In part 1 of our Innovators, Artists & Solutions interview with Aleta Margolis who is the Founder and President of Center for Inspired Teaching in Washington, DC, we discuss the Center’s founding, its core objectives, and its evolution over the last 29 years as it has worked to inspire radical change in how we approach education and learning.

In Part 2, we discuss with Aleta many of the programs that Center for Inspired Teaching has implemented. We also explore more specifically the radical changes in the education environment that the center is working for.

Elizabeth: [00:00:00] Welcome to the Innovators, Artists, & Solutions series of Creativists in Dialogue, a podcast embracing the creative life. I’m Elizabeth Bruce.

Michael: And I’m Michael Oliver.

Elizabeth: And our guest today is longtime friend and colleague, Aleta Margolis. Aleta Margolis, a third generation Washingtonian, is the founder and president of Center for Inspired Teaching, a nonprofit that has spent nearly three decades investing in teachers as the leverage point for change in the education system. At Inspired Teaching, she helps teachers redesign their roles in the classroom and transform the learning experience through improvisation-based professional development. Instead of merely delivering a curriculum, Inspired teachers are instigators of thought who fuel students’ curiosity and innate desire to learn. Aleta is a former elementary and middle school teacher for court-involved youth, and professor of education at [00:01:00] American University. She is the creator of the award-winning Hooray for Monday article series and teaching tool and is an Ashoka Fellow committed to investing in teachers. Welcome, Aleta.

Aleta: Thanks so much, it’s wonderful to be with both of you.

Elizabeth: Yes, it’s great to have you. Aleta, Inspired Teaching’s website states, quote, “Inspired Teaching provides transformative, improvisation based, professional learning for 100% engaging, intellectually, emotionally, and physically. Our mission is to create radical change in the school experience, away from compliance and toward authentic engagement.” As you know, this podcast is entitled Innovators, Artists, & Solutions, so we’re especially keen to talk about the radical change on which Inspired Teaching was founded. So, briefly, can you talk about this embrace of radical change? What makes [00:02:00] Inspired Teaching so innovative?

Aleta: The radical change that we are seeking is for students and their teachers to love school. And I can talk about that for hours, but that’s really it in a nutshell. We expect to have school be something we get through and we plod through and, “Oh, it’s Monday we got to go to school.” And we accept that as appropriate or even necessary. So the radical change quite simply is that school should be a place we love to go to.

And the reason it’s not only radical, but also possible, is as human beings were hardwired to learn. You watch a baby, you watch a toddler, trying to touch everything, feel everything, explore everything, pick up language. Nobody is instructing that child on how to walk, how to feel, how to stand up, how to speak. But the child is eager and curious. We’re hardwired to learn. So, if school were as it should be, we would be delighted to go there every day of the week. And that’s really the radical change that we are seeking.

In terms [00:03:00] of what we do that’s innovative, it’s innovative because in a lot of ways it’s very simple. We build on the curiosity and communication that are natural parts of us as human beings. As I was saying, we’re born curious. We’re eager to connect and communicate with each other. At Inspire Teaching, we believe that ought to be the basis of what happens in school. We ought to be nurturing rather than diminishing kids’ curiosity and building their communication skills and ours.

Some other things that make Inspired Teaching innovative is that our approach doesn’t require high tech or expensive materials. It doesn’t require carving out additional instructional time. So it’s not, from 2:30 to 3 we do Inspired Teaching. It’s not a fad. It’s not a trick. It’s not a hack. It is a mindset and a practice that provides a sustainable structure for teaching that centers student voice and curiosity and autonomy. It creates classrooms based in mutual respect where children and adults benefit.

And the other thing, it’s [00:04:00] available to everyone. We’ve worked with teachers—we started out as you both know, working particularly in DC, particularly in low-income communities in schools that had very few resources. We continue to prioritize reaching the children and teachers who need us most, but we have also over the years worked with teachers and students and school leaders in Ukraine, in India, in South Africa, in very affluent schools in the US, in rural schools, in all manner of schools, because this is not, again, this is not something you have to buy. This is a mindset.

The mindset is the shift in my role as a teacher. It’s not my job to get the kids to be quiet and be on the right page on the right day. It’s my job to help young people use their minds well. And I have to credit Ted Sizer, who I borrow that phrase from. He’s the one, I know that phrase of the purpose of education is to teach kids to use their minds well. But if I think of [00:05:00] myself, as you said in the intro, as an instigator of thought, then I’m going to do my job very differently. So that’s what makes our approach unusual is that it’s just building on what we naturally have.

And I know we’ll get into this later, but we also know that as teachers we shouldn’t just teach from the neck up and our kids shouldn’t just learn from the neck up. So, we talk about our approach as being a hundred percent engaging intellectually, emotionally and physically.

Michael: Before we get into the innovative aspects, I just want to explore a little bit more about what you and possibly your colleagues experienced in the, let’s call it the traditional American education system that ultimately led you to say, we need a new approach, a better approach. There must be some stories that you can tell or share with our listeners—

Aleta: How long do we have? Yeah.

Michael: —about those experiences that said that this is, I would assume the stories might be like deadening curiosity or preventing the sort of natural inclination that you talked about. Could you [00:06:00] share some of those stories with our listeners?

Aleta: I’m happy to, and they are very much the genesis of Inspired Teaching. Many of my colleagues and friends and family have the story that you might expect, which is they were really not served by school. They really struggled. They were made to feel stupid and incredibly frustrated in school. And of course, that is a very common story that happens. That’s something we need to shift.

My story is the other side of the same coin. I was an excellent student. I was very good at doing what I was told. Very good at following the rules. Very good at looking like I knew what was going on at all times. Which is what I now call “the game of school.” So, I think about English classes where we read whatever, that I probably didn’t really understand, but I knew what the teacher wanted us to say to sound smart. I was really good at doing that. So, I got good grades. I was not a risk taker because if you take a risk, you might not be perceived as smart, if you say what you really think, because that might not be what the teacher wants to hear or [00:07:00] the answer guide is looking for.

I think as I got into middle and high school, I was actually aware of that. But I had an incredible teacher, Judy White, who was my eighth-grade speech teacher and then went on to be my drama teacher and my theater director in high school, and she is now a mentor with Inspired Teaching and I’m just so grateful to have her. She is the original Inspired teacher. She was the first one who called my bullshit. And when she would give me an activity to do, and I would check all the boxes, she knew that I wasn’t trying very hard. She knew that I wasn’t really pushing myself. She knew that I wasn’t taking a risk and venturing outside of my comfort zone. And she wasn’t satisfied.

And she was a teacher who, she still is, who almost never answers a question. She only asks them. So, if you’re struggling with something, she’ll ask you a question to challenge you to figure out your own solution. And she’s right there with you, but she’s not doing the work for you. And that experience, really, as I [00:08:00] created Inspired Teaching, I drew heavily on Judy’s teaching. It’s inquiry-based instruction, but it’s really authentic inquiry-based instruction. It is not, I have three question starters that I’m ready to prepare. It’s, I’m deeply observing my students. I see where they’re struggling. I see what they understand. I see what they haven’t gotten to yet. And I’m going to craft the just right next question to push them to the next level.

Michael: You mentioned Theodore Sizer and his Horace’s School, he actually is talking about a school where all the students are doing, the school is producing all these good grades and everything, but they’re not doing that sort of inspiring thought and risk taking.

Aleta: That’s right.

Elizabeth: Actually, I want to go a little bit further into your background because in addition to theater, as I remember you were, and probably still are, a dancer in your own creative history.

Aleta: I am.

Elizabeth: And I can’t help but [00:09:00] think that your dance experience deeply informed the core mission of Inspired Teaching. As I recall, so much of what the organization does involves teaching across the multiple intelligences and having, quote, “full body kinesthetic learning,” which is what dance does. It creates meaning through movement and the synthesis of movement with music and other spiritual or cultural content and this usually happens without words. So, can you talk a little bit more about this connection of movement, of kinesthetic learning, with Inspired Teaching’s vision and methodology?

Aleta: I would love to, and I think I’m going to pull it into two parts. There’s one that would be expected, which is things like using movement to teach math, using movement to teach pick your subject. One of our favorite activities at Inspired Teaching I developed when I taught sixth grade with my sixth graders, it’s called the math dance and basically it started with kids, but it’s much more exciting with adult teachers. Did you guys do the math dance when you—? [00:10:00]

Elizabeth: Probably.

Aleta: I bet you did.

Elizabeth: Walk us through.

Michael: We did something related to dance, I don’t know.

Aleta: There’s a lot related to dance. But the math dance is simply you’ll, we’ll divide people into groups of usually eight. That’s a nice, good round number. And then each group gets a set of criteria. If it’s geometry, we would have parallel lines, perpendicular lines, acute, obtuse, and right angles. We might have, get some fractions, half time, double time, on the rhythm, arhythmic. We might have symmetry and asymmetry, and radial symmetry, bilateral symmetry—your listeners, I’m sure, know these terms, but if not, please Google them because they are fabulous.

But so, you get some math terms. And the assignment is we’re gonna play—we usually play Wham!’s “Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go” because it has an amazing eight count beat—in the background. And you’re gonna choreograph a dance with your group where you meet all these criteria. You have to have a moment with parallel lines, you have to have a moment with perpendicular lines, you have to have a moment with a third of the group on one side of the stage and two thirds of the group on the other side, which is particularly [00:11:00] challenging if you’ve only got eight people. All of these kinds of criteria.

And when we begin the process, especially with adults, there’s generally a look of some fear and “maybe I’m in the wrong place” in people’s eyes. But what’s so beautiful about it is that within moments, people realize, oh, a right angle’s just, I’m gonna make a shape with my, put my arm out and my hand up to the sky, and I’m making a right angle, like a goal post signal with my hands. That’s, oh, that’s a right angle, that’s easy. Symmetry is just where I stand still, and asymmetry is where I wiggle around. That we realize these concepts are just part of our body. And suddenly these mathematical, abstract, and often intimidating concepts, we realize that’s how our bodies move anyway. And we’re able to feel a sense of ownership and a sense of playfulness with math. And we build on, we build that out. There’s all sorts of written assessments so that you can actually make sure the concepts are—people need to write the definition, etc. But [00:12:00] we first explore them in our bodies.

So, dance in the one hand is part of our set of activities and lessons where we deliberately require kids and teachers to use our bodies for the learning process.

The other part is much more fluid and, in some ways, more important. So often in education, the good news is these days we realize that it might not be the best to sit still for seven hours a day. That it’s still, we’re still learning that but happily there’s some research that is now catching up on the dangers of sitting too much sitting still for people of any age. And so a lot of schools are incorporating movement breaks, which is fine. In fact, they’re great.

