January 6, 2025
By Jenna Fournel, Director of Teaching & Learning
Listen to this week’s Hooray For Monday podcast to hear Ms. Ezeh and Ms. Schoppert share their insights and expertise into cultural awareness during our November 2024 Inspired Teaching Institute.
Members of the Inspired Teaching team visited Ms. Ezeh and Ms. Schoppert’s classroom in December. L-R: Jenna Fournel, Ada Ezeh, Michelle Welk, Meag Campos, Jaqueta Abbey)
For November’s online Inspired Teaching Institute — “Cultivating Curiosity: Raising Cultural Awareness” — Jenna was joined by Ada Ezeh and Shay Schoppert, who co-teach a PreK classroom at Brightwood Elementary in Washington, DC. Ms. Ezeh, a ‘24-25 Teaching with Improvisation Fellow, and Ms. Schoppert, a 2010 graduate of Inspired Teaching’s residency program, shared the many ways observation helps their diverse students feel connected to one another and their learning.
You can watch the webinar in full in the video below and listen to this week’s episode of the Hooray For Monday podcast for highlights of Jenna’s conversation with Ms. Ezeh and Ms. Schoppert.
Create Connections
During a visit to Ms. Ezeh and Ms. Schoppert’s classroom earlier in the school year, Jenna noticed a book choice for story time that seemed to be in service of helping one particular student having difficulty with transition — but every student was engaged in the moment.
“They all had just gone through that [experience] and it was such a relatable emotion for all of them,” Ms. Schoppert said.
Identifying moments to both address unique student needs and build empathy helps all students understand their connections with one another, laying the foundation for a supportive classroom community.
Task Students as Observers
It is not uncommon to find a bulletin board outlining centers in an early childhood classroom. In Ms. Ezeh and Ms. Schoppert’s room, the students play an important role in deciding on and defining each area of play and learning. When it’s time to update the space, the students are tasked with identifying the changes in their classroom and to revise their options.
“Ms. Schoppert and I have always wanted the kids to be autonomous and have independence,” said Ms. Ezeh. “We always ask them questions pertaining to whatever we are trying to do so that they can be part of whatever change is happening in the classroom.”
Helping students feel ownership of their surroundings supports authentic engagement with their education, which is necessary for deep learning.
In addition to encouraging students to create their own skin-color paints, Ms. Ezeh and Ms. Schoppert, along with their classroom paraprofessional Mr. Valdez, make it a point to highlight the diverse cultural festivities observed by the class — including their own. A lesson on the differences between yams and potatoes, inspired by a book about yam festivals, was also an opportunity for Ms. Ezeh to share more about her background with the students and her colleagues.
“That’s one of the awesome things about our classroom … we all come from very different cultural backgrounds,” said Ms. Schoppert. “We all three have shared a joy in learning about each other. So, we get to have a model for [our students].”
It can often feel like the many differences between us outnumber the things we have in common, which in a classroom can make it difficult to mine curriculum for relevance to all of our students. But as Ms. Ezeh and Ms. Schoppert illustrate, learning more about others — whether students, colleagues, neighbors — just requires some curiosity about the world around us. When we create opportunities for self-expression, we are far more likely to discover shared perspectives and experiences than when we rely on assumptions.
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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.