Gratitude | Hooray for Monday

January 16, 2023

By Aleta Margolis, Founder and President of Center for Inspired Teaching

Hooray for Monday is a weekly blog filled with questions, ideas, reflections, and actions we can all take to remodel the school experience for students.

You can now listen to Hooray for Monday on Spotify! Check out our podcast here.

Martin Luther King Jr. Day has become synonymous with service, action, and reflection on the role we all play as citizens and communities in helping make the world a better place. The work of Inspired Teaching is driven by the belief that all children deserve a school experience that nurtures their curiosity and engages them in reaching their full potential. We invest in teachers to achieve that vision. And that work requires the service and action of an amazing community of colleagues, some of whom I’d like to introduce you to today. Their contributions are evident in Hooray for Monday and in the other programs we run.

I am grateful for this team:

Maria Salciccioli, our research specialist, leads us in asking, “How are our programs impacting teachers and their students?” “How can we gather more insights from our teachers in order to strengthen our programs?” and other thoughtful questions about what teachers and students need, and how well we are meeting those needs. Like any social change organization, we want to know what kind of impact we are having. Maria helps us craft the questions, surveys, focus groups, data collection protocols, and studies that reveal how well we are doing, and push us toward continuous improvement. All of that data informs what we share with you each week.

Michelle Welk makes our toolkits, guidebooks, programming, and resources clearer, stronger, and easier to access. She’s been instrumental in helping us adapt our materials (print, video, audio) to evolving preferences in how teachers seek professional learning. This includes serving as producer for the Hooray for Monday podcast. Michelle is remodeling our website with new features like this interactive introduction to the Inspired Teaching instructional model, in order to make our materials more accessible to teachers who are working to bring this instructional approach to their classrooms and schools.

Cosby Hunt launched our youth programs years ago so they could serve as models of Inspired Teaching in action. He leads Real World History, our student-driven honors level course for high schoolers that teaches history through inquiry.

Cosby continues to lead our youth programming today, along with Max Peterson, a historian who specializes in oral history work. Our youth programming provides great opportunities for local students, and a wealth of insights into student experiences that inform the content we include in Hooray for Monday.

Jaqueta Abbey provides technical support for our youth programs and teacher programs. This includes everything from managing relationships with school administrators to gathering insights from our teacher Institutes. Jaqueta compiles resource booklets from each Institute (for example: Games that Build Student Expertise), which we share with hundreds of teachers in the DC region, and many more across the country.

Christine Sheridan ensures all our databases, platforms, and systems are in place so Hooray For Monday can find its way to your inbox each week, and all our other programs have what they need to run. Christine also writes the grant proposals that inspire our funding partners to invest in Inspired Teaching, and enable us to provide these resources free of charge.

Jenna Fournel designs and runs our monthly Institutes, our Speak Truth Fellowship program, and a number of other professional learning initiatives for teachers. She also serves as the design and production editor for each week’s Hooray For Monday, and co-authors many of them with me, including this one! Jenna solicits input from teachers of all grades and subject areas to create our resources. In her role and in collaboration with our whole team, she also helps chart the organization’s strategic direction.

It takes a lot of people to create and sustain a movement. And Hooray For Monday is part of Inspired Teaching’s movement to create a radical shift in the school experience for every child, away from compliance and toward engaging, curiosity-based learning. You are part of this movement too. Your ideas and input, priorities and needs, and the artifacts and findings you share with us, shape the work we do.

In his 1963 March on Washington speech, Dr. King spoke of the “fierce urgency of now” and said, “this is a time for vigorous and positive action.” Today I am thinking with gratitude about how my colleagues demonstrate that action. I wish you a week filled with the same.

Download Our New Booklet

A square, spiral-bound notebook with a colorful cover that reads "Hooray for 2023" Inspiration for the Year Ahead

Play helps us learn better; but play can feel at odds with all we have to “get through” in our curriculum. This booklet comes from our January Institutes where we explored how play and instruction can go hand-in-hand, while building student expertise. When, for example, students are tasked with working collaboratively and using their bodies to demonstrate a math concept, they must rely on what they know and understand to accomplish that task. Centering their knowledge in this way builds confidence and it’s also fun! Check out the booklet here.