But where we’re pushing is that movement does not just need to be a break from learning. It should be part of the learning process. So that’s where you might have a student who’s tapping their pencil on the desk and drumming all the time. That’s something that a lot of kids and adults sometimes feel the need to do. Sometimes as teachers we spend a lot of time trying to [00:13:00] get them to cut it out. That creates all sorts of power struggles and discipline issues and unhappiness on everyone’s side. So. what if that child’s job was to drum in three-four time, drum in four-four time, drum in two-four time, drum—if we could capture that and harness that. Or you have the kids again who want to be active, what if as we’re learning about perimeter, instead of, or in addition to the worksheet, we say, “Okay, you’re, Michael, you’re going to walk around this first floor of the building and see if you can estimate the perimeter of this entire level with your feet first and then with actual 12-inch feet later.” And then we talk about standard versus nonstandard units of measurement. In other words, using our bodies to deeply understand concepts.

And we believe at Inspired Teaching the body was not designed just to carry the head around. But we teach kids as if it were! Please leave your bodies out in the hall, we just want the head right now. And then we wonder why kids don’t pay attention and aren’t engaged and so, [00:14:00] we believe at Inspired Teaching the body is not it’s not like an obstacle to overcome, it’s part of the learning apparatus. And again, that’s the shift in mindset.

When you see the whole like excited, antsy, full-of-momentum child, we could do a physics lesson on momentum. What’s momentum? What’s centrifugal force? Again, if we’re observing the child and seeing the movement, we can encourage it. And I’ll add, there are a few kids who are perfectly happy and comfortable to sit still and would rather not move. I would argue those students need this kind of teaching the most. Because the kids who are for whatever reason willing to be passive and quiet and sit back and disappear, boy are those the kids the ones who need to learn that their bodies are important and are part of their learning apparatus and that their ideas matter.

Elizabeth: One of my favorite expressions is “nothing succeeds like success.” These kiddos who are the super kinesthetic bouncy kind, the [00:15:00] kid drumming on the desk all day, suddenly is in a position of taking that skill and that inclination and succeeding in a way that’s just really public and really beautiful.

Aleta: Can I tell you a story that makes me think of?

Elizabeth: Sure.

Aleta: It’s a lovely—this young man named Casey, who was in my first class of sixth graders. I taught in Skokie, Illinois back in the early, mid-‘90s, when I first started teaching. And he, on paper, he was struggling in a lot of ways as a student, and the other kids were aware of it, and as sixth graders will do, they were really unkind to him, particularly in math class. And we happened to be doing a unit partway through the year of kite making, which is something that teachers do, and that I loved to do as a way of teaching geometry and teaching aerodynamics and teaching precision. And it’s great authentic assessment because if your kite doesn’t fly, you don’t need me to grade you. You just need to figure out what to do to make your kite fly. So, the students were making kites and learning the Pythagorean theorem and doing all [00:16:00] their work. And I knew that Casey had sort of the mind of an engineer because he had fixed my tape recorder, which gives you a sense of how long ago this was. But he—and like my desk drawer had broken and he had fixed the desk drawer. And I knew that he had a strong sense of mechanics and engineering. And when it was, after the kite unit happened, the students were flying their kites, and some flew, and some didn’t and some broke and then had to be repaired right on the spot. And the kids found their way to Casey and asked his help to repair their kites. And he was able to do that, and he was the expert by leaps and bounds, including his kite. I remember, it was a very cloudy day—Skokie’s right outside of Chicago, so you can imagine the clouds and the wind—his kite flew so high that we couldn’t see it.

Elizabeth: Oh, wow.

Aleta: Which was extra—everyone else’s flew only feet from them. And it was a moment for him to shine, as you said, because he had found an opportunity to put his brilliance to use. [00:17:00] So that next time something was hard for him, it was okay because he was the genius when it came to mechanics, so it was okay if he struggled with something else. And that was a, I think, a pivotal moment for me too in knowing about teaching.

Elizabeth: That’s a great story.

Michael: So let’s launch officially then into the creation of Center for Inspired Teaching. Can you maybe walk us through the genesis story? The founding of the institution, who was involved, where, when, all those sorts of journalistic questions. Set it up for us.

Aleta: I’d love to. Yeah. So I—as you both, I think, know—I was not planning on being an educator. I was, my whole childhood and young adulthood, planning to be a professional actor and dancer and singer and performer. That was my goal. In college, I majored in theater arts, I was planning to become an actor. My first job after I graduated from college was here in Washington, DC, designing and running a playwriting program for high school students in the juvenile justice system. And for me, this was an arts gig because I [00:18:00] was teaching playwriting, which was something I knew how to do. It was run by, it was a collaboration between For Love of Children, which I still adore, and Sasha Bruce Youthwork, which I also still adore—they do extraordinary work—and a theater company that is no longer around that was wonderful, it’s called the No-Neck Monsters Theatre Company.

Elizabeth: Oh yes, I remember.

Aleta: Do you remember Gwen Wynne and Helen Patton? And “no-neck monsters” is a piece from Tennessee Williams.

Elizabeth: Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.

Aleta: Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, that’s right. Gwen and Helen hired me to come and create and run this playwriting program. And I thought, “Fabulous!” I was teaching playwriting. I was 22, my students were 17 and 18 years old. And, on the very first day, I explained the process. We did a lot of improv, and I talked about how we would create characters and build a script and build a play.

And I want to say all of my students came up to me and said, “I am functionally illiterate.” This was a phrase they knew, that they had been taught. “I am functionally illiterate,” and I said, because I had learned to ask questions, I [00:19:00] said, “What does that mean?” “It means I can’t read and write. This playwriting thing, I’m not, I can’t do it.” Being 22 and more fearless than perhaps I am now, I said, “No problem, here’s a tape recorder.” Again, back with the tape recorder, it was ‘89. “When it’s time for you to script your character, you’ll record it on a cassette, and then I will transcribe it for you. That’s how we’ll do it.” Fine.

So, the students went through the process, created this extraordinary play in which—they were interested in archaeology. I brought in an archaeologist to speak with them who ended up then becoming my husband. We knew each other before, but that was Michael.

Elizabeth: Oh, that’s another story.

Aleta: Yeah, he studied anthropology and archaeology, and he came in and talked to the students about the process of archaeology.

And they decided to set their play in Washington, DC, in the year 3000 when the city had been destroyed by drugs and greed and all the things that were destroying our city in 1989 when, as we all know, we were called the murder capital of the world, we were in the [00:20:00] middle of a crack cocaine epidemic. It was a tough time to be a young person, to be anybody, particularly a young person growing up in DC. And so, they set their play in the year 3000. The city had been destroyed. It was a mound. And they were archaeologists excavating this site, wondering what had happened back in 1989. And they found some artifacts. They found this green paper, rectangular paper, with money with they—it was money—but they found this green rectangular paper with white guys’ faces and numbers on it. They wondered what that might be. They found these little baggies of white powder. They wondered what that might be and they found these metal things with barrels and a trigger and they wondered what those might be. So, they, naturally, built a time machine, went back to 1989 and investigated what had been going on. They had also found the diary of an 18-year-old boy that talked about his life. And he had written about how someone had insulted his girlfriend and he was taking the gun with him to go and find that person. But the end [00:21:00] of the diary was gone, it had dissolved into dust, so they didn’t know what had happened.

So, they went back to find out what had happened to the boy, to find out what had happened back in 1989. And they learned about what the gun was, they learned about the money, they learned about the crack, and they found the boy’s mother. And she was bereft because she hadn’t seen him in three days. She couldn’t find him anywhere, and they said, “We’re going to help you find him.” And they searched and searched. But the student playwrights decided to end that section of the play unresolved. They never found out what happened to the boy. And they explained to me, they said, “The reason we did it that way is if he’s dead, there’s no hope. We can’t end the play like that. But if everything’s fine, that’s not real. That’s not what really happens, so we’re going to leave it unresolved.”

And then they took the time machine back to the year 3000, and in the presentation of the play at the very end of the year, they had a whole panel with family members, with members of the city council, with all sorts of city leaders, [00:22:00] about what could have been done back in 1989—it was 1990 by then—to save our city.

And so, these young people who were involved in the juvenile justice system who were really at a crossroads in their lives of, what are my options and what choices am I going to make, were these incredible change makers and problem solvers for their own community.

And, related specifically to academics, when it came time to write their scripts, I said, “Okay, give me your”—they had all recorded their lines—“Give me your cassettes. I’m going to transcribe them for you.” Every single student said, “No, these are my words. I’m doing it.” And every single student, of course they could write, they wrote their script. They wrote their lines. Because it mattered to them. It was important to them. They absolutely could read and write. Maybe not perfectly, but who cares? We went through the editing process.

And that experience said to me, what must have happened in their education, in their schooling, that convinced them that they were not readers [00:23:00] and writers, and that sort of set them on a path where they’d be involved in the juvenile justice system? And I thought, if we could change the way we teach, I’m, certainly these couple dozen young people in my program are brilliant, creative people—one of them went on to be a local hip hop artist, he was the one who wrote our music. They had built the sets. They built the costumes. The incredible creative and intellectual potential of every single young person in the program made me realize that something needed to change in what happened in school in order for their potential to be realized.

And I also realized what I had studied as an actor and actually as a director, and what Judy White had taught me, which is really just to ask good questions, pay attention, ask good questions was what good teachers did. So I decided to go get my master’s degree in teaching. I taught in public school for several years and I loved teaching all ages, but especially middle school. And my students really did great work and I loved working with my students. They responded so [00:24:00] beautifully to my crazy approaches, doing the math dance in the hallway.

But I sensed such a sense of complacency among my teaching colleagues—even the ones who, like me, were in their mid-twenties—of, some kids can learn math and some kids can’t. That’s just the way it is. Some kids are good at history, some are not. That’s okay. You just, your job is to make sure they, like, get through the class and stay out of trouble.

And I probably did blame the teachers at first, but I now understand that teachers, like all of us, we’re doing the job that we’re asked to do. And if we’re asked to keep kids quiet and out of trouble and basically on the right page, then this is what we shall do to not get fired from our jobs. But in any sense, that sense of complacency among teachers made me think, “Ok, I love teaching and to this day, what I really like to do is teach kids, but if I want to make a deeper impact, I need to work with teachers.”

And so, I came back to DC. As you know, I was on the faculty for a while at an American University. I loved that but [00:25:00] I was still the crazy one who thought we should be teaching with our whole bodies and our whole hearts and our whole minds. And so, I started doing workshops with teachers, anyone who would let me come to their school for free to do something with the teachers.

