Connect & Create

EMC² Learning

If you are looking for a message and a speaker team that will inspire, engage, and most importantly move your audience toward actionable results, then 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. In short: we do PD differently. While we might be a pair of published authors, we are both two working classroom teachers who commit ourselves daily to help fellow educators take a second look at the serious scholarship and research science behind playful pedagogy. When we do it right, we truly believe that we’re not just changing the game: we’re changing the world.

We offer practical, purposeful PD to share the power of game-inspired lesson and course design to teachers, schools, and organizations of all sizes. Our message is deeply relatable, actionable, and proven. Whether you’re trying to motivate 10,000 educators at a national conference or a single department in your school, we will not only inspire your audience to change, but we will provide them with practical tools they can use that deliver real results.

Engaging at the Speed of life

At EMC², 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

Michael Matera (@MrMatera) 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. Michael is a 2015 ASCD Emerging Leader with over a decade of teaching experience using interactive play, passion and purpose-driven learning to transform the classroom in international, public and private schools. A nationally recognized speaker, consultant and presenter, Michael is the host of the long-running WellPlayED education podcast and the founder of the annual Hive Summit, an annual event hosted every summer that welcomes thousands of teachers from around the world to a rich and dynamic online speaker lineup of free PD.

 

John Meehan

John Meehan (@MeehanEDU) is the author of EDrenaline Rush: Game-Changing Student Engagement Inspired by Theme Parks, Mud Runs, and Escape Rooms. In July of 2020, Book Authority ranked EDrenaline Rush among the top 10 titles on their list of the “100 Best Teaching Books of All Time.” He is a high school English teacher and an instructional coach with more than 10 years of  experience in public and private schools in the greater Washington, D.C. area. A 2017 ASCD Emerging Leader, an alumnus of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s 2016-2018 Teacher Advisory Council, and a 40 Under 40 award recipient from the Leadership Center for Excellence, John’s passion for education is matched only by his boundless creativity.

We Do Professional Development Differently

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