August 4, 2025
By Jenna Fournel, Chief Curiosity Officer
Listen to this week’s Hooray For Monday podcast to hear Jenna’s conversation with Ben Frazell, an Inspired Teacher who took the Institute in 2011 and is today an instructional coach at Inspired Teaching Demonstration School in Washington, DC.
In the U.S. education system, a student who attends preschool will be in school for between 14 to 15 years. The average number of hours a student spends in DC Public Schools each year is around 1,267. Multiply that by 14 years and you get 17,738 hours of education. That’s a lot of childhood. One hopes those hours are spent well.
Fourteen years ago, we met Ben Frazell and Michele Turner—two teachers who took our Inspired Teaching Institute because they wanted to make the most of those hours with their students—and it’s been a delight to learn that they’ve kept those flames of enthusiasm burning in their work with students ever since. The children they taught in the 2010-2011 school year have all completed their 17,738 hours of preK-12 education by now. But hundreds of other students have passed through Ben and Michele’s classrooms since.
This week, we’re sharing Ben’s story. After he took the Institute, he joined the founding faculty of the Inspired Teaching Demonstration School, where he’s been ever since. This spring, I got to see him working with a group of fourth graders he had been working closely with. It was a delight to observe the same caring connection with every child that was so evident in his classroom the first time I saw him teach in the fall of 2010. Listening to his interview, you’ll see how he’s grown his practice beyond the classroom walls into support he offers school wide.
What Ben Frazell, the 3rd Grade Teacher from Brookland Educational Campus, was aiming to do when he took the Inspired Teaching Institute in the 2010-2014 school year:
“I really just enjoy getting to know kids as people, seeing their curiosity blossom, seeing them grow throughout the year. Every year is a whole new challenge and I don’t ever want to get content at what I’m doing.
I’ve realized how much more students retain when it’s different and something that they like. Inspired teaching has given me more confidence to know I can do things in a different way, and the learning will actually be richer and better for my students.
I feel like a lot of what Inspired Teaching taught us about creating a classroom community helped me form that this year, and I’ve seen the rewards.”
What Ben the Instructional Coach at the Inspired Teaching Demonstration School, is saying now, 14 years further along in his teaching career:
“In my current role, since I work with Kindergarten and up throughout the school, I love seeing the trajectory of students. At the end of 8th grade, we have students do these portfolio presentations where they write an “Inspired Essay” about their time at the school. I get to sit on some of those panels and they never cease to make some of us cry because they talk about how they’ve grown and what they’ve learned…you know, what years of nurturing and support can lead to.
[As an instructional coach] as the Science of Reading and things like that have come along, and we’ve learned more about what kids need, especially at the earliest levels, there have definitely been some pivots and changes in curriculum and things like that. A lot of what I’m thinking about now is how to both give kids the foundation that they need, and then also the engagement and excitement that they need. Because you can definitely do both, and you need both.
[I enjoy] working with teachers who want to improve their practice and appreciate help. We’re really an open-door school, where people are in and out helping each other. It’s nice to be somewhere where we’re collaborative.
As I start working with new teachers, I get to know them as people and see what they need, and that allows me to build trust with them, so that they know I’m there with them, walking alongside them. I do a lot of co-teaching and planning together so the teachers feel supported and not just judged. That’s important to me, to build a community of teachers who feel trusted and like they can try things, and maybe they don’t always go perfectly, and that’s fine.”
The impact of every teacher has a multiplier effect. When you watch this documentary featuring Ben and Michele in the year we first met them, you can see how they planted seeds with their students that year that have grown exponentially ever since. May they share their passions and skills for many more years to come!
For additional insights, resources, and information on Inspired Teaching teacher and youth programming, subscribe to the Hooray For Monday newsletter!
Hooray For Monday is an award-winning weekly publication of Center for Inspired Teaching, a social change nonprofit organization that champions the power of curiosity and is dedicated to transforming the school experience from compliance-based to engagement-based. Inspired Teaching provides transformative, improvisation-based professional learning for teachers that is 100% engaging – intellectually, emotionally, and physically.
