December 1, 2025
By Aleta Margolis, Founder and President
Listen to this week’s Hooray For Monday podcast for the audio version of this newsletter.
Members of the Inspired Teaching team sporting our Be Curious gear.
As longtime members of the Hooray For Monday community know, we started 2025 with an ambitious goal: To make curiosity the word of the year. In January, Center for Inspired Teaching launched our Curiosity Challenge.
Eleven months and 47 weeks of Challenges later, we have a lot to show…
- At the beginning of 2025, before we launched our Challenge, “Curiosity” was an average search term in the United States per Google Trends, with a score of 58. Throughout the year, we’ve watched its popularity climb, peaking at 100 (the highest possible) in the first week of November—the same week in which we began a month of promoting curiosity to strengthen media literacy!
- School leaders and classroom teachers across the DC region, around the US, and around the world are fueling their students’ curiosity via conversations about politics, studies of different cultural traditions, and even some explorations of the ubiquitous “6 7”.
- Leading publications and education changemakers are highlighting curiosity. From the Discovery Channel’s Curiosity Weekly podcast to popular food writer Samin Nosrat’s latest book inspired by the exploration of awe (a synonym for curiosity) to Scott Shigeoka’s Bridging Differences Playbook at Berkeley’s Greater Good Science Center, curiosity is taking center stage.
- Many of our partners here in the DC region are joining forces with Inspired Teaching to spark curiosity in our students. Thrive DC, Girls on the Run DC, and Life Pieces to Masterpieces joined recent sessions of Speak Truth to support students in using curiosity and critical thinking to develop solutions to some of society’s most pressing issues, including viral social media phrases, how gender expectations show up in our culture, housing insecurity and the economic crisis, and the government shutdown.
I’m proud of this progress. And I know many of you—the teachers, parents, and school leaders in our Hooray For Monday community—are the reason for this success to date.
And, there is much work still to do.
Center for Inspired Teaching used a simple display board and Post-It notes to spark curiosity among attendees at the Spur Local Changemakers event in November.
Division in the United States remains a huge threat to our democracy. AI is showing up in classrooms across the country, often without a thoughtful plan for implementation. And statistics show teachers and school leaders everywhere are struggling to keep students engaged.
As I’ve described in recent issues, curiosity bridges divides among us, enables us to implement AI productively, and fuels student engagement.
Teachers and school leaders, this means fueling curiosity should be high on your priority list. Meeting this priority is pretty straightforward:
Teachers: ask your students, every day, “What are you curious about?”
School leaders: ask your teachers, every day, “What are you curious about?”
Why invest time every day in answering this question? Because curiosity is a muscle. When we exercise it, it grows; when we neglect it, it atrophies. Curiosity fuels engagement and diminishes apathy. When we expect learners (of all ages!) to build their curiosity muscle, to be curious, we are holding one another to high expectations and fueling authentic learning.
Asking “What are you curious about?” can be a quick exercise, and it can take a number of forms:
- A quick check-in, for instance during morning meeting
- A bulletin board or white board in a classroom, hallway, or faculty lounge with handwritten sticky notes (as our team created at a recent citywide event here in DC)
- An interactive whiteboard or other digital display
- Individual student devices
- An exit ticket at the end of class, noting students can select something related to class content and/or something else that sparks their curiosity
It’s enough simply to ask the question. But if you want to go further, teachers, you can fuel your own teaching by challenging yourself to incorporate some of the things your students are curious about into your lessons. And school leaders, you can do the same as you design professional learning for your teachers.
Being curious isn’t just a good idea. It’s an imperative—for our schools, our communities, and our country.
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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.
