September 29, 2025

By Jenna Fournel, Chief Curiosity Officer

Listen to this week’s Hooray For Monday podcast to hear Jenna’s conversation with Cathy Fleischer, author of Everyday Advocacy, on the role teachers can—and should—play in effecting change in education.

A few weeks ago, I attended parent night at my son’s high school, and I was struck by the apologetic way his AP Literature teacher explained what parents could do if they wanted their child to opt out of reading Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. The teacher then went through other books she was looking forward to teaching this year, “if they get approved.” It was the first time I’d seen what it looks like from the parent-side when a teacher is anticipating blowback about her text selection.

Teachers are responsible for growing the minds of our society. It’s an enormous task. And then we complicate it by doubting—and making them doubt—their capacity to do this vital work. That doubt is reaching crisis levels in many places and causing teachers to flee the profession, and many potential teachers to choose a different path.

But it doesn’t have to be this way. Every teacher can have the agency to take the reins of what’s happening in their schools and start to do something about it. But they need tools to make that happen. This week’s Hooray for Monday guest, Cathy Fleischer, Professor Emerita from Eastern Michigan University, explains a set of tools she’s created in collaboration with educators from across the country called Everyday Advocacy designed to do just that.

Through a wide variety of web-based resources, teachers can use the Everyday Advocacy website to walk through a step-by-step process to create change. A core component of the toolkit is a focus on how the stories we tell and share shape public perception. If we can shape public perception, we can shape public support.

Listen to today’s podcast to learn more about organizer and educator Marshall Ganz’s work around public narrative: “the means by which an issue comes to be understood in a community.” And hear how one teacher used this framework at a curriculum night to get parents engaged with her approach to teaching writing.

Next week we’ll dive into the rest of my conversation with Cathy, in which she explains the core principles of Everyday Advocacy that make it possible for educators to work within the system even as they seek to change it: making the effort Smart, Safe, Savvy, and Sustainable!

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.

Listen to This Week’s Episode of Hooray For Monday