Shannon Shabanaj is a 21-year veteran teacher from Southlake, Texas. These days, she teachers sixth grade GTSS/SS – Contemporary World Cultures and Geography, and she has found that rather than piling on “just one more thing” to keep track of in her classroom, the EMC² Learning approach to student-centered instruction has actually been a perfect pairing with a number of other systems and strategies that she has put in place to keep her instruction engaging and full of all sorts of creativity from bell to bell.
From Shutdown to Standout
During the Covid Shutdown in the Spring of 2020, I discovered the Adam Moler’s blog. Adam was in the process of publishing his first book, The EduProtocol Field Guide Social Studies Edition. And he shared all of the amazing successes he had in his classroom using Eduprotocols he had tailored to his social studies lessons in conjunction with a number of activities he had adapted from EMC² Learning. I loved the different approaches in the classroom. The two systems really seemed to fit together seamlessly, and it was awesome seeing his classes use the protocols and then shift to a Resource Rumble for review! I bought the Eduprotocols books first and then November 2021, I got my first subscription to EMC² Learning.
A New Mindset Creates a New Skill Set
One of the things that I love so much about this site is that the structure of EMC² Learning very closely aligns to the mindset I’d already started to develop by reading Adam Moler’s work and exploring the Eduprotocols approach. In each lesson, the class is challenged to make use of a particular frame in different ways but it is gamified (which the kids love!). I quickly found that since my students were so used to the structure of the Eduprotocols, they very easily adapted to the EMC² Learning approaches. I really liked the gamified way of approaching textual evidence in particular. The activities were similar to ones I had designed in the past, but EMC² Learning took it to the next level with all sorts of engaging extras like immersive themes and in-game surprises, which really helped to draw my students into the lesson plan. I am continuing to work on engagement plus up the Reading and Writing skills within my Social Studies classroom. It’s so great having a variety of activities to change up the tasks.
EMC² Learning is home to more than 600 fully editable resources for any course or content area. Engagement Engineers and members of the Creative Corps enjoy a full year of access to each of these resources on demand. We hope you’ll consider joining us to unlock a full year of site access. For complete details including our exclusive limited time offer for annual site membership, click here.