April 21, 2025
By Aleta Margolis, Founder and President
Listen to this week’s Hooray For Monday podcast for the audio version of this newsletter.
In March, Inspired Teaching’s Curiosity Challenge focused on connecting; participants received weekly resources to support them in using curiosity to cultivate community and communicate with those around them.
One of those resources is the Building Belonging eBook. This digital booklet includes insight into the importance of Belonging as a core need (as defined in Inspired Teaching’s ABCDE of Learner Needs framework), communication strategies we teach high school students during Speak Truth sessions, and conversation-starters inspired by the likes of Stephen Colbert and Alan Alda.
Each of these is a resource Inspired Teaching has spent decades developing and refining, or, in the case of Stephen and Alan, sought out to support our work (and our curiosity!). On their own, each tool offers a specific perspective on connection; together in the Building Belonging eBook, they become a holistic tool, applicable in new contexts beyond their original intent.
In the spirit of Earth Day this Tuesday–and the familiar “reduce, reuse, recycle!” refrain–I encourage you to consider how you might breathe new life into the many things you have done in your classroom since the fall, and over the course of your teaching career, as we enter the final stretch of this school year.
It can be easy to be swept up into the demand for new lesson plans, activities, materials, that speak to novelty and timeliness. Creating learning environments that are relevant to our students’ lives is important for engagement. However, digging deeper into familiar content is a powerful way to go beyond covering curriculum to ensure students understand the material.
If you are already using Scribe’s Record in your teaching, invite students to look back at the learning experiences they’ve identified as most meaningful so far this year. Then work together to choose a few to engage with more deeply. If you haven’t yet instituted Scribe’s Record at the end of each day, now is a good time to start!
In addition to supporting the monumentally important health of our planet, the number of useful things that can be made by recycling materials is astounding. Upcycling your work in the classroom may lead to similarly impressive outcomes–sustaining you, your students, and your creativity.
Happy Earth Day from all of us at Inspired Teaching.
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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.
