Teacher Lessons & Activities
A collection of lessons and activities from Inspired Teaching to foster authentically engaging learning with students and deepen teachers' understanding of their role in the classroom.
Whether you teach early childhood or calculus, these award-winning lessons and activities—informed by 30 years of work with thousands of educators—authentically engage, spark curiosity, build community, and support academic success in your classroom. The self-led teacher assessment tools challenge you to shift your role from deliverer of information to Instigator of Thought, providing small steps with big payoff for reinvigorating your practice and rediscovering your why.
Yes. But… vs. Yes! And…
As teachers, embracing an improvisational mindset can help us think creatively about problems, and building this kind of thinking in our students can do the same for them. This activity is a good place to start.
Listening With Someone Else’s Ears
This activity invites students to step into the role of someone (or something!) else, imagine what they would say, and listen to what those around that person are saying too.
Zoom Out
Considering the size of our problems in the relation to a bigger context can help us understand the nature of the issue better, and sometimes even make the problem seem less huge.
Seven Bikes
This activity combines observation and inquiry as learners exercise their imaginations to find multiple answers to the same question.
Automatic Writing
One way to stimulate our imaginations is to relax and let our minds flow uninterrupted. Automatic writing gives our minds the space to do just that.
What would make you look forward to coming to school?
From a very young age, children know what interests them. This activity invited the possibility that this wisdom could drive our instruction.
10 Things You Can do With Soap
We’re all using soap to wash our hands more than usual, what else can you do with that slippery bubbly substance?
Sometimes
Sometimes one person can have lots and lots of feelings — different from each other. This activity encourages students to explore that experience.
Inside/Outside
In a moment where the world is especially fraught with change and uncertainty, we are all struggling to observe, name, and adjust to the flood of feelings around and within us. This activity was created in response to that reality.
Story as Witnessing: Creating Oral Histories During the Covid-19 Epidemic
How are you preserving the stories that document this unprecedented time in modern world history?
Plan a Trip
In this activity, students plan a trip from start to finish including where they wish to go and what they wish to see when they go there.
Document History with First Person Accounts
Some of the most interesting and useful artifacts from history are the first-person accounts we find in journals and interviews.
