February 3, 2025
By Aleta Margolis, Founder and President
Listen to this week’s Hooray For Monday podcast for the audio version of this newsletter.
It’s been an overwhelming week here in Washington, DC and across the country – with executive orders cutting funding to educational and other critical institutions, teachers and parents fearing their students or family members will be detained or deported, and the deadly airline crash over the Potomac.
As I’ve written before, action is the antidote to worry. So, at Inspired Teaching, we’re bolstering our resources and programming to make school a place where students and teachers feel safe, respected, and engaged in their learning. This includes:
Last Monday marked the completion of Inspired Teaching’s 7-Day Curiosity Challenge, which kicked off our year-long campaign to make Curiosity the 2025 word of the year, in direct contrast to Merriam-Webster’s 2024 word of the year, polarization.
People who’ve completed the Curiosity Challenge – which anyone can now access and will remain relevant all year long – are telling us their vision is sharper; they’re starting to see connections and find awe in unexpected places; they’re breathing more deeply; they’re smiling more.
We have 11 more months of opportunities to build curiosity. If you haven’t already, join the Curiosity Challenge today!
This week, it was easy to fall into despair as one devastating headline after another came across our feeds. But curiosity keeps us moving forward.
Borrowing from my dear friend Caitie Whelan who writes a brilliant newsletter, Policy is For Lovers:
“‘The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function,’ wrote F. Scott Fitzgerald in The Crack Up. ‘One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless yet be determined to make them otherwise.’”
Curiosity can help us in that drive to restore hope. This week we found hope on the front lines as we engaged with teachers, students, and parents…
- We led a professional learning session for the faculty at a DCPS elementary school focused on increasing students’ sense of Belonging. Teachers enthusiastically engaged with new strategies to help them support and protect their students.
- We launched a workshop series for teaching artists on using improvisation to meet instructional goals. At one point in the session, a participant exclaimed, “The flow of joy in this room is unstoppable!”
- We engaged high school students in four Speak Truth sessions about mental health and social media addiction — topics they identified as critical in their lives right now. It was inspiring to watch the students support one another. They shared strategies for reducing screen time, getting more sleep, tuning out negative influences, and seeking more opportunities to connect in person.
- We taught parents in rural Rappahannock County, Virginia to use the ABCDE of Learner Needs to move beyond managing their children’s behavior and focus instead on helping their children thrive.
In each of these professional learning experiences, we encountered people who are equal parts distressed and curious. Who represent a wide range of beliefs and viewpoints. Whose eyes light up when they speak about their work with children.
Being curious in this moment is a vital act. Curiosity is the heart of learning, and it will be our commitment to learning — about ourselves and the world, and from one another — that will enable us to make change, build bridges, and overcome.
Thanks for being a part of Inspired Teaching’s brave and curious community.
For additional insights, resources, and information on Inspired Teaching teacher and youth programming, subscribe to the Hooray For Monday newsletter!
Hooray For Monday is an award-winning weekly publication of Center for Inspired Teaching, a social change nonprofit organization that champions the power of curiosity and is dedicated to transforming the school experience from compliance-based to engagement-based. Inspired Teaching provides transformative, improvisation-based professional learning for teachers that is 100% engaging – intellectually, emotionally, and physically.
