Guidebooks & Toolkits
The Inspired Teaching resources teachers need, all in one place.
Inspired Teaching resources are invaluable tools for creating classrooms where students are genuinely engaged in and excited about their education. The Inspired Teaching guidebooks and toolkits assist teachers and school leaders in implementing these lessons, activities, and programs. Whether you are looking for resources to address specific topics in your classroom or want to bring Speak Truth to your students, you’ll find the strategies and insights you need below!
Join Inspired Teaching in making 2025 a year full of curiosity.
Sign up for the Curiosity Challenge today! Throughout the year, Inspired Teaching will share exclusive interviews, prompts, and tools to support exploring and understanding new things about yourself, your community, and the wider world. Help us make Curiosity Word of the Year in 2025!
The ABCDE of Learner Needs Guidebook
Whether you are an administrator, teacher, student, or caregiver, we all need Autonomy, Belonging, Competence, Developmental Appropriateness, Engagement, and Fun in order to learn and thrive. We CAN meet these needs in schools and we don’t need to go to extreme measures to do so. This Guidebook includes links to classroom activities, printable reflection and planning sheets, posters for your classroom walls, and a whole section designed to be shared with families.
Early Childhood ABCDE of Learner Needs Guidebook
This resource contains the same concepts as our original ABCDE of Learner Needs Guidebook but the examples, research, and activities included are tailored to the early childhood experience. Please share this guide with any early childhood educators in your life and let us know how you use it.
This resource is made possible through the generous support of the PNC Foundation.
Speak Truth Guidebook
Young people care about issues affecting them and the world around them. Their concerns don’t always line up with the curriculum, and teachers don’t always have the time, tools, or resources to explore their students’ interests. Yet we know elevating youth voices is critically important not only for students’ well-being, but for their development as problem-solvers and future leaders. The Speak Truth model presented in this Guide offers a way to bring meaningful student-led conversations into the classroom. Whether you host a Speak Truth session once a quarter, once a week, or every day, you will be creating a valuable space for learning where young voices and curiosity can grow.
Inspired Teaching Institute Resources
Inspired Teaching Institutes are FREE, improvisation-based professional development for teachers and school leaders. They move participants beyond passive professional learning: Inspired Teaching teaches the way people learn best – with our whole selves. All Institutes, both in-person and online, are fully interactive. Participating in an Institute is proven to reinvigorate your passion for and commitment to teaching.
We also provide participants with all the strategies, exercises, and tools needed to implement the Institute’s focus in their classrooms, right away. Now, those resources are available to everyone! If you’re unable to attend an Institute, or want to discover resources from past sessions, you can check them out at the link below.
Inspired Breathing for Inspired Teaching
Created following an Inspired Teaching breath workshop, co-facilitated by Catherine Dahlman, an Ayurvedic yogi, neuromuscular therapist, and breathwork expert, the Inspired Breathing for Inspired Teaching guidebook offers exercises for identifying and exploring your needs, as well as resources for reflection. It’s a wonderful tool for [re]centering yourself and your practice!
To Share with Parents
As teachers, we have a whole toolkit of ways to deal with the challenges that arise in a typical day with a child. Most parents do not. Until now! Share our Resilient Summer Handbook, which is filled with many of the same activities and lessons Inspired Teachers use — updated with parents in mind. Creating a common language with parents for how we strengthen relationships with children and what we expect them to know and be able to do paves the way for better partnerships with families when school resumes.
Resilient Children Handbook
For more than 27 years, Inspired Teaching has been working with teachers and school leaders to create classrooms where children thrive. Now, we’re helping parents bring this approach into their home. The Resilient Children Handbook has short articles and activities parents can put to use in strengthening their relationship with their child, engaging them in meaningful tasks to help them build independence, focus, and perseverance, and setting expectations for open communication and mutual respect.
As we sit in our bedrooms and basements this week peering into our screens, preparing to greet the young faces who will soon peer back at us, we will create, we will learn, and we will grow, just as we always have.
