In 2004, our founder Dave Wakefield was a first-year teacher working with English language learners, many of whom had been in the country less than a year. Every morning he closed his classroom door and did the hardest, most meaningful work of his life. With no one watching, no one helping, and no lasting record of what happened.

The breakthroughs disappeared. The mistakes disappeared. The growth disappeared. That felt wrong. The work mattered too much to vanish.

That belief became Sibme.

The name came from that original belief: that when educators can see themselves teaching, they believe in their own capacity to grow. Seeing is Believing Me. The belief hasn't changed. The platform has grown around it.

For too long, schools have treated instructional improvement as a series of disconnected events. A walkthrough. A coaching conversation. A formal observation. A lesson plan. A reflection. Each one matters. But by itself, each one fades.

What schools have been missing is memory. A living record of teaching and learning across time. The evidence of what happened, the context that explains why it mattered, and the growth that followed. That's what Sibme exists to build.

Read the full Sibme manifesto