Whether we’re parents, educators, or both, we all know the feelings that back-to-school can bring. It’s a time of excitement about all things new: a new classroom, a new teacher, a new pencil, a new year. It’s a time of all-consuming busyness: of forms to fill out, buses to catch, supplies to buy, and more. And it’s a time to wonder about making this school year the best school year yet.
The good news is that it doesn’t have to be daunting. A remarkable school year doesn’t always start with big, sweeping changes. More often than not, it starts with something small — with a “little bet,” to borrow a phrase from a book by Peter Sims.
Little bets are small, low-risk experiments that let us try something new. Sometimes, little bets lead to little improvements: a better math lesson here, a stronger relationship there. Sometimes they fail — and failure can be valuable, too. (There’s a reason Mister Rogers made a whole week’s worth of episodes about the importance of making mistakes!)
And sometimes, as Sims argues in his book, little bets set the stage for a breakthrough.
Jennifer Ameigh is proof. We first met her during a When You Wonder book study organized by Dr. Shanna Haden of BLaST Intermediate Unit 17, an agency that supports educators across north-central Pennsylvania. Over the course of several weeks, Jennifer and roughly a dozen colleagues used Mister Rogers’ blueprints to design little bets aimed at bringing more curiosity, more creativity, and more belonging into their classrooms.
Like their peers across the country, teachers in the book study rarely had the capacity to do something drastic — they had standards to meet, professional development to attend, and attendance to take (not to mention lives to live). But by focusing on what they could do amid the many constraints of their jobs, the teachers devised simple, surprising ways to bring learning to life for their students. “By the end of the series, participants weren’t simply talking about student-centered learning,” Dr. Haden explains. “They were creating lessons, projects, and classroom experiences that intentionally fostered wonder, connection, and engagement.”
Jennifer, an ESL/Gifted teacher in the Sayre Area School District, made a little bet of her own — one sparked by her passion for history. She wagered that the subject would be far more interesting to students if she, as a teacher, could make it personal. “Growing up, the reason I loved history was because my dad told stories connected to his own life and experiences,” she says. What little bet might help her do the same?
Along with one of her students, Sophia Hyatt, Jennifer applied to the prestigious Albert H. Small Normandy Institute, which selects student-teacher teams for an intensive study of World War II’s Normandy Campaign.
They were one of just 15 teams to be accepted nationwide.
Together, the pair dove deep into the life of Lorenzo Alvin Taylor, an American soldier born in nearby Tioga who was killed in action on D-Day. They learned that by the time of Lorenzo’s deployment, most of his family had already passed away. That left Jennifer and Sophia to tell Lorenzo’s story, aware that his sacrifice might otherwise be forgotten.
With support from the Normandy Institute, Jennifer and Sophia met with faculty and researchers from George Washington University, traveling first to Washington, D.C. and then to the beaches of Normandy. There, Sophia delivered Lorenzo’s biography next to the fallen soldier’s grave, spreading sand from Omaha Beach into the engravings on his tombstone.
“Do you think he knows we’re here?” Sophia wondered.
Given the passing of Lorenzo’s family, Jennifer and Sophia may have been his first — and perhaps his only — posthumous visitors.
That was this summer. Today, Jennifer and Sophia are home again, going back to school like everyone else.
But for them, this year will be different.
“You can’t go back to being that same small town girl that you were,” Jennifer tells Sophia, who’s starting her senior year. “Because you’re now a world traveler, girl.”
Sophia agrees. The experience connected her with new friends from across the country. A professor at George Washington University encouraged her to apply there for college. In the meantime, she’s grateful for Jennifer — a teacher, she says, who is “very good at being supportive of my dreams…and then figuring out how to take my dreams to the next level.”
It all started with a little bet — in Jennifer and Sophia’s case, with a chance application.
This year, where might your little bet take you?