Remarks from Chocolate Inspiration 2010

Thank you Jon, and thank you all for joining us for Chocolate Inspiration 2010. We hold this gala each year to celebrate the accomplishments of Center for Inspired Teaching and the people whose support makes our work possible.  

Thank you again to our corporate and foundation sponsors, our Host Committee, and our Board of Directors.

Thank you to our gracious hosts in this beautiful space: Ambassador Arturo Sarukhan, Alejandra de la Paz, and Claudia Keller Lapayre. And thank you to all of the chefs and businesses who have donated their talent—and their chocolate!

And of course this evening wouldn’t happen at all were it not for the hard work of Claudia Ades and Eventfully, and most importantly my colleagues, the Inspired Teaching staff.

Before I begin my formal remarks, I want to acknowledge the Inspired Teachers in our midst. Would you please raise your hands. You are why we do what we do every day at Inspired Teaching.  

And this is what we do:

Center for Inspired Teaching trains teachers from recruitment to retirement, through courses, mentoring, school partnerships, a new teacher certification program, and soon a demonstration school and teacher residency. We teach teachers to build their students’ intellects and their imaginations. To ensure students learn their facts and learn how to think.

We know how to have our chocolate and eat it too.

Here’s an example:

Catherine Currie is one of our Inspired Teaching Fellows. Catherine is a first year teacher at Potomac Lighthouse Public Charter School here in DC and she’s been working with a group of 3rd graders who are reading the classic children’s book “How to Eat Fried Worms.” As she’d been doing all year, Catherine was working with students on their reading comprehension, reading fluency, and all the other skills in the curriculum. However with this book, Catherine noticed something: her students were really curious about worms!

Kids who wouldn’t normally tune in during reading time and who were known for causing discipline problems in order to avoid having to read, were riveted whenever they had the chance to learn more about worms.  

So Catherine, being an Inspired Teacher, listened to her students, wrote down their questions, and decided to find out more about worms. She did some research and brought in pictures of worm bins and lots of articles about worms.

After studying these items, her students had more questions:
How do you make one of those worm bins?
Can we make one for our class and put our own food scraps in to feed the worms? Will worms like cafeteria food?

And Catherine thought, well, why not? So she brought in some real worms, and even some worm eggs, and she and her students made their own worm bin.

Now the kids’ questions got deeper:
Do worms sit on their eggs like birds do?
What makes a worm male or female? – And when the students found out that worms have both male and female parts they wanted to know something else –
Can a worm make itself pregnant?

All year long Catherine had heard her mentors at Inspired Teaching talking about inquiry based instruction, the importance of children’s questions, and how she needed to let kids’ questions guide her lessons while making sure her students learned everything in the third grade standards and prepared them for the tests.

And now she was doing it!

Nonfiction reading; descriptive writing; expository writing (remember all those kinds of essays we had to learn to write in school?)… Catherine’s kids were doing all of these, and doing them well. Because they were immersed in something that was important. To them.

Catherine isn’t compromising student achievement by organizing her instruction around her students’ questions. She’s enhancing it. That’s what Inspired Teachers do. That’s what all teachers could do. That’s why we’ve gathered here tonight, to work together to ensure more and more students get to experience Inspired Teaching.

It’s easy to think of Catherine as simply one exceptional teacher. In fact in our society we love to think of great teachers, especially those teaching in challenging urban environments, as radical departures from the norm. Think of the last article you read or news story you heard on the radio about a great teacher. (Actually we don’t get too many of those, do we?) But when we do, the reporters love to point out how unusual, how exceptional this particular great teacher is. Think of those tear-jerker movies about the one great teacher who stands out in a sea of mediocrity, who believes in her students when no one else does, who can teach these kids to add or read or spell when everyone else has given up.

We love those movies about exceptional teachers. But in fact, these kinds of stories, while moving, can do more harm than good—because they reinforce the idea that good teaching, especially for kids living in low-income communities, is an anomaly. We should celebrate good teaching when we encounter it, but we shouldn’t expect to find it very often.

But at Inspired Teaching we expect all our teachers to be exceptional. We insist that teachers can, with the right tools, actually learn to be great. And that excellent, Inspired teaching can in fact become the norm.

Here’s another example:

In 2004 Principal Michelle Edwards started work at Orr Elementary in Southeast DC. She arrived at the school to find a disgruntled staff, poor student achievement, and a great deal of mistrust. She brought Inspired Teaching in at the start to help her achieve her vision for the school – a day when every facet of the building would convey a vibrant learning community.

Five years later Orr is a different place. Teachers meet every week to brainstorm around students’ needs and give each other feedback on their teaching. Student achievement is up, discipline problems are down, creative learning is taking place in every classroom, and you can feel the camaraderie and enthusiasm from students and staff alike.

What’s more, Orr Elementary has become a model for the district, it’s part of a consortium of schools that are learning from each other, sharing best practices, and serving as examples of what is possible in urban education.

And let me entice you further with a view into the future of Inspired Teaching. Pending approval from the DC Public Charter School Board this April, we will be opening a demonstration school in 2011 that includes imagination among the academic goals for children.

And here’s how we define imagination:
•    the courage to create
•    a joyful spirit
•    the ability to generate ideas and devise solutions
•    the ability to play  

Can you imagine what we’d all be like if we’d gone to schools that included imagination among their academic goals?

Last month an applicant to our Inspired Teaching Fellows program wrote something interesting in one of his essays. He said, “A teacher is like a box of chocolates. You never know what you’re gonna get.” And in our current environment, this is true. We hope our children end up in the classroom equivalent of a delicious caramel wrapped in dark chocolate, but we accept the reality that they might also end up in a classroom like …one of those things you bite into and put back into the box... We accept the notion that only some of our children’s teachers will be exceptional.

But at Inspired Teaching we know that great teaching can be the rule, not the exception.

And your support—whether you’re a longtime friend of Inspired Teaching or someone we’re meeting tonight for the first time—is key in making that happen. We thank you and we’ll continue to need you in order to ensure every child has an Inspired Teacher.

Here’s hoping that our sidewalks teem with worms in the spring days ahead, and that when those worms make us wonder like children, we redouble our efforts to make schools full of wonder for children.

Thank you.