And eventually I realized that I was going to have to pay myself. I was staying at AU, but I decided I wanted to leave and be full time with Inspired Teaching, which of course was then called Center for Artistry and Teaching. We had to raise money. The way you raise money is you become a 501(c)3 and you incorporate, so you’re tax exempt. People will make donations and you can write grants. Then and now, the structure followed the mission. The mission was always, “engage teachers as changemakers to rethink our roles in the classroom.” And then the structure was, alright we’re going to form a non-profit. We’re going to form some programs in service of that mission. But it was really that opportunity to teach the young people in DC—

Michael: So it sounds like you’re, with your dance and your theater background, dance and theater are kinesthetic. They’re interpersonal. They’re performative. As a [00:26:00] theater artist myself, “Teaching as a Performance Art,” I took that when I was getting my PhD in theater, “Teaching as a Performance Art,” and in universities, I’ve always been struck by just how non-performative most professors are. Anyway, we won’t go into that now. But it sounds like your mission is to get teachers who are in a profession that is dominated by linguistic mathematical thinking and not kinesthetic, not interpersonal, not spatial, not any of these other intelligences that Howard Gardner talks about. You’re trying to get them to step out of that comfort zone and experience teaching within these other dimensions.

Aleta: That’s, yes, that’s exactly right. And we do many exercises that are explicitly designed to understand our own comfort zones and then to first, gently, and then a little more deliberately step outside of our comfort zones. First in a very safe way. You and I might argue about, chocolate versus vanilla ice cream, right? Something that’s [00:27:00] not particularly emotional. And then we move into much more meaningful, whether it’s dialogue or physical work.

Yes, in our work with teachers, we talk about stance, we talk about eye contact, we talk about nonverbal communication. Actually, we don’t talk about these things, we engage in them. And as our work with teachers, it continues to be, as it always has been, based in improvisational theater, with the idea that an improvisational actor has a clear goal and welcomes surprise, welcomes unexpected input, incorporates that input, but doesn’t lose sight of the goal. So, you don’t get derailed. If we’re going to learn about multiplying fractions, I’m not going to get derailed. But if we’re having a pizza party, I might say, “Michael, would you like two-thirds of a fourth of the pizza, or would you like two-fifths of a third of the pizza? Which is going to give you more pizza?” Right? And now, you need to know how to multiply fractions. Again, I’ve got my goal, but I’m welcoming input from the situation.

I do want to make an [00:28:00] important point as you talk about the word “performative.” Often people will say to me when I talk about using theater arts in teaching, they’ll say, “Oh, because teaching, you’re performing for an audience.” And we’ve all certainly had those amazing teachers who are hilarious. They’re standup comics. And that’s, that is its own thing. But that is decidedly not what Inspired Teaching is. Because in a conventional, like, proscenium stage situation, which we all love, I love going to the theater and I love being on stage, but that is not what Inspire Teaching is about. We are not performing to a passive, quiet audience. We are engaging with our students as partners. There’s not a performer—there’s not a giver and a recipient.

In fact, we very much—there, there’s some words that we, my wonderful colleague Monisha Karnani, introduced me to the term “bury.” We bury words that we’re choosing not to use. One of the words we bury at Inspire Teaching is “deliver.” We do not deliver a curriculum. Because the people who deliver are postal carriers, mailmen, right? They [00:29:00] deliver a letter to a mailbox that’s just sitting there waiting to receive. That is not what teachers do. Teachers engage students, they challenge students, they talk to students, they listen to students, they observe students, they teach students. We’re not performing for students. We are using our skills. As you all know, really good actors are excellent observers. We’re really good at paying attention to what’s going on and then adjusting our approach based on the observational data that we take in. So that’s what we teach.

Elizabeth: So I wanna just tary a bit on this decision, this very pivotal decision you made so early at the very beginning of the organization to be a visionary leader who zeroes in on an acute problem. So often the first step is to intervene, as you mentioned, and begin offering direct services, a more humane way of serving a target audience, be it a student group or a subset of children or adults in need. That’s the kind of conventional service delivery—there’s that [00:30:00] word again—model. But as you’ve just described, Inspired Teaching had the foresight to focus on the professional development and the transformation of teachers on, quote, “training the trainers.” Which, interestingly, is usually something that an organization gets to after they’ve been delivering this direct service for a long time.

So, can you talk about some of the difficulties of convincing both educators themselves and funders and school administrators and leadership that this was a different point of attack, to use a theater term, and what some of the, the concept of creating and seeding radical change at a sort of macro level as opposed to the tiny, child-by-child level where you can serve ultimately more people and more children by training the trainers of the children themselves?

Aleta: I love that question because it’s the social entrepreneurs dilemma. It’s really easy and [00:31:00] necessary. You talk about fundraising It’s pretty straightforward. I would never say easy, but it’s straightforward to fundraise, let’s say, for an after-school tutoring program or program that provides books for students. I don’t have to explain why students might need books. That’s very clear. And the book costs five dollars, I need five dollars to give the book to the—it’s very clear. And again, that the direct service work is critically needed. The challenge is it doesn’t, you need to do it again and again if you don’t change the underlying systemic need or the systemic issue.

The answer to your first question from my experience is, I did do the direct service when I taught, and I taught for five years, and, as I said, I loved teaching. I love teaching. I still teach teachers. And sometimes I get to work with young people as well. But I, you know the, I don’t know, I want to call it an archetype, I’m not sure that’s the right word, but the stereotype even of the maverick teacher? Like the one person who’s doing all the crazy stuff, and all the kids love it, and everyone else is, like, standing at the board, and the kids are falling [00:32:00] asleep. I was very aware early on that was not what I wanted. I didn’t want to be the one crazy teacher with the kids dancing and singing and creating—my kids would write screenplays for their novels instead of book reports. I loved that. The kids loved it. The parents loved it. My principal alternately loved and hated it. But that was, I knew that wasn’t changing anything. And in some ways, it was setting the kids up, my sixth graders in particular, so that when they went to the seventh grade class next year, they were frankly getting in trouble. Because they were asking too many questions, they weren’t sitting in their seats, and they were pain in the neck. I knew that wasn’t doing it.

That direct service would be really powerful for a very small group of people. But I wanted to, I was frustrated. You could interview my husband, the one-time archaeologist-anthropologist, about the nights of just keeping him up all night, of just being so upset and frustrated. “What am I going to do? [00:33:00] Everyone hates school and everyone thinks that’s okay. I can’t take it anymore.”

And so I, it was just really born out of incredible struggle and frustration. Joy with what happened when I got to work with young people, but struggle and frustration with, we as teachers were rewarded, just like the kids, we were rewarded when we kept our heads down and did as we were told and didn’t ask too many questions. And that’s still unfortunately the norm in many places. So, that’s where I thought if I’m not going to teach kids directly, logically, it has to be working with the teacher.

And the challenge you asked about funders, it’s a great question. Early on, boy, for several years, I had to write grants that said, I’m trying to remember the exact phrase, “it is the teacher who controls what, how, and if children learn in school.” Because I had funders saying, “We really care about kids. We care about literacy. We care about numeracy. We care about learning. [00:34:00] Why are you working with teachers? We would fund you if you ran a program for students. Why would we fund you when you’re running a program for teachers?” And I had to literally connect the dots. And then people said—now, today, in 2024, we no longer have to have that conversation. But in 1995, ‘96, when we started, nobody—I think teachers were, and sometimes unfortunately still are, largely invisible. We see kids, we see families, we see communities. But teachers, I don’t know, what do they do?

Elizabeth: Yeah, they’re grown up.

Aleta: They’re grown up and they, like, open the teacher’s guide and read the thing. We don’t—so one of the really important parts of Inspired Teaching and my own personal mission is to make the work of the teacher visible. I do think in some ways it’s like with acting. You see a great actor and people who are not immersed in the arts might say, “They must be born that way.” And what does an actor do? They learn the lines and they learn the blocking. What else is there?

Elizabeth: Right. It’s just talking.

Aleta: It’s just talking, right? But they’re really good at it. But [00:35:00] we don’t know because, of course, we haven’t studied it.

And I think, I believe that is the same in the teaching profession. What does a teacher do? If you have to teach third grade math, you just need to know third grade math and you go through the book and you say the stuff on the pages and you give the tests and you have a point system for discipline. And that’s it. What else is there?

And so, one of the things that’s so important in my work is to make visible the incredibly technical, beautiful, complex work of teaching. And to me, that is actually why I teach, because it’s the most intellectually stimulating work I know of. Because I get to wonder about how your brain works and your brain works and try to investigate and learn about that. And every single person has a different brain, so you’re never done. So, that’s really an important part of the work as well.

Michael: Whenever you’re teaching radical change or just change in general, you’re going to meet resistance. And you’ve spoken somewhat about this mindset that you’ve confronted, but when [00:36:00] you’re in a school system where, if the banking style system is working, like you mentioned, you were getting great grades when you were young. If it’s working, and if everybody is evaluating their success on the grades, why change? Why inspire this thought-provoking methodology? Why get teachers to change their approach if they are getting good grades from their—that must, there must be resistance. And so, if you could just talk a little bit about the resistance you’ve encountered and how you’ve overcome that resistance to convince people that, yes, they’re getting good grades for their students, but maybe they’d get even better thoughts and more creative engagement from their students with this other methodology.

Aleta: It’s so true. So people often ask me, “What’s the biggest obstacle you face?” And this may sound like an esoteric answer, but my answer is always, our biggest obstacle is inertia. An object at rest tends to stay at rest unless acted on by a force. An object in [00:37:00] motion stays in motion in the same way, unless acted on by a force. We are the force. And that’s hard. We’ve done it this way. It’s working. Don’t fix it if it’s not broken. One of our challenges—and it’s a joy, but it’s a challenge—at Inspired Teaching is that we are offering something to people that many people don’t think they want. We are offering a chance to completely change everything.

So, teachers come to us, teachers and principals and district leaders come to us saying, “We want a behavior chart.” “We want a an SEL, social emotional learning program.” “We want an approach to teach math.” And we can address all those from a place of agreement. So, if you want a behavior chart, why do you want the behavior chart? Because the kids are not listening, the kids are being disrespectful. We can agree that we want kids to listen and be respectful, right? But then that’s where my job is to be an instigator of thought and ask good questions and say, “Why do you want them to listen? And do you want them to listen to anybody who claims to be an authority [00:38:00] figure? Do you want them to listen indiscriminately to anyone who tells them what to do now and in the future?” Of course nobody wants that. Huh. Maybe you don’t want a behavior chart. Let’s look at the research on extrinsic versus intrinsic motivation. What would it look like to intrinsically motivate? Also, if you have a behavior chart, how much money do you have to spend on prizes? How much time do you have to spend as teachers being a traffic cop and tracking, “Elizabeth, you said, please, twice you get a token, but Michael, you didn’t say, please, you don’t get a token.” That is not a fun job, right? At least to me.

