Education United States Project #624

Investing in Teachers to Transform Schools

by Center for Inspired Teaching

Project Report | Mar 20, 2023
2022- A Year of Exploration, Connection, and Joy!

By Aleta Margolis | President

It’s hard to believe that 2022 is now behind us! As we reflect on the past 12 months – filled with continued uncertainty as they may have been – I’m reminded of an issue of Hooray For Monday that considered Inspired Teaching's impact in the last year.

We held in-person Institutes and an in-person Speak Truth event in the spring, our first since 2019. Our Real World History students gave the keynote presentation at the DC History Conference. Hooray For Monday won an award and we launched the Hooray For Monday podcast on Spotify. Aleta Margolis, Inspired Teaching President, shared our philosophy with readers of The Washington Post, ASCD, and 350,000 educators in Italy. And, most importantly, we connected with thousands of teachers, school leaders, and parents.

The pandemic inspired a new approach to sharing with a wider audience the Inspired Teaching strategies, activities, and programming that educators in the DC area have enjoyed for decades. Our new digital guidebooks make incorporating our approach into any classroom more seamless than ever. Our online Inspired Teaching Institutes bring our improvisation-based professional learning to your living room. And our library of online tools for assessing students and building an engaging classroom continues to grow.

2022 by the numbers

52 issues of Hooray For Monday

34 episodes of the Hooray For Monday podcast

24 Inspired Teaching Institutes

5 Guidebooks published

28 Real World History students

92 Speak Truth participants

9,400 educators reached, including 3,600 in the DC area

Every Sunday last year our subscribers could count on (the award-winning) Hooray For Monday to show up in their inbox. And you can expect that – and more – in the year ahead! We launched the Hooray For Monday podcast in 2022 and we’ll continue to offer new, exciting ways to engage with our weekly insights, tools, and activities in 2023. From highlighting the on-the-ground experience of educators to offering insights on assessments, the importance of mistakes, classroom community, and more, Hooray For Monday is a resource teachers can depend on to make their instruction engaging, joyful, and relevant!

We embraced a “yes, and…” mindset during the pandemic and began to offer our Inspired Teaching Institute via Zoom, where we met teachers from near and far in 2022. In 2023, we’ll continue to offer opportunities to join us online for these fun, interactive professional learning opportunities – AND we’re excited to be back in-person at some of our favorite places in Washington, DC for monthly workshops beginning this spring. When teachers can’t join us live, they can now access the strategies and activities we share during our Institutes with our digital Institute Resource Guides.

We were happy to see students holding in-person Speak Truth discussions once again in May at E.L. Haynes High School in Washington, DC. We also welcomed our inaugural class of Speak Truth Fellows over the summer, who joined us for an intensive training, in partnership with Ford’s Theatre, to bring the program to their students during the 22-23 school year. At a time when open, respectful discussion is more important than ever, we’re looking forward to watching their classrooms host Speak Truth events in the new year.

“Our country needs its teachers. And it’s our collective responsibility, as a society, to find ways to help them thrive.”

~ Aleta Margolis, ASCD, December 12, 2022

Looking ahead to 2023, we are excited about what is in store – both the known and the unknown.

Your generous donations enable us to keep our programs free, create new resources, and advocate for change in education.

Thank you for your support!

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Nov 14, 2022
The Power of Possibility

By Aleta Margolis | President

In a recent issue of Hooray For Monday, Inspired Teaching wrote about the power of possibility and potential at the start of a new school year. It’s a time filled with excitement – and expectations. But as we enter the third year of schooling during a global pandemic, this is also a time of great challenge. While this school year is inching closer to “normal,” it still carries the effects of a prolonged period of uncertainty and trauma, for students, teachers, and families.

Center for Inspired Teaching is here to support educators and parents through all of this school year’s ups and downs. Our newly released ‘22-23 Making School Worth It Toolkit is filled with practical, standards-based tools, lessons, and activities that prioritize student agency, curiosity, and wellbeing. The fall Inspired Teaching Institutes will be fun, fast-paced sessions, teaching engaging, effective activities that teachers can use in the classroom right away. And at the start of every week, Hooray For Monday will arrive in inboxes, filled with insights and concrete tools and resources.

We look forward to supporting you -- the teachers, students, parents, and community members who are part of the Inspired Teaching family -- throughout this school year.

Inspired Teaching recently held our first-ever LinkedIn Live stream. Inspired Teaching staff, led by Aleta, gave viewers a peek into what an Inspired Teaching Institute is all about, showcasing improv-based activities and their connections to classroom content. Viewers also learned more about the Inspired Teaching Approach and the many resources available for implementing standards-aligned, engaging activities in their own classrooms. We enjoyed this opportunity to share Inspired Teaching’s mission with educators from around the world.

Back to School with Hooray For Monday

Whether focused on classroom assessments, current events, or social-emotional learning, each issue of Hooray For Monday is filled with the actionable insights and practical resources teachers, school leaders, and parents need to begin the week with enthusiasm.

Recent issues focus on tools for starting the school year right. Really getting to know students and building an authentic learning community are critical, but these priorities can get shifted to autopilot in favor of addressing content as soon as possible. Fortunately, you don’t need to choose between building community and teaching content. Find tips and tools for simple, effective “Getting to Know You” exercises, community builders that double as content instruction, and more, in the below issues.

