July 7, 2025
By Aleta Margolis, Founder and President
Listen to this week’s Hooray For Monday podcast for the audio version of this newsletter.
Over Inspired Teaching’s 30 years, we’ve had the opportunity to get to know and work with many individuals and organizations who share our mission of transforming schools. Back in 2018, Inspired Teaching collaborated with the Astra Foundation to undertake a study to determine what really makes a school engaging. For that project, we traveled to excellent schools across the country—schools like City Neighbors Hamilton, which is operated by the Baltimore nonprofit City Neighbors Foundation. We observed their student-centered curriculum in action, including a math class that integrated issues of social justice into the lesson.
I was delighted to have an opportunity to reconnect with City Neighbors as a recent guest on their Flip-Ed podcast.
I spoke with Mike Chalupa and LaShawn Gardner-Bowser, City Neighbors’ Executive Director and Educational Associate respectively, about all things Inspired Teaching—and all things engaging education.
At Inspired Teaching, we speak often of the need for teachers to be Instigators of Thought rather than deliverers of information, and it is this shift in understanding their roles in the classroom that is at the root of transformation in education. As you’ll hear in the podcast (at the button below), the “one thing I’d flip” in education is the role of the teacher. Mike and LaShawn got particularly excited about calling teachers Instigators.
To instigate is a direct action. It operates in opposition to the concept of control that is pervasive in our schools. And it’s a pivotal part of Inspired Teaching’s Observe-Plan-Instigate cycle for teachers, a structure that outlines how asking excellent questions leads to engaged, authentic learning (for students and teachers).
Listen, like, and share my conversation on the Flip-Ed podcast today!
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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.