So how do we rethink what we’re looking for? Where can we start from a place of agreement? And so again, in reframing the questions, particularly around, I’ll use behavior as the example, when educators say to us, “We want to help our kids behave,” we go through a process where we can shift the question to, “We want our kids to thrive.” It’s a very different question than, how do I get my kids to follow the rules versus how do I get my kids to thrive. [00:39:00] And following the rules might be a part of thriving. We also might decide to change some of the rules along the way and involve the students in creating them if our goal is thriving.

It’s also a difference between short-term and long-term outcomes. If I want to just get you through 7th period math, and I say, as a person who personally struggled with my 7th period math class with my students, my 6th graders, that’s a fair request some days. But that’s not all we’re here to do. We don’t just want to get through seventh period math without incident. We want to set up our young people to thrive. If we can change those questions, we get engagement.

The other sort of big answer that we have today with more clarity than we’ve had in my lifetime, unfortunately, is we know our education system isn’t working because look at our country. We have, a good half of our country thinks the other half is a bunch of idiots. And they won’t talk to each—we, I will I live here, right?—we won’t talk to each other. We are convinced we [00:40:00] know and you don’t. And we are really unable to talk and listen across difference. We equate “I disagree with you” with “I hate you.” We don’t understand how to say, “Michael, tell me, I don’t think I’m going to agree with you, but I’d really like to hear what you believe and why, and what brought you to that conclusion, and I’m curious.” And then, “Can I tell you what I think and why?”

And we inherently know how to do that, but I truly believe school has taught us not to wonder, not to be curious, just to go for the right answer and the certainty. And I do believe, unintentionally, of course, but I do believe that our schooling has prepared us to look very narrowly at what’s in front of us, to be to be attracted to the things that reinforce our views—so, our echo chambers, and of course, social media is a great place for echo chambers—and to avoid viewpoints that might make us, to your point, Michael, [00:41:00] uncomfortable. “I don’t want to hear that because that makes me uncomfortable. So I’m going to not watch that reel. Not look at that. Not read that.”

And so that is why it is no longer a nice—I don’t think it ever was a nice to have, but I used to argue with people that critical thinking was a nice bonus. People would argue that point. The good news is, I think we all know that it’s not a nice to have. It is a critical need for safety for our country, and for our country to be able to thrive. That has been, that has become clear. The challenge is now helping teachers realize that—that’s a huge burden, right? But you’re not, you don’t need to solve world crises, you just need to ask your kids with questions.

Michael: That seems to have, that inability to listen to the other, the oppositional point of view and then engage in a dialogue with that oppositional point of view, it seems to have gotten worse, the ability to do that in more recent years. I felt like we were making some progress [00:42:00] 10 years ago, but it seems to have gotten worse.

Aleta: I think, yes, I agree. And there’s so many people with more expertise than I have who have views on that. But this is my view: We know we have a crisis of belonging. The CDC has, certainly related to COVID and social media, but the CDC has identified a crisis for young people and mental health crisis. And we at Inspired Teaching, our sort of entry point into that is the sense of belonging and school connectedness. And it’s been, it’s work we’ve done for 30 years, but we’re really homing in on it with this idea that, if my need for belonging as a young person, or a not young person, is unmet, I’m going to have all kinds of struggles. And this polarization really meets that need for belonging when it is not met anywhere else. Because if I can be part of “us,” then I feel really embraced by “us.” But in order for there to be “us,” we [00:43:00] have to have a “them.” So, you embrace me and that means that we can go, “Those guys are the stupid ones or the wrong ones. They’re the bad guys, we’re the good guys.” That really meets the need for belonging in a very powerful way.

And if I am a 16-year-old or a 50-year-old or any-year-old who doesn’t, who feels adrift, who feels disconnected, and you offer me a group, that we all are bound by these beliefs and we know we’re right and those guys are wrong? That’s very powerful. That’s very appealing. And it’s hard to argue with. As adults, we can say, “How could you be so foolish?” But if my need for belonging is unmet and somebody offers me the opportunity to be the part of a very passionate certain group, like, we are sure we’re right. That’s so attractive. It’s very hard to resist.

And the fact that I might be missing some nuanced point, I don’t care. Right? Like, I’m part of this group for the first time maybe for the first time in my life I found my people. They need me. I need [00:44:00] them. They care about me. I care about them. We have a common cause.

And of course, I do want to say, I am a person who believes in causes. I think that’s great. Like, I have a lot of causes myself. I know you guys do too. But that critical thinking before you jump into a us versus them to say, “Let me consider whether there might be other viewpoints.” That runs counter to the desperate need for belonging at any cost.

Elizabeth: It’s uncomfortable not to have certainty in one’s life.

Aleta: Oh, yeah. Yes.

Elizabeth: I want to ask you a little bit more about the places and with whom Inspired Teaching found its first and earliest adopters of your methodology. Part of me remembers that teachers of English as a foreign language were among the groups of educators who were open to your methodology. I may be making that up, but it seems, or conflating it with something else—but can you talk a little bit about [00:45:00] who were the teachers, who were the administrators, where did you find this early receptivity to this, as you say, this huge departure from the status quo?

Aleta: We initially, so I was 28 when I started Inspired Teaching and I thought, is anyone who’s 29 or up gonna show up for this, whatever it was that we were inventing? But we, I was delighted and surprised that we really did have teachers of a variety of people who were, 20-, 30-, 40-year veterans. We had brand new teachers. We had teachers of all different grade levels. I think we did have a preponderance of teachers of students who were learning English for sure, early on, which is probably I would imagine because if you’re teaching kids who are non-native English speakers, you are, you don’t have a comfort zone, right? You’re comfortable with the unknown, with being outside. You can’t possibly have a rigid curriculum if you’re really being mindful of the backgrounds and the experience of a very diverse student body.

But we really, [00:46:00] I think what was, our early adopters were people who were either, like, closet creatives who found their people with us and said, “I didn’t know I was allowed to sing with my high schoolers.” “I didn’t know I was allowed to deviate from the textbook and ask questions, and this is so validating.” We found those people or they found us.

And we also found people who, interestingly enough—after a few years in, ‘cause our greatest recruiting method was and continues to be word of mouth—a few years in, it was people who were maybe on the verge of being burnt out, but they had a colleague who said, “Hey, check this out.” We were then Artistry and Teaching, right? The workshop in the art of teaching. You might actually fall in love with your job again. And that was a big, I remember particularly around math, people would say, “My colleague who teaches math, you used to hate teaching math, what happened to you?” “Oh, I did the math dance, I took the Inspired Teaching program, go check it out.” So I think that was really appealing.

I [00:47:00] think the other thing that was appealing and, interestingly enough is still radical, that we do, we work with teachers in—at the time it was only public—but we worked with teachers, as we still do from all eight wards of DC. Public, charter, private schools, and now across the country and around the world. Pre-K to 12 together. And there aren’t too many places where as a high school chemistry teacher you can hang out with a pre K teacher and learn together. And so, I think that is appealing, even though it at first can feel odd to teachers, that’s really appealing because you learn about developmental progress across the life span and you learn from and with people who you think are very different, but of course you realize you have something to teach and something to learn.

Michael: Elizabeth and I took one of those early professional development programs, I still remember to this day, was with Oran Sandel.

Aleta: Yes. My mentor Oran Sandel with Living Stage Theatre.

Elizabeth: The late, the great.

Michael: And I still remember an improvisation that I did. I was playing the disruptive student, and I still [00:48:00] remember that some of the other teachers were like, “How do you deal with this disruptive student?” Anyway but this whole notion of using improvisation and basically teaching teachers the rules of improvisation. There are five Inspired Teaching rules. Can you maybe just go through some of those rules?

Aleta: Yes. So we’ve used improvisation, and I credit Oran Sandel fully for the reason we use improvisation. As you both know, the first eight years of what used to be the workshop in the art of teaching and then was rebranded the Inspire Teaching Institute, my colleagues at Inspire Teaching and I taught alongside Oran and his colleagues at Living Stage Theatre, which was the social outreach arm of Arena Stage and an amazing place that brought the creative process to people who would otherwise not have had access. Oran and I met early on and I said, “What about teachers?” And I convinced him and we worked with teachers together and it was a joyful experience. So I learned so much from Oran. So, we’ve always done improv.

In the past few years, [00:49:00] thanks to my amazing colleague, Jenna Fornell, who said, “What if we codified this into five rules instead of a hundred lead sheets on improvisation?” So, here are our five rules of Inspired Teaching improvisation. The first one is “play big.” And that’s really, we know as improvisational artists, just don’t do anything halfway, right? If you’re going to sing off key, sing loud and off key. If you’re going to make a mistake, make a big mistake. Now, again, in the safe setting of an improv. Set it, right? You’re not going to cross the street in busy traffic and make a big mistake. We believe that the classroom should be a place where the stakes are relatively low so we can learn as we go. We can play big and then say, oh, maybe I’m going to change that next time or maybe it worked just as it was. So the first one is one of them is play big.

Another one is “respect what others create.” And that is “yes, and” which is another rule, but the idea is right if you and I are in a scene and you say, “Oh, there’s a tarantula on your back.” And I say “No, there’s not.” [00:50:00] Then I’m not respecting what you create. The scene is dead and I’m blocking, not building. And there’s nothing interesting happening. In a classroom, it means you’re, you know, reading to a group of five-year-olds about a cat and someone says, “My cat ran away last night!” And if you say, “We are not talking about your cat. Have a seat.” Then we’ve just taken the air out of the tires of that child. How can we build on that? Respect what others create is the second part. And it also connects to one of our five core elements in a classroom, mutual respect. Which means that respect is not a given, it is earned both by adults and young people. And that’s very important.

So, “embrace mistakes” is another one of our five rules of improv. And the embrace mistakes, in education, now we know that mistakes are okay compared with 30 years ago, 35 years ago, when I entered the field, when we didn’t think they were okay. We know they’re okay, but in so many places, mistakes are tolerated but it would have been better if you didn’t make any mistakes. What we say to teachers, I said to my own [00:51:00] daughters, I still do, but when they were in school, “If you go through a whole day you didn’t make any mistakes, you didn’t push yourself. You didn’t step outside of your comfort zone.” And a mistake means that you took a risk. You tried something you weren’t sure you could do, and you expanded your, you learned, actually, you expanded your knowledge base. You were in your zone of proximal development as Lev Vygotsky would say. Embracing mistakes means really just learning.

“Say ‘yes, and.’” That’s, right, that’s the core, that’s the core improv rule. Say yes to whatever happens, and then build upon it.

So those are the rules of improv, of Inspired Teaching improv, but they are, they’re useful for life. And they’ve really helped our teachers.

