Making School Worth It: Hooray for Monday - Center for Inspired Teaching

March 15, 2021

By Aleta Margolis, Founder and President, 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.

As many of us head back into the in-person classroom in the coming weeks, we face stresses we’ve never had to deal with before: the challenge of concurrent teaching, engaging both remote and in-person students simultaneously; the stress of keeping ourselves and our students safe from a disease; the pressure of learning and following complex new safety protocols; and more. It’s difficult to apply creative thinking while operating in survival mode. But even within these constraints, we know a return to the old normal will not work. (Was it really working then?) So, how can we make school worth it in this new reality?

Here are six concrete actions school leaders and teachers can take to make school a place where students and teachers can thrive in this uniquely important moment:

1. Collect meaningful data.

Learning loss is real, but it shouldn’t get all the airtime. If we focus solely on making up for things lost, we ignore the meaningful learning students and teachers have engaged in this year, and we lose out on the opportunity to build on the creativity and capacity for growth that students and teachers have shown. Before we set academic goals, we need to gather information about what our students have experienced this past year. This includes students who have thrived during online learning (How did you set up your home learning environment? What do you know now about yourself as a learner?) as well as those who have struggled (What do you need in order to feel comfortable and confident as a learner? What advice do you have for me, your teacher, to help me support you best?). A commitment to collecting meaningful data is even more critical for students who have experienced the loss of a loved one and other trauma during this difficult year.

2. Prioritize relationship building.

Pre-pandemic, we understood the importance of building relationships in school – co-creating classroom and school expectations, putting routines and rituals in place, and building with our students a safe and engaging learning environment. As we re-enter the school building, it will be more important than ever to devote time to remodeling that learning environment together with students. Some students will be delighted to see their friends, some will be tentative and afraid. Some students, especially those who have transitioned from elementary to middle school or middle to high school, may be seeing the faces of their classmates (vs. black zoom squares) for the very first time. The same is true for teachers.

Making deliberate choices to create opportunities for students to claim the classroom space and get to know one another in new ways will go a long way in setting everyone up for success. And it will also be important to stay connected to the parents and guardians whose living rooms and kitchens have been classrooms for the past year. Scribe’s Record is a great way to put students in charge of capturing each day’s learning in a format that can be shared with families.

3. Support student agency.

At Inspired Teaching, we meet every other week with dozens of high school students for Speak Truth – a student-led seminar in which young people discuss and debate current issues of their choice. Recent topics have included reforming the police force, voter suppression, cancel culture, and colorism. Our students attend public, charter, and independent high schools across the region. Most have been fully remote. They miss their friends and their teachers. However, students consistently tell us they’ve grown so much during this year – independent of school. They’ve pursued issues of interest via Speak Truth, social media, chat groups, and their own curiosity, and have become experts in their own personal curricula because they have the time and flexibility to follow their own intellectual curiosity.

If school is going to feel relevant at all for young people, students will need to be in the driver’s seat. Thoughtful students will demand the opportunity to continue to learn with the flexibility and freedom they’ve experienced this past year. And we need to be wise enough to listen to them.

4. Teach critical media literacy.

While it’s important to avoid overwhelming students with the barrage of news we’ve all been navigating during this time of pandemic and racial reckoning, it’s also critical to be alert and responsive to the things we are reading about, watching, listening to, and experiencing. In-person schooling will likely offer a break from screen time and may reduce the onslaught of information that has been at students’ fingertips. Actual facetime with your students can offer a great opportunity to them to process what they’ve been watching, reading, hearing. Teach them to find reliable sources, to distinguish between real news and fake. Help them stand in a place of power by teaching them to create their own news show. While it is important to keep discussions about news we find online developmentally appropriate, helping students discern fact from fiction and propaganda from useful information is essential to their development as engaged citizens in a democracy.

5. Listen!

Proactively soliciting student feedback is a vital way of validating the lived experience of the young people in our care. Creating regular spaces in our day to really hear what our students are feeling, learning, appreciating, and needing reminds them that their voices and their experience are respected and valued. Active listening can take a variety of forms, ranging from informal daily check-ins to instituting a student advisory committee to provide feedback to adults on what is and isn’t working.

6. Take care of yourself.

Remember the rule of the airplane oxygen mask: you can’t help others if you haven’t secured yours first. Educate yourself about what you need to stay healthy in your school. Build time into each week when you will turn off your school focus and do things to take care of yourself – like taking a walk, making a meal from scratch, watching a favorite TV show – hold that time sacred!

And find time to dream of a better tomorrow with like-minded colleagues. It’s good for your brain to spend time thinking about what’s possible, and it’s even better to equip yourself with strategies to make school joyful and productive for yourself and your students. You can do all of this at our 100% interactive March Inspired Teaching Institutes, which begin this week! Sign up for one or both of these free, virtual sessions, 3/20 and 3/24!

Wishing you a good week – and hope to see you soon!

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.