The Hooray For Monday podcast is now available on Spotify! Be sure to subscribe and listen each week here.

Speak Truth Fellowship Kicks Off

In August our 2022-2023 Speak Truth Fellowship began. We gathered with educators from throughout the DMV at the offices of Ford’s Theatre in downtown Washington, DC for three days of professional learning that included practice with the Inspired Teaching and Speak Truth approaches, exploration of the Speak Truth Guidebook, and specific training in Ford’s Theater’s oratory approach.

This year our Fellows are implementing Speak Truth sessions in a wide variety of school and youth group settings, and their experiences and insights will help us to enhance our resources for teachers who want to implement the program in the future.

A New Class of Real World History Scholars

The ‘22-23 Real World History program has officially begun! Students are identifying and connecting with their Great Migration narrators – individuals who will share their lived experience of this historic event — capturing their oral histories to be archived at the DC Public Library. Students will also visit the Phillips Collection to view Jacob Lawrence’s The Migration Series with their chosen narrator.

Read more about the program in this Washington Post article and listen to previous oral histories from Real World History students via Dig DC.

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Jul 15, 2022
A Season for Resilience

By Aleta Margolis | President

Speak Truth at EL Haynes PCS

We have finished another challenging school year. Teachers and parents have navigated numerous obstacles – some new, some familiar – over the last 10 months; I hope teachers, parents and students can take joy in their wins and recognize that there are no losses when witnessing the growth they've experienced between last September and now. As we head into summertime, it’s important to prioritize time to relax and reset. Given the lessons of the last few years, we can’t know for certain what this fall will have in store for us all. But we can make this season one for building resilience, within ourselves and the children in our lives.

Resilient Summer Handbook

For more than 27 years, Inspired Teaching has been teaching teachers and school leaders to create classrooms where children thrive. Now, we’re helping parents bring this approach into their homes. The Resilient Summer Handbook has short articles and activities you can put to use in strengthening your relationship with your child; engaging them in meaningful tasks to help them build independence, focus, and perseverance; and setting expectations for open communication and mutual respect.

Hooray for Monday on SoundCloud

The first issue of Hooray For Monday was published in August 2020, in recognition of the challenges school leaders and teachers were facing during the first year of teaching in a pandemic. In the many Mondays since, we’ve shared numerous resources, tools, and expert insights to help prepare and excite you for the week ahead. We’ve explored SEL, Inspired Teaching’s 5 Core Elements, the 4 I’s, and the ABCDE of Learner Needs, learning from school leaders’ and teachers’ on-the-ground experiences, and connecting current events to an engaged classroom.

And recently, we made it even easier for you to start the week off on a positive note! Hooray For Monday is now available in audio format. Whether you’re on the go, need to multitask, or just prefer auditory information, you can now listen every week!

Parent Workshop

On June 2 we held a workshop just for parents! Thanks to a grant from the Capitol Hill Community Foundation, we were able to create a session focused on “Parenting Resilient Children,” which explored ways to nurture social and emotional learning in order to help children thrive in school.

Participants learned about the ABCDE of Learner Needs, using Asset Framing to shift perspective on challenging interactions, and looked at ways to engage children’s Intellect, Inquiry, Imagination, and Integrity by pursuing their interests in new and creative ways. The session built on concepts Aleta has been exploring in recent issues of Hooray for Monday, including Resilient Children and The Desk is a Barrier. All participants received a copy of the Resilient Summer Handbook. (And you can get your own copy too!)

Speak Truth

Inspired Teaching held an in-person Speak Truth at EL Haynes High School in Washington, DC on May 31. Dozens of students participated in the event, which focused on four topics: Don’t Touch My Hair; Immigration & Deportation; Gotta Catch Em’ All; and Violence in School. The sessions were held in partnership with the school’s Intro to Black Law and LULAC after school clubs. During the Violence in School discussion, student-facilitators led with questions such as: What does solidarity look like to you? Why do we think there is racial tension in school? How do we relate to each other as students of color?

A Big Spring for Real World History

It’s been a big spring semester for students in our yearlong Real World History course. Real World History engages students directly, and serves as a model of the kind of engagement-based teaching we strive to implement in every school.In early April, Real World History students gave the keynote presentation on the closing day of the 2022 DC History Conference. The students showcased the oral histories of the Great Migration they compiled in the fall, exploring common themes in the experiences of the narrators as they relocated from the South to DC. Joined by narrators from this year’s program as well as several from previous Real World History classes, the students did a wonderful job presenting in front of more than a hundred audience members in the Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial Library.

Later in the month, three Real World History students presented their group project, The Good Friday Agreement, for consideration in the National History Day city-wide competition – and were awarded first place! After incorporating feedback from the judges, they will present virtually during the National Contest in mid-June, alongside thousands of other high school students from across the country. Their project explores The Troubles and the impact the Good Friday Agreement had at the moment and on future peace agreements.The students have put a lot of Intellect, Inquiry, Imagination, and Integrity into preparing for these events, from in-depth research into their Great Migration narrators’ lived experiences to sharpening their public speaking skills – in addition to their time interning with DC-area cultural institutions.

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