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Let’s Build Something Amazing
If you are looking for a dynamic professional development experience that will inspire, engage, and move your audience toward actionable results, we’d love to connect with you.
They say that purpose is what you do for others. And passion is what you do for yourself. Michael and John are proud to bring both of these vital elements together through the consulting services we offer here at EMC² Learning.
Our Services
There Are Many Ways to Work With Us
Check out just a small sample of the services that we offer and reach out so that we can connect and get started designing the best PD for your team.
Expert Presentations
Whether you’re planning a full day conference or a small group training session, EMC² Learning’s expert team will inspire, support, and empower learners to implement what they learn!
Virtual Coaching Events
Go beyond the one day workshop approach to offer your team a network of coaching and support that can help them continue to learn, grow, and strategize new ways to improve all year long.
Admin Alignment Meetings
The EMC² Learning team is proud to work with schools around the world to create timely, tailor-made presentations that are particularly relevant to the unique audience that they serve.
Hands-On Activities
Teach a man to fish, and they’ll fish for a lifetime. Work with our engagement experts to design custom activities that your faculty will never forget.
24/7 Platform Access
Get access to hundreds of engaging resources and fully editable templates that can help your teachers turn research into reality.
Partnership Program
For larger schools who are looking to create longer, lasting change across multiple years, EMC² Learning offers our ultimate level of customized support.
Meet The Founders
Engaging at the Speed of Life
At EMC² Learning, we’re passionate about student centered instruction, and we’re right there in the classroom with students each and every school day to figure out what works and where the passions of these young learners lie. We don’t teach content, we teach people.
And that means paying particularly close attention to the things that make our students so fired up to engage in their myriad interests that extend far beyond the four walls of our schools. From Fortnite to football, LEGO to League of Legends, or Mario Kart to Monopoly — we study the science behind what makes games so addictive and exciting. Then working together, we set out to capture that same lightning in a bottle to create similarly compelling, intentional, and risk rich instructional design.
Michael Matera
Co-Founder · 6th Grade Teacher · Author
Michael Matera is a Milwaukee, Wisconsin-based sixth grade teacher and the author of eXPlore Like a Pirate: Gamification and Game-Inspired Course Design to Engage, Enrich and Elevate Your Learners. A 2015 ASCD Emerging Leader with nearly two decades of teaching experience using interactive play, passion and purpose-driven learning to transform the classroom. Michael is the host of the WellPlayED education podcast and the founder of the annual Hive Summit.
John Meehan
Co-Founder · High School Educator · Author
John Meehan is the author of EDrenaline Rush: Game-Changing Student Engagement Inspired by Theme Parks, Mud Runs, and Escape Rooms — ranked among the top 10 on Book Authority’s “100 Best Teaching Books of All Time.” A 2017 ASCD Emerging Leader with over fifteen years as a high school English teacher and instructional coach, John is an alumnus of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s Teacher Advisory Council and the Pulitzer Center’s AI Teacher Advisory Council.
Published Works
Four Books. Years of Research. Real Results.
Between them, Michael and John have written four books exploring the research, science, and design principles behind meaningful engagement.
Our Story
Why EMC² Learning Had To Exist
One-shot trainings rarely fail because of a lack of effort or expertise. They fall short because it’s impossible to compress a life’s work into a single workshop.
You can’t meaningfully explore student engagement, motivation, assessment, and instructional design in 90 minutes—and you certainly can’t build lasting change that way. The work of playful, student-centered learning is iterative. It evolves. It requires testing, reflection, revision, and community.
John and Michael have spent their careers living in that work—first in classrooms, then alongside teachers in schools and districts across the country.
And everywhere they went, teachers kept asking the same thing: “Is there a place where the best strategies live—updated, modeled, and ready to use? Where do we go next? How do we stay connected to this work after the workshop ends?”
Books are powerful, but they’re slow by design. They’re frozen in time the moment they’re published—while classrooms, students, and technology keep moving. Teachers needed something more dynamic. A living pipeline. A one-stop home for high-quality resources, templates, and strategies built for real classrooms and real constraints.
That need is what gave rise to EMC² Learning.
Changing the Game for Teachers Around the World
Founded in March of 2021, EMC² Learning is a member-based professional learning community designed to do what workshops and books alone cannot: provide educators with continuous access to thoughtfully designed, classroom-ready resources grounded in research and refined through practice.
Today, EMC² Learning supports thousands of educators, schools, and districts worldwide with a growing library of gamified instructional strategies—each modeled, tested, and built to be adaptable rather than prescriptive.
In 2023, EMC² Learning won the Future of Education Technology Conference Pitchfest for Best Online Classes and was named a Top EdTech Product finalist by District Administration. In 2024, HundrED selected EMC² Learning as one of just twelve organizations worldwide honored in its Spotlight on Gamified Curricula.
Year after year, over 80% of our members renew, choosing sustained growth over isolated moments of inspiration. That’s not just fun and games. That’s playing with purpose.
80%+
Member Renewal Rate
2023
FETC Pitchfest Winner
Top 12
HundrED Global Spotlight
Let’s Connect
Get In Touch
Whether you’re trying to motivate 10,000 educators at a national conference or looking for resources that can transform teaching practices, we will not only inspire your audience but provide them with practical tools that deliver real results.
Our Location
10936 N. Port Washington Rd Suite 211, Mequon, WI 53092