Listen to This Issue of Hooray For Monday

InspiredTeaching · January 16, 2023: Gratitude

Micaiah Anderson

Community Outreach Specialist

As a Community Outreach Specialist, Micaiah is responsible for program promotion and outreach support for Inspired Teaching events and workshops. Micaiah has a passion for collaborating with community members to build-power and connect. She is an educator with a heart for youth and has experience supporting students fight injustices within their schools and communities. She has a BA in Political Science from, the real HU, Hampton University & anticipates graduating in May 2024 with a Masters of Arts degree in Educational Policy Transformation from Georgetown University.

AUTONOMY

"I want to have a say in what happens to me."

Autonomy is the need for independence; the ability to make choices, to create, to explore, and to express oneself freely; to have sufficient space, to move around, and to feel unrestricted with opportunities to exercise free will.

Brady Maiden

Outreach Coordinator

As the Outreach Coordinator, Brady helps maintain Inspired Teaching’s social media presence and supports the organization’s mission to connect with DC community leaders, educators, and parents. Brady has her Master’s in Public Policy from George Mason University and her BS in Political Science from Northern Arizona University. She is passionate about community, equity, and coalition building recognizing that learning and growing with the community at large is how we continue to be impactful.

What brings you joy in life?

I find joy in spending time with my friends and family and meeting new people. I like going to concerts and festivals, and finding new books to read.

The Learner’s Cycle, Wonder-Experiment-Learn, and the Teacher’s Cycle, Observe-Plan-Instigate, comprise Inspired Teaching’s approach to engaging students in inquiry-based learning.

When they are engaged in the Wonder-Experiment-Learn Cycle, students are immersed in learning. They take the lead in designing authentic learning experiences around their own interests and their school’s standards of learning. Each discovery leads to a new question which in turn leads to more wondering and more learning. In the Wonder-Experiment-Learn Cycle, Learn is not a destination or an endpoint; it is a deeper understanding, leading to a deeper wondering and new possibilities that create new entry points to further exploration. The cycle continues because what students have learned generates more wonderings that require more experiments that foster more learning – and on and on.

The Observe-Plan-Instigate Cycle is the work of an Inspired Teacher. While a student is expected to follow the Wonder-Experiment-Learn Cycle, the teacher joins them on the learning journey while following their own cycle of Observe-Plan-Instigate. This cycle ultimately serves to ensure an inquiry-based atmosphere is at play in the classroom.

Jaqueta Abbey

Teaching and Learning Specialist

Jaqueta is the Teaching and Learning Specialist for Inspired Teaching. In addition to her current role with Inspired Teaching, Jaqueta is a first-grade teaching assistant. Her background features a variety of traditional and non-traditional experiences in the field of education, including working as an adjunct professor, teaching summer reading programs to children and adults, and tutoring children in the foster care system. Jaqueta earned a B.A. in Communication Studies from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and an M.A. in Interactive Media from Elon University.

What brings you joy in life?

Creative self-expression! In addition to my passion for storytelling, I love dancing of all kinds. I've studied belly dance, bachata, and Brazilian Zouk among other styles. I also enjoy glass fusing, crocheting, photography, and cross stitching. These art forms allow me to express myself and build connections with other people at the same time. I think life would be a lot less vibrant without artists and storytellers!

Michelle Welk

Communication & Marketing Specialist

As Communications and Marketing Specialist, Michelle is responsible for finding and creating new ways to highlight Inspired Teaching and promote its programs in order to expand and deepen the organization's impact. Michelle has worked in communications in an array of settings, from creative agencies to state politics to national nonprofits. She has a BA in Journalism from Temple University in Philadelphia and is passionate about education, access, and equity.

What brings you joy in life?

My son, the beach, making a persuasive argument and good food!

Max Peterson

Real World History Assistant Teacher

Max received his Bachelor’s degree in History and African American Studies from Boston University in May 2016. He has worked in museum curation at the Museum of the White Mountains in New Hampshire and the Smithsonian National Museum of American History. Max has worked with young people of varying ages from young children to young adults transitioning to college.

Feedback and Accountability

We grow through feedback and an understanding that the quality of our work is a reflection of what we are learning, but the shift to remote learning this spring disrupted a lot of the tools teachers were used to using to evaluate student growth. How might we do things differently this fall? Participants in this workshop will explore ways to bring meaningful assessment into the virtual and/or socially-distanced classroom and approaches to student feedback that strengthen motivation, and build relationships and achievement.