Who's Talking?

Welcome to the Inspired Teacher Podcast! In this episode, I’m sharing a moment from right before spring break when I had a big plan for a Socratic Seminar… and then totally bailed on it. But here’s the thing—I’ve got an awesome grade-level team, and one of our newer members keeps pushing us to try new things, which got me thinking. I want my students to talk. I like the noise. I want them talking about social studies and thinking out loud together. But somewhere along the way, I let “keeping them on task” win out over giving them space to actually discuss. I’m diving into some great ideas from Catlin Tucker and Katie Novak’s book The Shift to Student-Led: Reimagining Classroom Workflows with UDL & Blended Learning,  and talking about why it’s okay to step back and let students lead the conversation—even if it gets a little messy. Because let’s be honest: teaching is exhausting, and we don’t need to be the ones doing all the talking all the time.