Jann Leppien, Ph.D.

Hello, my name is Jann Leppien, and I look forward to attending Confratute this summer. I have been presenting for many years in the areas of designing effective curriculum to advance learner potential and creating classroom environments that promote student thinking to bring about student agency and change. In my strand, Learning to Think, Thinking to Learn: Strategies to Empower Students participants will explore the use of instructional strategies, routines, and practices that can be used to motivate young people to take an active processing role in the learning process. Some of these tools might be the use of Visible Thinking Routines from the Cultures of Thinking Project: http://www.pz.harvard.edu/projects/cultures-of-thinking .

In the strand, Quality Curriculum and Instruction for Advanced Learners: A Look at Essential Elements, we will explore what is possible when curriculum is designed more flexibly to provide multiple pathways for students to construct meaning around disciplinary concepts. During this strand, participants will examine how to take a curricular unit and make it more conceptually driven and inquiry based in nature to create a culture of thinking that invites students to see connections, contradictions, alternative perspectives, and different ways of thinking. Then as translators of theory into practice, educators who attend this strand will take a unit of study they already teach and redesign it based on essential elements that can help structure student inquiry toward the pursuit of exploring big ideas that matter.

I look forward to meeting you this summer, as we explore the nature of thinking, student engagement, and promoting student agency in learning.