March 3, 2025
By Aleta Margolis, Founder and President
Listen to this week’s Hooray For Monday podcast for the audio version of this newsletter.
This week, Inspired Teaching and thousands of organizations across the country and around the world will recognize SEL Day, an annual event highlighting the importance of social-emotional learning.
In years past, this celebration may not have warranted an issue of Hooray For Monday. Every day at Center for Inspired Teaching, and in the classrooms of every teacher we have taught, is a day for prioritizing social-emotional learning. Equipping our students with the skills they need to navigate relationships, build community, think critically, and engage in learning with their whole selves is foundational to all we do, and teach. While we never pass up an opportunity to showcase the value of SEL, we also deeply believe that it should be no more unique to “standard” education than math, history, reading, or science. In fact, SEL is math, history, reading, and science.
But this year it is clear that taking a stand in recognition of SEL is necessary. Between the troubling results of the recent NAEP report card and the forces that push for teaching students what to think, instead of how to think, our students’ ability to learn the most important lessons about themselves, one another, and the world around them is at risk. We cannot expect math and reading scores to improve, or for our young people to grow into capable leaders in the future, if they are not given the opportunity to be curious, compassionate, critical thinkers today.
With that, I commend the organizations, like Washington, DC’s Office of the State Superintendent of Education (OSSE), facing this moment with full-throated support of social-emotional learning. I encourage everyone who is reading this to do the same.
Inspired Teaching will continue to champion the power of curiosity and transform the school experience from compliance-based to engagement-based, as we have for three decades. Included in the resource section of this email you’ll find activities and strategies for strengthening SEL instruction in your classroom, home, or community — this week and in the weeks to come.
May the days ahead be filled with opportunities to grow, teach, and learn.
For additional insights, resources, and information on Inspired Teaching teacher and youth programming, subscribe to the Hooray For Monday newsletter!
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.