We have a new program, which is just the latest iteration of the Inspired Teaching Institute, which the two of you took back in, I think, ‘98. But our new program is Teaching with Improv. And we have Teaching with Improv fellows who are teachers who come with us for an intensive in the summer and then they, we work with them all year long. And it is a train the trainers. [00:52:00] They learn how to teach our approach to their colleagues in their schools. So, again, it’s how we reach many more people through that train the trainers.

Tremendous thanks to all our listeners. To those of you who are free subscribers, please consider becoming paid subscribers so that Creativists in Dialogue can continue bringing you insightful conversations about creativity from Washington, DC, and beyond. Thanks.

Special shout out to Creativists in Dialogue’s production team: Audio engineer Elliot Lanes, social media manager Erin Dumas of Dumas83, and transcription editor Morgan Musselman. Thank you all.

For more information about Creativists in Dialogue, please visit creativists.substack.com or our Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn pages. To learn more about our other projects, please visit elizabethbrucedc.com or rmichaeloliver.com.

The Creativists in Dialogue podcast is supported in part by the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities and subscribers like you. The Theatre in Community podcast series is supported in part by Humanities DC. Thanks.

In Part 2 of our conversation with Aleta Margolis who is the founder and president of Center for Inspired Teaching, we discuss the many programs that the organization has developed to instigate and encourage change within our approach to education. Aleta speaks specifically about what it means to be an Inspired teacher.

Elizabeth: I want to ask you to describe for us or to elaborate on who some of your Both your core colleagues, I know Kate Keplinger, Jenna Fornell, we mentioned the late great Oran Sandel, but I want to ask you about other leadership who are either students or protégés of other great educational visionaries. You mentioned Vygotsky, you mentioned Sizer, we’ve talked about Howard Gardner. Can you talk a little bit about who and what are some of your theoretical inspirations?

Aleta: Yes, we have so many of them. One, you might not expect—you might because we’ve talked about dance—but one is Martha Graham, the consummate—the grandmother of modern dance and choreography. She has a beautiful quote about divine dissatisfaction, and that is at the core, and I’m sure we said it [00:53:00] even back in ‘98 when we worked together, when we do our, halfway through our first day with teachers, we have what’s called the opening wrap, which is a term I learned from Oren that I’m sure is came from the ‘60s but where we’ll talk about why we’re here and what we’re about. And I’ll always say to teachers, “I’m here because I think I’m a really good teacher and I want to be better. And I expect that you are here because you’re a really good teacher and you want to be better.” And then I’ll talk about Martha Graham’s divine dissatisfaction.

Sometimes we equate vulnerability with weakness. So, “I’m already good. I don’t need to learn anything. I don’t, I already know everything.” And teachers are often put in the position where we feel like we’re not allowed to acknowledge we need to grow. So Martha Graham’s idea of divine dissatisfaction is we focus on the divine, but also the what next? Great. You’re really good. What would you like to be better at? What could you, what where would you like to grow next? And that’s a really important part of our—

So many people. So Jonathan Kozol who I just had the incredible honor of interviewing for an episode of Hooray for Monday [00:54:00] a few months ago about his latest book, An End to Inequality. His work just on the vast difference between the school experience of kids living in low-income communities, of kids of color, and their white, more affluent peers. His work is so very important in influencing us. And he’s a person we get to talk to from time to time who really guides our work and so I appreciate that too.

Lisa Delpit’s work is so important, in particular, I actually want to, I’m going to share a quote from her that’s on our website that shapes our work. She says, “There are times when students, overexposed to worksheets and minimal thinking, resist being pushed to think. It is as if they have reached an agreement with their teachers. ‘Don’t ask much of me, and I won’t make any problems for you.’ Thus, the busyness of seat-work allows for the appearance of control that many schools in poor communities ask of their teachers, [00:55:00] whether any learning is occurring or not.” I can’t add to that. That’s just beautiful, her work, it’s painful and beautiful because she really makes the point that we need to rethink what we’re asking, particularly of our students in poor communities.

Debbie Meyer and Pedro Noguera, who—I was just at my 35th Brown reunion this year, and Pedro Noguera got an honorary degree, and that was an amazing thing to see. They really influence our work.

Adele Faber who wrote along with Elaine Mazlish, How To Talk So Kids Will Listen, such a beautiful approach to just listening to kids, right? And not getting in a power struggle and acknowledging and saying—I remember seeing Adele speak years ago and talking about with toddlers, but it’s as true with people of any age. The toddler wants the Cheerios. We don’t have any Cheerios in the house. And the toddler is throwing their body on the floor because they don’t have the language to say, “I’m really frustrated that I don’t get Cheerios.” And she said, “You know what you say? You say, ‘You want Cheerios. I [00:56:00] really wish we could have Cheerios. I agree. I wish we could have Cheerios. Unfortunately, we don’t have Cheerios. Here’s what we do have.’” But you acknowledge. You don’t argue. You don’t say, “Why do you need the Cheerios? You don’t even like Cheerios!” Right? Because you’re undermining their autonomy.

So many more. I think the last one I’ll share who’s so important—two more. Sir Ken Robinson, who, passed recently. Just his focus on the importance of creativity. Creativity is not a luxury. It is a skill for—he does a great job of making an economic argument for it and, which is terrific, and also just an argument of being thriving people.

And then I’ll add Viola Spolin, the grandmother of improvisation. Jenna and I took, we had a great experience when the pandemic hit and we took all of our improv-based professional development onto Zoom and thought, how are we going to do this? We had the opportunity to take an improv class with Aretha Sills, who is the granddaughter of Viola Spolin and the daughter of Paul Sills, the [00:57:00] founder of Second City. Aretha still does. She teaches online. She teaches Viola Spolin technique in person as well, but what a joy. So she is, Viola Spolin and her family are a great influence on our work.

Elizabeth: Oh, that’s a great list. Impressive. Speaking of impressive, let’s talk about how now, almost 30 years later, the organization has grown and expanded tremendously. Inspired Teaching has so many different programs and initiatives, and, oh my gosh, you’ve won so many different awards, it’s really gorgeous and wonderful. Can you talk a little bit about what some of Inspired Teaching’s innovative initiatives are? There are so many, but let’s talk about some of the core components. You’ve mentioned this, the Inspired Teaching Institute that is the—

Aleta: The Teaching with Improv Fellowship. Yeah.

Elizabeth: Yeah. And I’m just wondering if you could just elaborate on what that Institute is, some of the practical details. What it is, how it works, some of the kind [00:58:00] of logistics of that.

Aleta: Yeah, I would love to. So that, the Teaching with Improv Fellowship is a hyper-local program funded in great part by the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities for teachers who teach in DC, and we still have a few spots left for the summer, so I’m glad you’re asking me. But it’s teachers, you have to teach in DC, any school as long as you’re in DC. Pre-K to 12. And you come for a three-day intensive program all day long that’s like the institute you two experienced, where we’re learning with our whole bodies and our minds and our hearts how to rethink our practice, how to be instigators of thought, and how to incorporate improv, an improvisational mindset, and the five rules of improv, into our classrooms.

And then the teachers also learn to teach Inspired Teaching, the Inspired Teaching approach to their colleagues. They go back to their home schools. We support them during the course of the school year. We have opportunities for those teachers to co-facilitate. We do monthly Inspired Teaching mini-institutes, some online, some in-person for teachers from all over the world in the online ones. [00:59:00] And then our fellows are invited to co-teach those with us, which we love. And then they can actually ultimately become Inspired Teaching trainers. And when we go and do school partnerships, they can come with us and help teach.

So it’s a joyful way of supporting teachers who are staying in the classroom and building their skills as teacher leaders, teaching fellows, reaching their colleagues. So they learn hardcore Inspired Teaching.

We also have a new-ish initiative called “Hooray for Monday” that we started in August of 2020. And then, as we all know, in the midst of the pandemic, when we thought, how are we going to reach teachers in a way that’s meaningful? Everyone, certainly in the DC region and in much of the country, was teaching online, and it was rough. And there wasn’t a lot out there about how to teach online in a way that was engaging. So much teaching was watch a YouTube video, fill out an exit ticket, which was like three questions about the video. And that’s just because that’s all that was offered to teachers. We wanted to change that. We [01:00:00] started Hooray for Monday. Again, the name comes from the belief that we’re all hardwired to learn. If school were as it should be, kids and teachers would wake up Monday morning and say, “Hooray, I get to go to school!” Which was not what was really, was not ever what’s happened, but certainly wasn’t happening during the pandemic.

So we started Hooray for Monday as a written asynchronous professional development opportunity with a theme for each week. About a year in, we added a podcast. We’ve now been, I think we’re very close to our 200th episode, so we’ve been running it at somehow or other every Monday. It now comes out Sunday afternoons because we had school leaders say, “I want to build my week around this, so I need it Sunday.” Our initial audience was school leaders, but of course we have so many teachers subscribe.

And it’s just an opportunity to focus on a particular theme that’s an entrance way into practicing Inspired Teaching. It always contains resources, particular activities, further reading if you want, research to back it up, as well as a joyful podcast. This current [01:01:00] week’s Hooray for Monday, because it’s Memorial Day week is the, is our Inspired Teaching summer playlist. So we’ve all shared our music that inspires us. So sometimes it’s like that. Sometimes it’s very hard hitting on a particular academic issue.

We’re also running a really important program right now, as we were discussing with the division that’s going on in our country, called Speak Truth. And we’ve expanded it to be Speak Truth America. We started Speak Truth in 2015, so almost 10 years ago. My dear colleague, Cosby Hunt, who I’m sure you all know, because everybody knows Cosby. He’s like the mayor of Washington, DC. He’s a fifth generation Washingtonian, so making me seem like a relative newcomer as only a third generation Washingtonian. He started Speak Truth just about 10 years ago to bring together young people to engage in dialogue about the issues of our time, not with the goal of solving racism in an afternoon, but with the goal of talking about and listening to issues that matter to them [01:02:00] without an adult directing their conversation.

And we’ve built that out. And again, during the pandemic, we had that online had hundreds of kids at a time come to talk about every issue imaginable. We created a Speak Truth guidebook, which is available and free on our website, to help teachers who are understandably worried or a little bit afraid to teach about the big world events that are happening, because if young people have not practiced talking across difference it’s really hard to open up with a big topic, but this workbook really breaks it down, this guidebook breaks it down. And again you can start with a Speak Truth seminar on the school lunch, though I have learned that is actually not a non-controversial topic but relatively speaking it’s safer than some others. And again, the goal is not to come to consensus. It’s to learn the skill of saying, “I disagree with you” without having to say “I hate you.” And that is a really important distinction. It’s also built on the belief that curiosity is the [01:03:00] highest form of respect. All Inspired Teaching is built on that belief, but particularly Speak Truth.

