Planning Learning Experiences That are Worthy of Students’ Time & Attention

If we want to create learning experiences that are worthy of students’ time and attention, we must be planful! PEBC Lab Host and 6th grade Advisor at Jefferson County Open School, Gabrielle Hovinen, joins Michelle Morris Jones on PEBC’s Phenomenal Teaching Podcast to share her process for cultivating a community of reflective, self-directed, and inquisitive students. Student centered, life-worthy and responsive planning promotes student empowerment and fosters the confidence, skills, and drive to engage in difficult work. Gabrielle pairs content standards with carefully scaffolded inquiry based learning experiences which helps her students not only gain critical literacy skills but also make connections between school and the world around them. Her process includes; chunking the year into manageable bits, starting small with shorter units and texts, building discourse skills, increasing the complexity of the tasks and length of units, and increasing the amount of choice. Ultimately, we must “check the landing” by providing lessons that will guide students as they take on new personal, social, and intellectual risks as they climb the metaphorical tree of learning.

This conversation connects to the “Plan” strand of the PEBC Teaching Framework. From an intermediate school in the inner loop of a major American city to an elementary school school resting over 8,000 feet above sea level. From a pre-K-12 grade international school near the Dnieper River to where she first attended school as a kindergartener, Gabrielle has been teaching and adapting to different learning structures for over twenty years. She loves learning and the process of learning and, this month, she is learning how to work with polymer clay, learning how to make a birdhouse, learning how to teach her cats to stay, and learning how to speak Spanish.

The Phenomenal Teaching Podcast is brought to you by Public Education & Business Coalition (PEBC) and is intended to elevate the strands of the PEBC Teaching Framework which is illustrated in Wendy Ward Hoffer’s book, Phenomenal Teaching. Thank you for joining us this season as we strive to share the stories of educators who are making schools and classrooms more phenomenal than ever before by implementing community, planning, workshop, thinking strategies, discourse, and assessment strategies that promote agency, equity, and understanding.

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