Spotlight on Beth Morris

My name is Beth Morris and I am celebrating my 21st year as an educator in Philadelphia. More than twenty years ago I moved to Philadelphia with big dreams of being a progressive educator in an urban environment. Really I was a lover of Responsive Classroom and I hoped that my dreams of empowering students and building community and peace in the classroom would flourish in an area that maybe needed it most. I found a school that followed Responsive Classroom and my career began as a teacher at Russell Byers Charter School in Center City. 

At that time, RBCS was also an Expeditionary Learning Outward Bound school, a program that was inspired by Outward Bound and encouraged young learners to immerse themselves in a learning curriculum that embodied questioning, investigating and learning deeply about the world around them, not just surface level textbook knowledge. The learning philosophies of Expeditionary Learning and Responsive Classroom are what I was determined to stay true to and what have followed me throughout my career. 

After 9 years at RBCS, I decided I wanted to take all that I had learned as a young educator to other teachers in the city and inspire them too. I accepted a position as an Early Literacy Specialist with Children’s Literacy Initiative and began to coach kindergarten-3rd grade teachers in the School District of Philadelphia. After two years of coaching teachers, I realized that I missed teaching and engaging with students and I decided it was time to return to my roots as a classroom teacher. 

The difficult part was finding a school that believed in the same philosophies that I did, creating community in the classroom and school and educating students to question and look deeper. Ironically, at that time, I also had a young child who was entering pre-k in the city and I knew I would want the same education for her. Little did I know that both my worlds as an educator and a parent would collide when I found Inquiry Charter School. Not only was it a school with leaders who embodied and valued the same philosophies that I did, but it was an opportunity for my daughter to receive the same level of education that I believed in.

In 2017, I became a teacher at Inquiry and with that an Inquiry parent as well. Since then, I have never looked back. I am now the Math Specialist at Inquiry, an unchartered world for me that I graciously accepted 5 years ago. I never thought I would love math as much as my literacy background, but I do! It has given me a fresh perspective on my career and a new love for being an educator in an environment that values the same things I promised to myself and to my students as a young educator 21 years ago. To me, nothing beats that and never will.