March 31, 2025
By Jenna Fournel, Chief Curiosity Officer
Listen to this week’s Hooray For Monday podcast to hear Inspired Teaching’s interview with Mary Brown and Aikta Suri from Life Pieces to Masterpieces.
How do you react when:
- A bee enters your classroom
- A horrific news update flashes on your phone screen
- You find yourself in the middle of a conflict
- You feel so angry you might explode
Every day we are inundated with unexpected challenges, information, situations, and interactions–all of which test our capacity to cope with the unknown. This feels especially true right now. And we can feel quite helpless as teachers, trying to navigate a hundred things that we didn’t ask for, ushering our students through a school day they didn’t ask for either.
Then, there is the added pressure of serving as role models for our students – and recognizing that everything we do models for our students how they, too, might cope with the unknown. But what if we could get good at wading through this uncertainty? What if we could become cultivators of peace, calm, and even hope?
Today’s interview features two extraordinary educators from Life Pieces To Masterpieces, Mary Brown and Aikta Suri, who believe wholeheartedly that we can become such cultivators. It just takes practice.
Please treat yourself to listening to the full interview. Mary and Aikta offer helpful frameworks for dealing with challenging behaviors and even a guided meditation that will leave you wanting more.
Here are 4 big ideas from Mary and Aikta that just might help you jump into this new week:
- Don’t “imbibe the stress.” We can’t control the situations around us, but we do get to make choices about how much we let into the inner sanctuary of our lives. Mary explains, “It’s so important as educators for us to not necessarily imbibe the negativity, to drink and to say, I am the stress. Rather, we can look at it, uncover it… and try to understand what we’re feeling, and why we’re feeling it.”
- Get curious about your triggers. Rather than trying to avoid the situations, interactions, or even challenges with students that make us uncomfortable, Mary and Aikta suggest observing them more closely to see what we can learn. Sometimes that fight or flight response emerges because the situation hits close to home. Sometimes the students we struggle with most remind us of aspects of ourselves that we don’t enjoy. Aikta offered this shift in thinking: “If you’re triggering me, there’s an opportunity for growth for me in that.”
- Practice mindfulness. Taking just 5 minutes in the morning to pay attention to what is going on inside, how we are feeling, and how we wish to show up for others, can create a real shift in our approach to the day. In today’s podcast, Aikta walks us through a Lovingkindness Meditation practice that can be quite transformative.
- Remind yourself of your “why.” Reawaken your curiosity about where that why came from and how you can keep it at the center of your practice. Nobody can take that away from you. At Life Pieces To Masterpieces, a mantra students often repeat is: “When we are awakened to a sense of purpose, our power is limitless.”
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.
