Educator · Author · Speaker

The One in Front of You

Find one thing to love.

For more than forty years I stood in front of classrooms full of children becoming who they were. I learned one thing that never failed me, and everything I write and speak about grows from it.

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The whole of my work, held together by one thread.

The Book

The One in Front of You

A book for teachers who want to remember why they came.

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Speaking

Bring Lori to your room

A keynote for schools, boards, and faculties on the heart of teaching.

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About

My story

Forty years in the classroom, and the thread that runs through all of it.

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The Book

The One in Front of You

From Chalk Dust to Digital Boards and Artificial Intelligence
A work in progress · Chapter One: “I Thought Again”

Every teacher has stood at the front of a room and felt the question rise up. How am I going to manage this child? This book is about the moment just after, the half second when a teacher can choose again, and asks something different. What is one thing I can find to love about this student?

Told through more than forty years of real classrooms, the funny days and the hardest ones, with the voices of teachers who never lost the love woven through, it is a book about the one question that outlasts every policy and every reform.

It is written for the teacher at the beginning, standing outside their first classroom, afraid they are not enough. And it belongs on the reading list of every teacher’s college, where the future of this profession is deciding what kind of teacher it will become.

Also by Lori

Until Next Time — a mother’s story of love and loss, and the beginning of the One Thing to Love project. Part of her grief work, which lives at its own home, Held by Daisy.

Contributing author — invited into two anthologies in the Brave Voice Project series, Stories of Forgiveness and The Cost of Strength.

Speaking

Give teachers back the reason they came.

Ask new teachers what frightens them most, and it is almost never the children. It is whether they are enough. Whether they can last.

I speak to that. After forty years in the classroom, I know what keeps a teacher standing, and it is the same thing that helps a child learn. Being seen. Being loved. Finding one thing to love in the one in front of you.

Signature keynote

Find One Thing to Love

The one question that outlasts every policy, every reform, and every hard year. Told through real classrooms, it sends teachers home remembering why they came.

Topics — shaped as a keynote, a workshop, or a PA-day session

Who I speak to: teacher candidates and new teachers, whole staffs on a PA day, school boards and leadership teams, faculties of education, conferences and associations.

People leave lighter, and they leave loved. And they remember, for a while at least, exactly why they chose this work.

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About

Lori Johnson

For more than four decades I taught in Ontario classrooms, most of them full of Grade 7 students becoming who they were, and along the way in high school special education and at the college level too. I watched the profession change again and again, and I learned that the one thing worth holding onto never changed at all.

My work, under the banner One Thing to Love, is devoted to helping people feel seen, supported, and deeply connected. I am the author of The One in Front of You and Until Next Time, and I live in Barrie, Ontario.

Find one thing to love, and let it change everything.

Lori Johnson
Why a door

You can always close it.

Every teacher knows the noise. The policies, the paperwork, the government’s flavour of the month. It gathers in the hallway, and it never really stops.

But a teacher can close the door. And when it is closed, the only thing left in the room is the reason you came. The one in front of you.

That is what the little window is for. Even shut, if you look, you can still see the light.