August 11, 2025
By Meag Campos, Project Manger
Listen to this week’s Hooray For Monday podcast to hear Orly Friedman share how the school she founded centers student agency and autonomy in all things.
As we head into the new school year, Inspired Teaching knows how much energy and intention teachers are putting into planning for their new students. Whether it’s breaking down units of study, planning lessons, getting ahead of curriculum expectations, or any of the myriad ways teachers show up for their students, managing it all can get exhausting!
What better time than now for us to share this interview with an educator who is working to put that responsibility back onto her students?
Orly Friedman is an Inspired Teacher—she trained with us as a teacher in Washington, DC—whose desire to transform education led to her founding Red Bridge, a school in San Francisco, California. But this school functions differently from the schools you may be familiar with. As Orly puts it, Red Bridge takes compliance, removes it from the center of focus, and replaces it with agency. Students at Red Bridge are taken out of the role of passive recipient and become “drivers of their own learning.”
Red Bridge is making sure that students’ need for autonomy—one of Inspired Teaching’s ABCDE of Learner Needs—is being met through the intentional structuring of the school. Studies show that when the need for autonomy is not met, students become apathetic and disengaged. They reject or find ways to get around rules and expectations and ultimately lose their motivation for learning.
Autonomy
“I want to have a say in what happens to me.”
Autonomy is the need for independence and self-determination; the ability to make choices, to create, to explore, and to express oneself freely; to have sufficient space, to move around, and to feel unrestricted in determining choices and free will.
What does autonomy look like in your classroom?
Listen to the full interview to hear more about how Orly and the teachers at Red Bridge are centering student agency and discover ways you can build student agency in your classroom this year!
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.
