For years Don Graves’ wisdom has helped create meaningful connections between teachers, students, and curriculum and brought a more humane approach to teaching and learning. In A Sea of Faces Don returns to the theme of knowing your students. With an extraordinary, personal vision, and his warm, hopeful touch, Graves offers reflections on the vital importance of knowing each child as a unique individual and important insights on how to do it.

A Sea of Faces is both an idea book and a meditation on children and learning. Filled with Don’s wisdom, wit, and one-of-a-kind storytelling, it describes how to create new opportunities to understand your students better. Don includes exercises that will sharpen your ability to observe children and get to know them as individuals—not just students—as well as seventy delightful poems, written by Don himself, that model the writing of poetry as a new and powerful way to express what you know about the kids in your classroom. There’s even a website where you can listen to Don reading his poems and experience them as they are meant to be heard, straight from the author.

If the first day of school feels like an overwhelming blur of youngsters, trust Don Graves and read A Sea of Faces. You’ll find out that all those new faces are an opportunity to renew your teaching, and that you can connect with your students in more meaningful ways than ever before.