“There is no more important work than the education of our children.  However, with-in the current story of schooling, many of our children often feel inadequate as learners and far too many emerge from their school experience intellectually, emotionally and spiritually disconnected from their own abundant potential.

In, How May I Serve You? , Dr. Lori Desautels presents a vision for the education of our children that is radically different from the current landscape of educational reform, a landscape that currently is filled with standards, testing and the endless pursuit of rigor.

Dr. Desautels weaves a new story of education!  This new story goes deeper and moves all educators and those that care about children, toward the heart and spirit of the children and youth in our care. Dr. Desautels speaks of teaching as service to those in our care and frames her new vision using a simple, yet powerful  question :

How may I serve you?

The current story of schooling is rooted in scarcity and deficiency, where educators spend enormous amounts of time and energy finding, fixing and remediating the learner’s limitations.  This story is deadening to the souls of our students as well as to the teachers who work with them.  It is time for a new story!

Dr. Desautels story moves the current educational discussion toward the “felt sense” of caring and compassion for the students we as educators serve.  She weaves a narrative that shifts the teacher’s role from transmitter of facts and information toward one that is of service to his or her students.  It is a story rooted in compassion and service.  It is a story that takes one to the heart of what it is to teach.

Dr. Desautels centers  the “felt sense”  of caring relations as the foundation for the activity of teaching and learning.  As we shift the relation of teaching toward serving our students needs, as we engage students in conversations, we learn about who they are, their interests and their talents.  As teachers make this shift they can gain critical information from their students and can better build instruction that leads toward individual progress and toward our students aspirations.

The shift that Dr. Desautels writes about shares a vision of what is possible for the children and youth we serve in schools.  It moves the current debate from standards and testing toward the heart and soul of the students we teach.

To be radical means simply to go to the core- to the deepest and most sustaining part of life.

Dr. Desautels book takes us to that place.  It puts us on a path toward a new story of learning and schooling because it reconnects us to the deepest roots of what it means to be fully human.  It is a generative new story of schooling that if followed will lead us to create schools that serve all our students well.  “

Michael McKnight