Transcript: Our Conversation with the Founder and President of Center for Inspired Teaching, Aleta Margolis
Transcript: Our Conversation with the Founder and President of Center for Inspired Teaching, Aleta Margolis
With Hosts Elizabeth Bruce and Michael Oliver
If you want to read a transcript of Parts 1 & 2 of our conversation with Aleta Margolis, the Founder and President of Center for Inspired Teaching, you’re in luck. Below is the opening of Part 1 with a link to Parts 1 & 2 here.
Center for Inspired Teaching is a non-profit that helps teachers redesign their roles in the classroom and transform the learning experience through improvisation-based professional development. The organization has spent 3 decades investing in teachers as agents of change. Instead of merely delivering a curriculum, teachers who embrace the Inspired approach to education are instigators of thought, fueling their students’ curiosity and innate desire to learn.
Aleta is a former elementary and middle school teacher for court-involved youth and a professor of education at 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.
For more on Center for Inspired Teaching click here. For more on Aleta, click here and here.
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]
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