It’s been a big spring semester for students in our yearlong Real World History course!

Have we considered how limiting it might be to ask a child to choose their favorite?

How can we nurture students’ inquiry, imagination, and integrity, while maintaining a laser-like focus on growing their intellects?

Focused and specific feedback on how we positively relate to others is good for our self-esteem and encourages us to lean into our authentic selves.

Learning to listen deeply may very well be one of the most important skills we can cultivate as members of a community and one of the ways we can demonstrate our understanding of what we hear is by sharing back what was said.

Using basic observation and listening skills, this activity can serve as a catalyst for building community in the classroom and deepening understanding of how each of your students thinks.

As teachers, embracing an improvisational mindset can help us think creatively about problems, and building this kind of thinking in our students can do the same for them. This activity is a good place to start. 

The way we start a question, the context, and the tone with which we ask it all matter.

This activity invites students to step into the role of someone (or something!) else, imagine what they would say, and listen to what those around that person are saying too.

Considering the size of our problems in the relation to a bigger context can help us understand the nature of the issue better, and sometimes even make the problem seem less huge.

If our mindset is to inspire our students, we’ll start a joyful chain reaction, and the learning will continue long after the lesson ends. That’s where the 4 I’s come in.

If we allow ourselves to be curious about what our students think, we’ll not only serve them better, we’ll likely encounter more joy in our work as teachers.

In this piece, Inspired Teaching’s Aleta Margolis writes about how Inspired Teaching is being shared with broader and more varied audiences locally, nationally, and across the globe.