What is Inspired Teaching?
I have said all along that there’s nothing magical about Inspired Classrooms. Its just the environment that inspired teaching and inspired learning takes place. The environment raises the odds for creative, collaborative and transformative things to occur. In thinking about this, I have raised a few more questions in my mind. The first of which is “how do we define inspired teaching?”
Take a look at this graphic. Unfortunately, this is how I see us organizing and prioritizing our days in the classroom. It all starts with the state-mandated and district-mandated curriculum. Many teachers see the TEKS as the ultimate “checklist” that dictates everything that happens each day. I am not knocking the TEKS, just the idea that all things in the classroom should begin and end with them. I see the TEKS as just a baseline that identifies the minimum expectations and a starting point for activities and lessons.
To say that we are now in a high-stakes testing environment is a huge understatement. On top of TAKS testing, teachers are responsible for giving many district-mandated assessments and diagnostics. I hear teachers say all the time “with all this testing going on, when am I supposed to teach?”
The biggest problem I have with the current system is that it takes a lot of the teachers’ creativity, ingenuity, inspiration and passion out of the teaching equation (and does it in a really sneaky way). It is never said out loud that teachers shouldn’t do certain things, but teachers are so bombarded with objectives, indicators, assessments, reports, diagnostics and portfolios, that there is little room for anything else. A lot of the time, we stay so busy with the “compulsory” teaching and “compulsory” assessing, that we rarely have time to enjoy inspired teaching and learning. Most of us, I think, show up to work every day because we are passionate about teaching. Most days, however, what we WANT to do, and what we LOVE to do, gets pushed aside by what we HAVE to do. My best definition of inspired teaching is “teaching what you are passionate about in creative ways…no matter what.”
So what’s the solution? We just can’t ignore the TEKs and the TAKS in the name of teaching passionately and creatively, and its not looking like this will be going away any time soon. The solution is to find ways to overlap what we are passionate about with the things that have to be “covered.” In fact, the bigger you can make the area overlap, the better. I really think this is key to improving education across the board. This gives teachers free license to love what they do and pass the passion on to their students. When teachers can do this, teaching is transformed. This is where the “art” of teaching takes over. We want students to engage and “own” what we teach, we should set th example.