And Speak Truth America is a program we’re currently building out and looking for funding partners for, where we’ll bring together teachers and students in red states and blue states around the time of the fall election to engage in dialogue. Because whatever happens with the election, we’re going to be probably more divided in November. And because half of us will have lost. Right now, we all think we might win. And so, how do we teach our young people to talk to each other with respect so that when they get to college, so that when they get into careers, they are able to keep that skill. So that’s what Speak Truth is all about, super important project.

Elizabeth: I want to just rewind the videotape and say, particularly with the Institute, back when we did it, and I think for many years going forward, because when I was at CentroNía, we sent many of our teachers there—

Aleta: We love teachers from CentroNía, yes.

Elizabeth: It was great, [01:04:00] but it did not cost the teacher or the institution, the school, anything at all. I don’t know if you’ve been able to continue that through your funding, but it took this huge barricade away and so I just wanted to reiterate that. I don’t know if that’s still the policy, but—

Aleta: Yes, it is, and it’s really, I’m glad you asked it’s really important to us because we want to reach, of course, everybody but particularly teachers who teach in schools where they couldn’t go to the PTA and say, “Give us some funding for this special program.” In fact, we provide stipends for the teachers because we’re asking their time and their professional work. That’s really important. All the resources I’ve mentioned are free and on our website. And that’s always been the case, but particularly during COVID, we went to our funding partners and said, “We want to reach teachers. Schools are spending all their money on PPE on HVAC systems, heat and air conditioning, nobody’s paying for professional development. And nobody’s really getting quality professional development.” [01:05:00] So our funding partners stepped up and helped us keep our resources free.

The only thing we charge for is we do intensive school partnerships and district partnerships and those of course have a different cost structure. But all of our core programming is free for teachers. Hooray for Monday is free. And that’s really important.

And I will say from a fundraising perspective, we’re so grateful for the support of many local and national foundations. Also, many of our funding partners are teachers who, for many years give us $25, $50 a year. And I think that actually means the most to us, right? Because it’s a teacher saying, I value Inspired Teaching for me. I want my teaching colleagues to experience it and I want to invest.

Michael: Clearly, radical change takes time. It takes a teacher who’s trying to experiment with new ideas, new approaches. It takes time. And you have something called the Inspire Teaching Fellowship and I assume that has something to do with giving teachers an [01:06:00] opportunity to develop over a period of time.

Aleta: The iteration of that right now is the Teaching with Improv Fellows, which is, we are just beginning our second year, our second cohort of that program. And indeed, they are developing because we have 27 fellows in our first cohort. In addition to the summer institute, they’ve taken train the trainers courses. Many of them are leading school wide professional development now at their home schools. Which, incidentally, I just want to add from an economic perspective, that’s a great investment. Because they already work there, right? And they’re much generally better than an outsider who doesn’t have the relationships and the trust or know the community.

Elizabeth: Exponential growth piece.

Aleta: Exactly. And we see tremendous increase in job satisfaction of teachers who work there. with us because we’d all rather like our job than not like our job. And when you’re more effective at it, you like it better. That is our current iteration of our fellowship program.

For 10 years we ran a teacher preparation program where our teachers were also teaching fellows. [01:07:00] It was a residency program. And it was an extraordinary program where a teacher spent two years with, aspiring teachers spent two years with us in coursework. We partnered with Trinity University and we placed them at our school, the Inspired Teaching Demonstration School, at Capital City, at some other, Creative Minds, those were our core partner schools, where they spent a full year working alongside a lead teacher before they became full teachers themselves.

That program has actually transitioned to the Inspired Teaching Demonstration School, and a lot of the curriculum and the approaches that undergird that program are now in use in teacher residency programs other places in the country. That’s what we want, is for it to spread.

Michael: Can you help me and our listeners visualize a teacher prior to getting involved with Inspired Teaching versus, a year later, if they’ve committed, how would they have changed? Can you maybe help us visualize them in a classroom before and after? [01:08:00]

Aleta: Yes. And I’ll do my best to actually do this through a couple of stories from some of our colleagues. The kinds of things you will see after a teacher works with Inspired Teaching tend to look like more music—and I’m talking also about high school classes, not just early childhood. More questions and fewer demands. Instead of a list of rules on that on the wall, you’ll often see a class constitution co-created by the teacher and the students together. And a class constitution is a list of rights and responsibilities with the idea that if I have the right to speak, that I also have the responsibility to listen when you speak. That’s the simple version of that. So, you’ll see those kinds of changes. You will tend to see fewer behavior mod tools, like the red, yellow, green light of, you’re on red if you’ve been bad and you’re on green if you’ve been good. And more restorative justice, more evidence of [01:09:00] restorative justice, of conversations when things have gone wrong. You will tend to see fewer rows, more circles, more evidence of a progressive engaging classroom. You might see, you might walk into the classroom and not be able to find the teacher because the teacher might be sitting with a group of kids, sitting on the floor, sitting at a desk, or in conversation, rather than commanding control at the front of the classroom.

Another thing that, that we’re really proud of is, when you walk into the classroom of someone who’s really engaging in Inspired Teaching, usually a student—you know sometimes when you walk into classrooms, Kids will look, either they’ll be like, oh, somebody, what’s going on? Why is somebody walking into our classroom? Or it’s oh, thank God, we get a break. We can, we get a distraction from whatever we’re supposed to do. In a classroom of someone who’s really embracing Inspired Teaching, usually a student will say, “Hey, come on in, let me show you what I’m working on.” They own the place. This is, ah, “We’re, we’re focusing on, all right, here’s the thing. When you multiply, you’re supposed to get more. But, John asked, when you multiply [01:10:00] fractions, how come you get less?” And we’re trying to figure that out. You might, someone might grab you and say, “Can you help us with this? You want to hear what we’re figuring out right now?” You’re invited in. And the kids, or if you were to ask a student, “What are you doing?” Instead of saying, “We’re doing chapter six.” They might say, “We’re trying to figure out, we watered this plant with water and this plant with orange juice because orange juice is good for you, but we’re trying to figure out if orange juice is good for the plant, right?” So, they would engage you in a meaningful, something meaningful.

Michael: Yeah. So it sounds like you’re not—normally when people think of teachers, they think of lessons being delivered, if you will, but you’re really talking about the teacher as the organizer of the universe of the classroom and what you’re describing is a paradigm shift with how that universe is organized, where the power center is, maybe there are multiple centers of power now or groups, and maybe it’s more of a collective. But you are talking about a [01:11:00] physical organizational change in the whole classroom learning space, if you will.

Aleta: Yes, absolutely. Although, that alone is not enough. And I will tell you, I’ve spent a lot of time lately, not in DC, but in other places, seeing classrooms with beautiful tables and kids sitting facing each other. And you think, oh, that’s going to be great. And they are all on screens. And I don’t think they make eye contact with another human. Because—and that’s in the name of individualized instruction. I’m on my page on the electronic workbook, and you’re on your page on the electronic workbook. In that sense, yeah, it’s individualized, but we’re not engaging with one another. We talk a lot in Inspired Teaching about the iPads, having worksheets on iPads, very expensive worksheets. And technology, I’m not a luddite, technology is amazing. But it’s a tool for building our critical thinking skills. It needs to be used that way.

So, yes, it’s a physical change in the classroom, but it’s also a change again in the role of the teacher. And [01:12:00] you know this, but I want to say it for our listeners, it may appear to the untrained eye that the teacher’s not doing that much. Because the teacher’s, like, sitting and chatting with a couple kids while some other kids are doing something else. But a teacher who’s an Inspired teacher, it is, it’s joyful, but it is exhausting. Because they are, they’re doing what teachers do. They have their eyes on all 20-, 30-plus kids in their classroom. But they are—actually, I want to describe this because it’s our teacher’s process. We call it “Observe, Plan, Instigate.” You’re, you’ve got your plan, you’ve got your lesson plan and, teachers, if you want to use Inspired Teaching, you actually have to plan a much more detailed, intricate plan, because you know you’re going to recalibrate in real time. So you can’t just have, “I will say this at 2 o’clock no matter what.” You have to really have a fully thought through plan with clear goals and clear expectations. So, you have your plan, and then you instigate, you ask the question, you offer the problem, you, whatever it is, you throw something out, and then you observe. What happens? What do the kids do? What do they say? Where do they [01:13:00] struggle? Where do they thrive? What do they do that you didn’t expect? And then you, in real time, recalibrate your plan, and then you instigate. You ask the new question, and then you observe, and it goes on and on. So that’s what the teacher is doing, and it’s wonderful, but it is hard work. It’s so important, because sometimes in these classrooms visitors say, “The teacher is just sitting there, not doing anything.” But we think if the teacher’s not standing at the board, delivering a lesson, they’re not doing anything. But in fact, they’re doing much more thoughtful work.

Michael: And I would imagine that sort of leads to a more project-based learning system as well.

Aleta: Yes, but I would say project-based, and even more importantly, curiosity-based. Because project-based, I love project-based learning, but like everything, it can be beautiful, it can be not so beautiful. Sometimes project-based learning can be prescriptive. Here’s step one, step two, step three, step four, step five. That’s more what we called in the day hands-on learning, which is, again, better than hands-off learning, but it can be, [01:14:00] I’m just following the steps that somebody has given me and I’m not really grappling, I’m not really figuring stuff out for myself. So, it’s curiosity-driven learning.

Elizabeth: I want to dig down a little bit into the weeds on some of what you’ve been talking about in terms of assessment and standards, because it’s certainly been my experience that immersive learning experiences like those that are cultivated by Inspired Teaching are extremely dense, as you mentioned. There is, the learner is learning at multiple levels and they’re honing skills across competency, whether it’s language or cognitive development or socioemotional, mathematical, gross motor, fine motor, content areas, science, fractions, etc. Anyway, all of these things are happening at once.

And it seems like standards-driven teaching and learning has parsed this out into these little micro-units or micro-benchmarks of skill development that are each measured separately. So, it’s [01:15:00] a real challenge to peel back the layers of all this measurable skill development enough to, A, satiate the appetite of these increasingly standard oriented educational systems and, B, really capture the density of what’s happening and all of this multi factor learning that is going on.

So, Inspired Teaching has been able to reconcile this dense process focused learning with the standards-oriented education system. So, I wanted you to talk a little bit about how you’ve been able to both perceive as well as surface, to use that term, and make visible the density of learning that is happening in this Inspired Teaching way.

Aleta: We have some core values at Inspired Teaching. One of them is radical creativity and structured execution. Goes together. And that, we certainly, we [01:16:00] utilize that when we’ve been working with the standards.

