Here at The Greater Educator, we’re kicking off the school year thinking big. I’m setting a vision for myself and my students that I think is a surefire way for any educator to improve, and it’s just two steps. If, at the end of each day, I can say that I’ve done each of these two things, then I think it’s going to be a pretty awesome year.

So, with each lesson I teach, I will aim to 1. Inspire and 2. Empower my students.

I know those two things seem like they might be too broad and vague to be meaningful, but I really do think that, with the right approach, keeping these two simple things in mind will help me to constantly reflect upon what I’m actually doing in class.

So, let’s take each of these steps one at a time. What’s it really mean to inspire learning for our students and it is practical to try to achieve this every single day?

For me, inspiration is a prerequisite to learning. We can’t really learn something on a deep level that will transform the way you see the world or permanently engrave itself as a lifelong skill unless we care about what we’re learning about on a personal level.

This can seem very daunting and maybe a little unrealistic. How do we know if we’re really inspiring our students?

I think it’s one of those things that you know it when you see it. Think about that project you do that your students absolutely love - the one they look forward to from day one because they’ve heard about it from your former students - the one that you need to pry your students away from when it’s time to move on to the next lesson - the one that other teachers, and maybe even parents, get annoyed with because your students are spending all of their time on it and not enough time on their other responsibilities.

I think the thing your students love so much about that learning experience is something we should try to replicate as much as possible.

I recently delivered a lesson on effective storytelling by creating a video production project for my students. I set this project up by showing them some videos from their favorite YouTubers - the ones our students spend so many hours consuming each day. My goal was to turn these consumers of content into creators. So, my pitch was that we were going to take a crack at becoming YouTube stars by analyzing and then mimicking the storytelling styles of our favorite YouTubers.

This lesson was a hit right out of the gates because it met a lot of my student right where they are - on YouTube. It shattered their assumption that watching YouTube was something they did in their freetime and that school hours were when you did school stuff. I tried to cram the two things together and show them that there is something worth learning from their favorite YouTubers that we could apply to our own classwork.

But what really made this lesson take off was when I took the initial inspiration for learning - in this case, the learning was all about effective storytelling, and followed it up with step #2 of empowerment.

I empowered by students in two ways. First, I put professional-grade tools in their hands in order for them to create in the same way that their YouTube heroes did. (We can discuss how I was able to pull this off in another pod.) And second, I removed as many restrictions as possible regarding how they were going to do their work. I didn’t spell out for them step by step how they should create a video; I didn’t even tell them what their video had to be about. My students had free reign to do it their way and the tools at their fingertips to do it.

It wasn’t easy for me to relinquish so much control over the day to day activities of my students. I forced myself to sit idly by while they made mistakes that were costing them valuable class time...