September 7, 2026
By Eric Hollister Williams, Communications & Marketing Advisor
Listen to the Hooray For Monday podcast.
We tend to think of engagement as something designed: the right activity, the right hook, the right amount of movement or choice. And those things matter. But this week Dr. Michelle Edwards, a former Chicago teacher, DC principal, and current Inspired Teaching board member, offers something simpler and harder to fake. She asks, “How can you engage me if you don’t know me?”
This week we’ve arrived at E in the ABCDEs of Learner Needs: Engagement. And Michelle teaches us: Know the student first. The engagement will follow.
Here’s the moment that sticks with me. Michelle described meeting a friend’s grandson for the first time, and asking him what he was working on in school. Subtraction, he said. The easy problems were fine. The larger numbers weren’t.
Most of us would say, “Let me show you how I do it.”
Michelle didn’t. She engaged her curiosity, handed him a math problem and watched him attempt to solve it.
“I didn’t go and say, well, let me show you how to do it. I watched him. And I was like, oh, okay, I see where he’s struggling.”
The move worked because it wasn’t really about subtraction. It was about finding out how this learner thinks. “It’s treating the learner like they’re the expert on how they do things and how they think,” she said. “You have to help them figure out how to articulate that as well.”
One thing to consider this week:
The next time a student is stuck, resist the urge to demonstrate first. Engage your curiosity. Ask the student to show you what they’d do, and watch. You may learn about where the gap actually is. You’ll also learn about the student’s strengths. And your students will learn that how they think is worth paying attention to.
Michelle said it well: “I have to pay attention. What is it that they’re organically moving towards? How do I support that? Versus trying to curate something for them.”
2026 ABCDE Resource of the Week
Tapping Into Interests to Ignite Learner Engagement
One surefire way to engage your learners is to tap into the things they find interesting, important, and useful in their lives. This takes some creative thinking when it comes to connecting Pokémon to math or fashion to literature, but these reflection sheets invite your students to help you imagine what’s possible. You can expand on this exploration with this full “Interesting, Important, and Useful” lesson from our archives.
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.