So, I’ll tell you a story. When the Common Core Standards first came out and were adopted by DC in 2011-ish, I believe, we had a real debate and discussion at Inspired Teaching. We’re going to support the standards, oppose them, have nothing to do with them, engage with them because of the issues that you raised. We really thought about what we were going to do. And we decided to embrace the unknown and step outside of our comfort zone and embrace the standards with the belief that it’s all about implementation. Because the standards themselves were and are great. It’s all about implementation. If the implementation is, Monday at 9 o’clock we do Standard 1, Monday at 10 o’clock we do Standard 2, that’s going to be a problem. But there were ways to do it thoughtfully.

So, we actually partnered with DCPS. We had some really intensive multi-year partnerships around standards implementation. Also with Baltimore City Public schools around the particularly middle school math. We trained all of their middle school math teachers over a two-year period.

And I think [01:17:00] I can do this. I wanna share with you briefly how we introduced the standards. So we did this with the middle school math teachers in Baltimore City. Inspired Teaching Institute that you would recognize with lots of improv and meeting one another and building that community. And then we put some posters on the board with sort of skills. And we said, walk around with—and we were, and still are, old school. You get a marker, and you get chart paper and write down on the chart paper a response to whatever prompt. It’s called the old school chalk talk. So here are a couple of prompts, and I’m going to ask you, can you think of a time in your life when you have to attend to precision. Michael or Elizabeth, do you ever have to attend to precision in anything you do in your daily life?

Elizabeth: I don’t bake very often, but if I’m baking, I have to be precise about so many half a teaspoon of baking soda or powder or whatever it is.

Aleta: Makes a big difference.

Michael: In writing, I do a lot of writing, and if you want to communicate clearly, or describe something [01:18:00] clearly, you have to attend to precision in terms of how precisely you describe something or how precisely you lay out an action or whatever.

Elizabeth: Or doing your taxes.

Aleta: That’s a good one. Yeah, really? Does that matter?

Elizabeth: You’ve gotta be really precise.

Aleta: Right. Alright, how about, do you ever have to reason abstractly and quantitatively?

Elizabeth: Oh, yeah. Parenting. Our kids are happily grown and flown and wonderful adults, but, man, parsing some of that dialogic stuff as parents was really hard.

Michael: I do that all the time.

Aleta: Alright, I’ll give you one more. Do you ever have to look for and make use of structure?

Elizabeth: Yes.

Aleta: As artists or as in any part of your life?

Elizabeth: Oh, as a writer, as a creative writer, man structure is plot, I’m pretty associative as a creative writer, so I have to really struggle to create not just a sequence, but some kind of larger [01:19:00] schema that, that makes all of the actions and the characters in the piece move forward and stick together.

Michael: Whenever I’m listening to a podcast, I’m constantly trying to see the structure, figure out the structure that the person is using to present their argument or their case. So for me, sort of, it’s drawing the structure out of the things I experience. Because I think structure is one of the most influential parts of something.

Aleta: All right. So these three questions I’ve asked you—I’ve asked you when do you reason abstractly and quantitatively? When do you attend to precision and when do you look for and make use of structure? These are some, but not all of the Common Core, part of the Common Core standards of mathematical practice. Alright? That we taught middle school teachers in Baltimore city. And this is how we presented them: We put up [01:20:00] chart paper around the room and said, “When do you make use of structure?” Taxes was big, negotiating for a car came up, all these things. And we didn’t say what they were. We just said, “When do you do these things in your life?” And everybody said, “Oh, I do these things all the time.” Their sense of competence was high. I already know this. I know how to do this. I know about this. This is something that’s already part of my way that I move in the world. Parenting, right? What a beautiful example.

And then we said—we literally peeled off the top page—and said, “These are the standards. You’re already doing it. And you’re not doing it, you’re not spending Monday on structure and Tuesday on argumentative reasoning and Wednesday on perseverance. You’re doing it in doing work that matters to you, that’s important to you.” When you do work at a high level, these standards are part of how you approach the work. And that’s what we think standards ought to look like.

And I do know is what the Core, what the idea behind the standards is and was. Is that [01:21:00] we want—we don’t want kids to learn to multiply because the textbook says to multiply. Which is how math often is taught, right? We don’t want kids to learn grammar because someone said you have to learn grammar, or because it’s going to be on the test. We want them to learn for a reason, with purposeful intent behind it. And so we were able to take the standards, help our teaching colleagues see that these are things that thoughtful people do every day. Now let’s be intentional in making sure we’re developing those skills in our young people as we are doing the things we do every day, in this case, in middle school math.

And the core answer to your question of how to deal with standards, and it’s the same answer to all the testing that of course is, has always been part of education, is teaching is problem solving. Okay, what’s the latest problem to solve? We’ve got these standards to teach. Great. We have certain beliefs. Curiosity needs to be central. Kids need to be actively involved. The work needs to be meaningful and matter to them. Kids need to be engaged respectfully. [01:22:00] Fine. How do we teach the standards within that framework, within that structure?

And I love your point, Michael, about structure being perhaps the most important thing. I think so too. Especially when folks like us at Inspired Teaching are using a structure that looks very different. People think structure in a school looks like kids in rows all on the correct page in the book. That’s structure. I would say that’s rigid structure. We’re talking about a much more, we’re talking about creative constraints. The kind of structure that allows for creativity to flourish, but you have to be really intentional in designing that structure. And that’s what we do in teaching the standards, or whatever other requirement teachers must address.

Michael: So you guys have been doing this for 30 years now, right?

Aleta: 29.

Michael: 29. Okay.

Aleta: We can say just about 30.

Michael: 30th anniversary is coming up. Okay. So clearly, you’ve had students, teacher-students who’ve come back to you after 25 [01:23:00] years or whatever. Can you maybe just share a story of what Inspired Teaching methodology has meant to a particular student of yours or and just how it has affected their lives and their learning and their teaching process?

Aleta: I’m going to tell you about a teacher who came back to us who has been part of a number of programs, including our Teaching with Improv Fellowship. She shared that the activities she’s learned from Inspired Teaching helped her students take ownership of their math class. And this is something that she, just wasn’t on her radar before. And she’s really redesigned her math class to where the kids teach the class. So, she works with—I guess it comes back to standards or curriculum or expectation—she works with them to say, “This is the material we need to make sure we’re learning. So you’re going to be in charge of this part of the content, and you’re going to be in charge of another part.” She helps prepare them. She supports them, but they lead the class.

And as I was saying before, that is much harder work than leading the class yourself, much harder, but it’s really joyful. And [01:24:00] she says it’s completely revolutionized her experience teaching and her kids are super excited to come to her classroom and be a part of—because they get to teach.

The other thing, we don’t have data on her class yet, but we often collect the data on attendance. There are lots of reasons kids don’t come to school, of course, that are outside of our control that are systemic that must be addressed. But one of the real reasons people don’t come to school is because they don’t feel valued. What do you got for me? If I’m going to sit in the back and get in trouble all day or just not be engaged, why would I overcome obstacles to get there? We have teachers saying their attendance challenges are getting better because the kids, certainly, if it’s my job to teach the lesson on Thursday, I’m going to be there. And if my friend’s teaching on Wednesday, I better be there for them because I feel needed and I know that I have a role to play. So that’s one particular example.

What I’ll tell you about, too, is a colleague—’cause you mentioned Kate Keplinger, who you guys know very well, she was with me right from the start at Inspired [01:25:00] Teaching and has been a thought partner and an action partner in all aspects of building the organization. She, so she’s not a teacher who’s come back to us, but she’s an amazing educator. She now is the Director of Operations at the Inspired Teaching Demonstration School, which we started in 2011 as a demonstration school, a place to see, to put the process, the approach into action, to invite people in to see it, and also to field test all manner of things in a real school. And Kate stayed with Center for Inspired Teaching initially, although we were at the school constantly, but then she transitioned over to the school. And she’s running a large organization, both—she’s running the business, she’s running—she’s not technically running the academics, but I know that she has a hand in all of the teaching and learning going on. And it’s interesting to see her growth as the growth of Inspired Teaching has happened and the skills that we’ve all built together, and certainly, again, among our [01:26:00] teachers.

People, we have another teacher who’s actually, I’m not going to remember her name, but I think she’s at CentroNía and has been there for many years and is now just—I do have her name, give me a minute—Joangelee Hernández.

Elizabeth: Oh, Joangelee!

Aleta: Joangelee.

Elizabeth: Yeah, I saw her in one of your pictures.

Aleta: Yes, she was just featured in Hurray for Monday, and she’s moved into a leadership role.

Elizabeth: She has.

Aleta: Teaching teachers. But what I know from her and from her conversations with Jenna is that she’s not moving away from the kids. She’s staying deeply connected to the students, even as she gets to look across grade levels and work more broadly. So, we’re excited when things like that happen.

Elizabeth: I want to give you a chance to just give us a few data points. There’s probably a fact sheet that would go on for pages. But are there just some key data points of achievement that you want to share? How many teachers you’ve trained, how many schools you’ve worked with? Things that would probably show up in a kind of [01:27:00] quantitative analysis of your work over all these years.

Aleta: Yes, so there, as you can imagine, there’s so many ways we’ve collected data over the years, whether it’s surveys, classroom observation. We are not averse to test scores as long as it’s not the only tool that you use. All manner of, we’ve used the CLASS, which is a nationally normed tool that looks at classroom environment. It looks at what’s going on in the teaching process.

Elizabeth: And I want to insert, my understanding is that in that CLASS analysis, US teachers are the least effective in that kind of point of engagement, cognitive, critical thinking area, so kudos to—

Aleta: Yeah, so we can see, we can compare our teachers to the national norm on that, and we see growth in ways that we would hope. We also have used for many years, I think it’s out of University of North Carolina, the Teacher Working Conditions Survey, which looks at a whole school climate and everything from a teacher saying, do I know how to access the copy machine? To much more meaningful, am I consulted for decisions? Do I feel a [01:28:00] sense of ownership? All of those really important questions that can look at the well-being of a school.

And so we see, using all those kinds of tools, we see changes, improvements in teacher, I think I’ve mentioned, in job satisfaction, in the teacher’s own engagement, the student engagement.

But here I’ll give you the, some of the numbers. This is on our impact page on our website. We have taught over 50,000 teachers in districts across the US and around the world, still primarily in the DC region, but, everywhere. We teach educators how to teach students to approach academic problems, social challenges, and other people with curiosity and respect. And teachers report increased job satisfaction, they learn strategies that make school a better place for their students and themselves. 91% of students find the Inspired Teaching approach more engaging than a typical class. 98% of students say the Inspired Teaching approach creates opportunities for respectful dialogue on [01:29:00] complicated topics. 100% of teachers find our programming and resources engaging and relevant and report that their students are more engaged and motivated. Who would not be engaged if you’re doing the magic scarf dance, right? So, people definitely, they may not like it, but it’s engaging. That is definitely what we hear. And 93% of teachers report learning new teaching strategies to support their students social emotional needs.

