August 18, 2025
By Aleta Margolis, Founder and President
Listen to this week’s Hooray For Monday podcast for the audio version of this newsletter.
When was the last time you were in a room with a dozen or more people who were complete strangers to you? When was the last time you were in a room with a dozen or more people who were complete strangers to you with whom you were having conversation about some of the day’s stickiest subjects—on purpose?
For some high school students in Washington, DC, the answer to that question is, “A couple of months ago, and I plan on doing it again later this week.”
Inspired Teaching’s Speak Truth program convenes students for face-to-face dialogue on topics they’ve determined to be important, and then supports them in facilitating those conversations among themselves, with minimal adult oversight and no adult interjections. With regular city-wide seminars open to all Washington, DC-area high school students throughout the school year (including the 2025-2026 kick-off sessions this Thursday and Friday), Speak Truth was envisioned as a demonstration of what the Inspired Teaching Approach looks like in action, and as an outlet for young people to wade through the issues that concern them.
Since its inception in 2014, and especially in the years following the COVID-19 pandemic, Speak Truth has taken on an additional role for the students who participate: a source of human interaction.
A recent episode of the Vox Media podcast “Today Explained” focused on the modern phenomenon of “crashing out,” or, to translate from Gen Z: pitching a fit in a public way. Psychologist Maytal Eyal dove into what drives young people to catalogue their big feelings on social media. What she identified is closely related to something we observe in our Speak Truth students:
“We should be doing way more work with group therapy and working on our sort of relational fitness, instead of just sitting one-on-one and turning further and further inward, I think it would be really helpful to sit in a group with other people and turn outward and understand how other people are doing and understand our patterns as we relate to other people.”
Speak Truth is not group therapy, but it is a structured, supportive space for learning to navigate life’s difficult discussions and building the skills of leadership and empathy. And it has also become, at its most fundamental level, an opportunity for young people—whose lives so consistently play out online, muted by a screen—to quite literally see one another.
And as we prepare to begin the new school year and look forward to months full of Speak Truth seminars, we encourage all educators to consider the many ways you can help your own students strengthen their relational fitness. You can begin by downloading the Speak Truth Teacher Guidebook, which offers step-by-step guidance on bringing the program into your classroom, as well as strategies and activities to support meaningful, student-led community building.
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.
