December 7, 2015
(Photo credit: Sammy Magnuson/Center for Inspired Teaching)
On December 7, Center for Inspired Teaching opened the Catalogue for Philanthropy’s annual Inspiration to Action event, engaging the audience of philanthropists and community leaders in an interactive math activity that highlighted the radical difference between the conventional school experience and the Inspired Teaching school experience.
After an introduction by Leon Harris, award-winning ABC7/WJLA-TV anchor, Inspired Teaching staff asked the audience to be part of two different scenes that showcased how these different models of instruction look and feel for learners. In the first, conventional scene, the audience sat still and quiet and passively received a formula to memorize and blindly follow; in the Inspired Teaching scene, however, the audience was fully engaged physically as well as intellectually as they wrestled with difficult questions about the multiplication process and the underlying mathematical concepts: What does it really mean to multiply fractions? What happens when we take a fraction of a fraction of a whole? When and how does this apply to real life?
These scenes pushed the audience to reflect on how learning changes when teachers ask students to do more than memorize a quick trick. As the Inspired Teaching scene demonstrated, a classroom engaged in deeper learning isn’t silent and neat; it can appear messy and complicated and is a place where students’ initial confusion and curiosity are understood to be key parts of their journey to build independent understanding.
Learn more about Inspired Teaching, our instructional model, and our work teaching teachers across DC and other cities how to get their students engaged and excited about learning. Help spread the word, and support Inspired Teachers everywhere as they build a better school experience for students.