And I’ve got, I grabbed a couple quotes to share with you from recent programming. A teacher says, “The Inspired Teaching Institute activities are too delicious.” And another teacher says, “It was the most engaging and meaningful professional development I have attended in recent memory.” And that’s really important to us because we’re all former teachers. I’m a former teacher. Often—Ed Week did a study recently, I think this just came out this year, that surveyed teachers about the best kind of professional development and the resounding answer was none. Was the best [01:30:00] kind of professional development. It’s just, please don’t make us go to that. And I, that certainly resonates with me from my time in the classroom. Professional development tends to be an outside expert with a lot of PowerPoint slides on, like, the five ways to teach reading. And if it didn’t work, it’s because you did it wrong.

And, forgive my glib response. There are lots of teacher educators who work really hard, but if it doesn’t involve the teachers as experts, then you’re missing a huge opportunity. And our professional development, because it is improv-based, I couldn’t do it by myself. I couldn’t stand up, I could certainly, you can hear me, I can talk a lot by myself. But it doesn’t work unless the participants contribute. And that feeling of being needed and being valued for your expertise, really, not just, “Elizabeth, could you pass me the marker?” Not that kind of valued but truly your ideas, your experience, your successes, your failures, your hopes, your, the things you say to [01:31:00] kids, the things you wish you could say—that is a necessary ingredient in our professional development. And teachers, like other humans, like it when we, when they feel valued. So that’s something that’s a really important takeaway.

And the reason that matters is, A, because we care about teachers and, B, because then we ask teachers to teach their students the same way that we teach them. We are—and that’s other feedback we often receive. We’re not doing a PowerPoint on active learning. They’re learning in the way that they then are going to take to their students so they can say to their kids, “Yeah, when I had to do this at first, it felt really uncomfortable. I get it. But let me tell you why it’s worth it.” Right?

Michael: As a teacher, I taught for many years. One of the consistent things that I learned as a teacher was that students are constantly changing. Whatever cohort of students I had five years ago or last year is now different. Their world is changing, their references are changing—[01:32:00]

Aleta: Yeah, their music is changing.

Michael: —the way they talk, everything is changing. And it’s changing—today’s world, things are changing so rapidly. We’re in the midst of four, five, six revolutions, for everything from technology to social. Everything is changing. And so obviously, the center is, you’re dealing with Inspired Teaching. You’re dealing with engagement. You’re dealing with improv. How does the center and how has it over those 29 years you’ve been around, dealt with the reality of a changing world and environment as it goes about helping teachers more effectively and more efficiently engage students in critical thinking skills?

Aleta: Uncertainty tolerance. And that is at the core of improvisational thinking. Uncertainty tolerance. It’s a term I learned during the pandemic. I didn’t know it before, but I think we’ve been teaching it all along. It’s the ability to say, “I had a plan and I was expecting [01:33:00] it and everything changed and I can still handle it and I still know what to do.” The pandemic, of course, was the ultimate experience. And while there were much more painful versions of uncertainty tolerance, the ones that were every day for teachers was, are we going to be online or are we going to be in person tomorrow? Is it, because with all the changing protocols. Do we have to, sometimes we have to wear masks and then the protocol changes and we don’t have to wear masks. Are we required to get vaccines? Are we not required? Are we going to have class outside or inside? Can we be in a pod? Every minute was changing. And so, we really leaned hard on this idea of uncertainty tolerance in our work.

We worked, particularly during the pandemic, worked with teachers locally, teachers nationally. We had a school in Myanmar that we did professional development online with that was, if we thought it was hard here, we got to realize how much more challenging. We started a partnership last year that’s continuing, we’re reaching over a thousand teachers a year in Ukraine. Again, they have incredible uncertainty. Will they be teaching in a bomb [01:34:00] shelter? Will they be teaching from home? Will they have internet? Incredible unknowns.

And if you are build the skill of uncertainty tolerance around improvisation where, again, you say, I have a clear goal. I recognize that things are not going to go according to plan. And that’s not to say it won’t be hard, but I’m not going to get derailed, I’m going to say oh, look, this time we’re wearing masks. Okay the activity where we, you know, make vowel sounds with our mouths with my four-year-olds isn’t going to work. That’s okay. We’re going to draw the vowel sounds, you know, or we’re going to sing through our masks. Or we’re going to, we’re going to, we’re still going to learn vowel sounds, we’re going to make the O with our bodies instead of with our faces or whatever it is we need to do. That uncertainty tolerance is a skill that can actually be built.

Michael: The best improvisational actors have a bag of things they can reach into during those moments where things fall apart.

Aleta: As you say that, then I have to [01:35:00] share with you, Michael and Elizabeth, an activity that, actually, we designed it when we started the school, 10 plus years ago, but it’s an activity called Bag of Rocks that’s about that entirely, and it’s improv. You work in pairs. One person is climbing a mountain. They’re using imaginary objects and you’re climbing a mountain. The other partner hands them a series of just index cards where you write down something on the index card, and it’s a series of gifts that you would not really want when you’re climbing a mountain, but you have to thank them and use it. And the first gift is always a bag of rocks. So, I’m climbing the mountain. I would say, “Here, Michael, here’s your bag of rocks.” And he’d say, “Thank you for the bag of rocks. I’m going to use it to mark my trails so I could get back down.” And then I’d hand you a new thing that Swarm of bees. And you would say, “Thank you for the swarm of bees. They’re going to lift me up so that I can fly to the top and now I can rest.” And on it goes. And it’s funny, but it is, it’s one of those activities that really resonates because [01:36:00] teaching—life, life is, “Thank you for that bag of rocks.” Oh, great. Now we have a pandemic. Okay. I’m still a teacher. I still think it’s worth learning how to read. Let’s figure this out.

And again, we can learn it in a safe and sometimes even fun setting. These skills that are really serious business when we’re in times of crisis, you’ve got to be able to say, as you said, an improvisational actor has honed that skill.  And that’s what’s so interesting about, again, you watch improv, you’re like, “They’re so funny. They’re making it up out of nowhere!” And that’s partly true. Yes, and. Right? But the hard work and the years of practice it takes to be an excellent improvisational actor are not unlike the hard work it takes to be an excellent Inspired teacher.

Elizabeth: That leads me to ask you one of our final questions that we ask all of our interviewees, and you’ve given us multiple answers to this question already, but we ask everyone if they could [01:37:00] give a piece of tangible, practical advice to our listeners on how to cultivate their own habits of a creative life. Clearly, the last 30 almost years have been a testament to all of this advice but is there a particular concrete piece of advice you would give our listeners on how to cultivate their own creativity?

Aleta: Be curious. And ask yourself the question, what are you curious about? We now start every staff meeting with a quick round robin of what are you curious about today? And it can be, “I’m curious about how to get my AC fixed.” Right? It can be something very practical. It can be, “I’m curious about how astrophysics works and is there, where’s the dark matter in the universe?” It can be whatever level is meaningful.

But if you get in the habit of asking yourself, what am I curious about today? You will actually build your curiosity and you will find yourself approaching problems, including entrenched problems, from a place of [01:38:00] curiosity rather than assumption. Assumption is, I know I’m bad at this, I know I can’t do it. Or I know I don’t like you, and I know whatever you’re going to say is going to piss me off. That’s assumption. And it’s based in reality. There’s a reason I might feel that way. But curiosity allows me to see a problem with fresh eyes, to see a person with fresh eyes, and to see myself with fresh eyes. And so that, that curiosity is really key.

Elizabeth: Oh, that’s great. Aleta Margolis, what is next for you and Inspired Teaching and where can our listeners find out more?

Aleta: What is next is just to keep on going, I think. We are really building out Speak Truth America. We are pushing hard on this curiosity agenda that we have and wanting to reach more and more teachers and school leaders.

We are also really starting to reach out to parents because we realized that is a group—who cares more about kids thriving in school than their parents? And we’ve always worked tangentially with parents. We’ve done workshops. They’ve come to our different trainings. [01:39:00] Of course, any of our teachers are themselves parents. But we are doing a more intentional focus on reaching parents both as the child’s first teacher and also as people who can advocate for change. Because if your kid comes home and says, “Ah, I hate math.” Many of us would say, “That’s okay. I hated math too. It’s just school.” But if instead as parents, we say, “Wait a minute, you hate math? I know that math is fascinating, and if you were taught math differently, you would love math. I’m not gonna go in and be obnoxious, I’m going to go in and offer support and point the teachers in your school to”—and now I’ll share the resources—”point the teachers to Hooray for Monday.” As I mentioned, it’s our free weekly publication filled with asynchronous professional learning. We hope it’s inspiration for each week. And you can go to our website, inspiredteaching.org, and Hooray for Monday is under the For Teachers tab and sign up, and then you’ll receive it in your inbox every Sunday afternoon. So you can prepare for that.

You can also, if you’re a DC teacher, [01:40:00] sign up for the Teaching with Improv Institute, also on our website. And if you’re a teacher anywhere in the world, come to our free online monthly institutes, also under the For Teachers tab, and come join us and meet wonderful, creative, beautiful educators from around the world.

And the last thing I will offer, because it is a really important resource, is that we resource that we haven’t talked about much today, we have a guidebook called the “ABCDE of Learner Needs.” And it’s a whole toolkit, but it can be narrowed down to one page. You can put it on your refrigerator. You can also get all the research behind it if you are inclined to do so. A is autonomy, B is belonging, C is competence, D is developmental appropriateness. E is engagement. And F is fun. And those are needs, not nice-to-haves. Those are needs we have as human beings. Our kids need them. We need them. And this is a whole series of activities and workshops to help you build those needs in yourself and [01:41:00] in the children in your lives.

Elizabeth: Alright. Whew, that is impressive. Aleta Margolis, founder of Center for Inspired Teaching, it has been wonderful. It’s always wonderful to see you.

Aleta: It’s so wonderful to see both of you.

Elizabeth: It’s wonderful to have this long and very engaging, very dynamic, very curiosity-based conversation.

Tremendous thanks to all our listeners. To those of you who are free subscribers, please consider becoming paid subscribers so that Creativists in Dialogue can continue bringing you insightful conversations about creativity from Washington, DC, and beyond. Thanks.

Special shout out to Creativists in Dialogue’s production team: Audio engineer Elliot Lanes, social media manager Erin Dumas of Dumas83, and transcription editor Morgan Musselman. Thank you all.

For more information about Creativists in Dialogue, please visit creativists.substack.com or our Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn pages. To learn more about our other projects, please visit elizabethbrucedc.com or rmichaeloliver.com.

The Creativists in Dialogue podcast is supported in part by the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities and subscribers like you. The Theatre in Community podcast series is supported in part by Humanities DC. Thanks.