February 10, 2025
By Aleta Margolis, Founder and President
Listen to this week’s Hooray For Monday podcast for the audio version of this newsletter.
When I was a child, I was a “good” student, particularly in history class.
I was highly skilled at memorizing names and dates, sequencing events, and remembering all of this information just long enough to ace the test. Though I was successful as a student, I didn’t particularly enjoy my history lessons, because they did little to spark my curiosity.
And then I found myself teaching ancient world history to sixth graders! I realized that in order to teach history, I needed to find a meaningful way of engaging with it myself. And so, along with my students, I delved into explorations of why ancient Chinese artisans kept their silk-making techniques secret; how Aristotle’s virtue ethics inform modern day value systems; how ancient African mathematical systems were shaped by culture; what role chocolate played in ancient Mayan rituals; and much more. My students and I experienced history in a way that fueled our curiosity.
This February, like every February since 1976, is Black History Month. And this year it is as imperative as ever to teach our young people to engage with Black history — which is, of course, American History and world history — in a way that respects and fuels their curiosity.
Yes, students should know important names like Shirley Chisholm, Frederick Douglass, John Lewis, Toni Morrison, Nelson Mandela, and Maya Angelou, and the times in which these historical figures lived. But students should learn about these important individuals through inquiry and engagement and opportunities to explore their curiosity.
Curiosity is fueled by learning content in context, by connecting what we learn in the classroom to our own lives and the world beyond the classroom walls.
My colleague Cosby Hunt leads Inspired Teaching’s Real World History program for DC students. In this program, students learn about the Great Migration by reading The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson. Students get to deepen their understanding when they analyze Jacob Lawrence’s Great Migration series at the Phillips Collection. Students deepen their understanding even further by collecting oral histories from elders in our community who actually experienced the Great Migration themselves.
That kind of layered, expansive understanding of history goes beyond names and dates. It helps students understand that they are part of a continuum of history, they are living and making history, and moving forward based in an understanding of what came before.
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.
