Hover-Free Teaching: Guest Blogpost by Miriam Plotinsky

Make sure to listen to Episode 76 Zooming In on Hover-Free Secondary Teaching with Miriam Plotinsky.

Is it possible for students to take more responsibility for their own learning, which in turn gives teachers more bandwidth to handle a variety of instructional needs as they arise in real time? In my conversation with Melissa this month, we discuss the challenges around how to achieve an instructional model that puts more ownership on students, also known as “hover-free” teaching. While student-centered classrooms are often misunderstood as being anywhere from difficult to impossible in terms of implementation, taking a measured approach with one small step at a time gets teachers ever closer to achieving ideal results.

The four stages of this process are fully outlined in Teach More, Hover Less: How to Stop Micromanaging Your Secondary Classroom (W.W. Norton, 2022), a practical guide to moving from “helicopter” teaching to a method that increases the level of shared responsibility among teachers and students. To get a sense of what two of these stages look like, read these linked excerpts in Edutopia and Mind/Shift (KQED). Both include specific strategies or scenarios that demonstrate what “hover-free” teaching looks like in practice, and that help teachers who want to increase student agency get just a little bit closer to achieving their goals in 2023.