different key ideas that we are taking away and applying to our future classrooms. One of the largest key ideas that we thought held the most importance to our future classrooms is the idea of building community and relationships, getting to know one another, and realizing differences as well as similarities in all of our cultures and characteristics. Another key idea we took away from the book was the idea of providing support for students, which includes modifying instruction for lower performing students, as well as providing enriching and challenging material for students who are high performing. Keeping students involved in their work will in turn build a positive environment while also clearing the classroom of poor behavior. Setting positive goals for students and the classroom as a whole is also a key idea that we took away. This is also something that helps with behavior problems, all the while building community and working together as a whole to reach a common goal.

Connecting
Because We Can Change the World discusses key ideas that are critical to implementing the foundation for community in the classroom. One topic our discussions focused on was the importance of diversity and similarities in the classroom. This book includes strategies for celebrating the diversities of all students in the classroom but also the importance of their similarities. Through those similarities, students are able to make connections, form relationships, furthering the classroom community. Through this community, students can collaborate during instruction and most of all, feel safe and respected in the classroom so that they are willing to take risks and grow. This book also helped us to realize the importance for flexibility in classroom management. Although we feel that we are prepared to teach the core subject areas on the first day of school, it is not possible to be prepared to immediately shape the social aspect of the classroom. It is essential that the teacher build relationships with students and encourage the students to build relationships with one another, as that is the foundation of the classroom.

In Our Classrooms
As a whole, this book has put our ideas about social studies education into an action plan. This book gave us ideas how to create community using books, team building activities, morning meetings, and creating expectations for students. Our discussions centered on how we see community in our classrooms currently and how we want them to look in the future. We discussed implementation of behavior plans, community building activities, and differentiation strategies and how they look in a collaborative classroom. The suggestions in this book create opportunities for students to share their personal lives and gain trust from you and their classmates. Once this trust is created students feel safe to share their worries and concerns. When students are able to create this community, they feel empowered to make changes within themselves and in the bigger picture. The author challenges teachers to try these ideas and reflect on how they contribute to the bigger picture of creating a collaborative community in the classroom.