September 21, 2026
By Eric Hollister Williams, Communications & Marketing Advisor
Listen to the Hooray For Monday podcast.
Fun can seem like a classroom detour, something saved until after the learning, if there’s time. But fun is a human need – and it’s the bonus letter F (for Fun) in the ABCDEs of Learner Needs.
At Inspired Teaching, we define fun as doing something, with or without a goal in mind because you enjoy doing it. In this week’s Hooray for Monday episode, I speak with Adia Coleman and Christian Miskell, teachers at Capitol Hill Day School in Washington, DC.
Fun isn’t a detour. It’s the door and the work.
What stands out about Adia as a teacher is that it’s never about her. She leads recess lineups with enough energy to make the whole line feel like an event. An annual trip to NYC is a rite of passage, one students look forward to for years. None of it is engineered to be fun. It’s simply how she builds a room that belongs to everyone. Or in a word: community.
“Classroom is not about me and my comfort level,” Adia said. “It’s about everybody as a community, and everybody being comfortable in the community. That’s why joy and engagement [are] important, because it builds community.”
It’s really about how she shares experiences with her students. When Adia’s students learn about Ghana, they write to pen pals about food and traditions, then wait for replies. There’s no worksheet, just real correspondence half a world away.
“If I can’t take you there,” she said, “how can I bring it into the classroom?”
Curiosity drives students’ engagement, and they’re having fun along the way. They’re building something together and learning about people and culture more deeply than they might from a textbook.
Years later, Christian’s seventh and eighth graders still remember Adia’s class: the energy, the New York trip, the adventures. Fun and enjoyment made the learning stick.
Christian put it simply: “It might not be fun right now, but when you look back on it, five, six months later, you might be like, wow, I did that thing. I accomplished that thing. That was fun.”
One thing to consider this week
Let one part of something on your plan be goalless. Give students something interesting to do, with no rubric waiting at the end.
See what comes back. You may find that community, engagement, and lasting learning are exactly what show up.
2026 ABCDE Resource of the Week
Growing Fun From the Ordinary
Not everything we learn will feel fun from the outset. But with some creative thinking, a topic that starts out as a challenge can become something joyful. This week’s activity sheets invite students to do that thinking with you. The first asks them to name what they already have fun doing. The second puts homework, studying for a test, and learning something new into the soil, and then asks learners to imagine what might grow from each.
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.
