August 25, 2025
By Jenna Fournel, Chief Curiosity Officer
Listen to this week’s Hooray For Monday podcast to hear Jenna and her son, Leal, discuss his experience with clarity in the classroom as a high school senior.
At Inspired Teaching Institutes, participating teachers are trained in exercises that require close listening and clear directions. Pictured: Cosby leading an activity at the 2025 Teaching with Improvisation Institute.
The new school year is upon us, and depending on your relationship to school, this might be exciting, depressing, anxiety-producing, or just plain uncertain.
What if there were a simple way to ensure we could start on the right track? In her book Dare to Lead, author Brene Brown shares research that shows the greatest source of discontent in the workplace stems from people “avoiding tough conversations, including giving honest, productive feedback.” This has logical consequences, which include:
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Diminishing trust and engagement.
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Increases in problematic behavior.
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Decreasing performance due to a lack of clarity and shared purpose.
Sound familiar? These same things happen in our homes and schools when we avoid doing the hard work of communicating effectively. And Brown offers a clear way of thinking to ensure we’re doing just that: Clear is kind. Unclear is unkind.
The clarity isn’t just about giving someone direction; it’s also about things like being honest about how you feel, telling someone directly when they’re harming your relationship rather than whispering behind their back, or saying “no” because it’s the right answer for you even if it might hurt someone else’s feelings. In all these instances, the clarity is kind because it conveys trust that the other person can handle your truth, expectations, and needs.
The start of the school year is an opportune time for setting clear expectations in the classroom. Pictured: A few Teaching With Improvisation Fellows in Washington, DC, as they begin their year with classroom visits and support from Inspired Teaching.
What would that look like in practice as the new school year begins?
FOR PARENTS
A smooth start to the new school year requires establishing clear routines that work for everyone. So parents can sit with their children and talk about what they need in order for the morning to go smoothly, and why. And then they can enlist their children’s help in coming up with a way to meet these needs. This might sound like, “Mom has to get to the office by 8 AM every day. You have to be dressed, fed, and get to the bus stop by 7:30 in order for me to have enough time to get to work. We really struggled with this last year. What can we do differently this year to stay on track?”
FOR TEACHERS
Much anxiety can be eased when everyone in the classroom understands each other’s needs and expectations. So teachers can be clear with students about what they need right out of the gate in order to be successful in their role as Instigators of Thought. Then, their students can create a Classroom Constitution so they set the expectations for both their teacher and one another in order to meet everyone’s needs. With the Constitution in place, they can also hold one another accountable to its tenets.
FOR STUDENTS
One of the big struggles at the start of the school year is getting to know teachers, and for teachers to get to know their students. Students can bring clarity to that process when they create operating instructions for themselves, articulating what they need in order to thrive as learners. These operating instructions can accelerate the learning curve for their teachers and provide a helpful resource for problem-solving when things go wrong.
FOR ADMINISTRATORS
A new school year often comes with mandates from the District, and new initiatives that must be put into place across the school. When these changes aren’t communicated thoughtfully, they can quickly become a source of frustration. But if School Leaders clearly and succinctly communicate their vision to their staff, that lays a strong foundation for enlisting their colleagues’ help in figuring out how to put that vision into action. In this way, they can adopt a “with” not, “to, or for” approach with their teams, which increases buy-in and shared responsibility.
No matter where you are in relation to school, adopting a “clear is kind” approach in your daily life has huge benefits.
I’ll close with an example:
A few weeks ago, I was having a bad day, but I was pretending I wasn’t. I was trying to spare my teenage son my complicated feelings, and instead, banging around the house like a trapped hornet, just daring any living thing to get in the way of my discontent. It wasn’t going so well. But “clear is kind” is the rule in our home.
And so my son asked me to tell him what was wrong. And I wanted to say, “nothing,” but instead I explained that I was feeling sad because (were I still married) this would have been my 20th wedding anniversary. “Oh, Mom,” he said, “I can see why that would make you feel bad, and I really appreciate you telling me about it. Do you need anything?”
It’s taken us a few of these fleeting teenage years to teach each other how to be that direct. But this simple idea that “clear is kind” has pushed us both to think before we speak and to be more considerate of one another in our actions.
Starting the school year with this mindset will strengthen your communication and your community. Give it a try!
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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.
