Shannon Shabanaj | 6th Grade

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. 

With all of these different instructional techniques at play at once, there was definitely a lot to take in as I tried to synthesize all of the resources from EMC² Learning with the systems I’d learned from Adam’s book! I’ll be honest – I had the same hang ups when I first started using Eduprotocols. But I committed to working through all of the logistics of setting up groups, pushing out templates, and organizing materials. In time, I discovered that the resources from EMC² Learning actually had something of a compounding effect built right into how they all sort of worked together by helping to encourage student creativity through playful pedagogy and game-based learning. I simply had to develop systems and procedures for how my students would go about making use of this new mindset in our classroom. And now I have that done so it’s much easier to run group activities!