Hooray for Helping - Hooray for Monday

November 28, 2022

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.

Tomorrow is Giving Tuesday, a day when people around the country donate to organizations whose work they value. There are lots of organizations doing important work, and lots of ways to decide which organizations to support. One important criteria is impact.

How do you know if an organization is making an impact? This is the same kind of question we ask as teachers: how do we know our teaching is making an impact? We examine our practice and we examine student work. And we encourage our students to reflect on their accomplishments as well. Thoughtful teachers examine impact through reflection on work completed, with a vision toward work yet to be done. This is the way we at Inspired Teaching measure our impact too.

Our mission is to shift the norm away from compliance-based schooling, so that school is a place where every student – and every teacher – experiences authentic engagement and meaningful learning.

You receive Hooray for Monday every week, and that’s an important component of the work we do to achieve our mission. Today, I want to share the bigger picture, and tell you about the work Inspired Teaching has done in the past 12 months.

Over the past year we reached more than 3,600 DC area teachers and school leaders, plus an additional 5,800 educators nationwide, through our programs and resources. These include:

Monthly Institutes that address all facets of the Inspired Teaching instructional model, offered in-person, online, and through booklets teachers can access on their own time.

Standards-based lesson plans and activities designed to make learning more engaging and effective.

Guidebooks and Toolkits tailored to specific topics including student-led discussions and parenting with an Inspired Teaching approach.

Self-directed professional development activities designed to deepen your practice and enable you to build students’ motivation and achievement.

Youth programs that model Inspired Teaching in action, including Real World History – a course that puts high school students in the role of historians.

Our programs and resources are made possible thanks to the generous support of institutional grants and individual donations. This financial support enables us to offer everything to teachers for free. We believe every teacher should have access to high quality learning that promotes their growth, just as teachers provide that high quality learning for their students. So we strive to eliminate barriers to that access. This includes making our programs and resources accessible in multiple formats (virtual, in person, asynchronous) and eliminating fees for participation.

This means every donation to Center for Inspired Teaching makes a big impact! If you value what you receive each week in Hooray For Monday, and if you are able, please consider supporting us during Giving Tuesday. Donations of every size are joyfully received, and truly make a difference.

There are many organizations in the DC area, across the country, and around the world that have an important and positive impact on our lives. I hope you’re able to take time this week to support as many of those as possible.

May your week bring opportunities to reflect on the impact of your own work. We are grateful for the giving community that enables us to continue doing our work. And we’re grateful to you, our teachers, for being our reason why.

Click here to donate to Inspired Teaching.

Listen to This Issue of Hooray For Monday

InspiredTeaching · Hooray for Helping

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.