Get Connected

If you are looking for a dynamic professional development experience 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.

In short: we do PD differently. And we help busy educators make sense of the serious research and practical resources that will give them the power to bring playful pedagogy to life in classrooms of any age.

Whether you’re trying to motivate 10,000 educators at a national conference or looking for resources that can transform teaching practices within 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.

Partnering With EMC² Learning

There are many ways to work with us at EMC² Learning. 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.

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

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. Michael is a 2015 ASCD Emerging Leader with nearly two decades 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, a free virtual conference that welcomed thousands of teachers to a rich and dynamic lineup of presentations by teacher leaders in schools around the world.

John Meehan

John Meehan 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 its list of the “100 Best Teaching Books of All Time.” He has over fifteen years working as a high school English teacher and instructional coach in public and private schools across the greater Washington, D.C. area. A 2017 ASCD Emerging Leader, alumnus of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s 2016–2018 Teacher Advisory Council, the The Pulitzer Center’s 2025 Information & AI 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.

Our Story

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. Between them, they’ve written four books exploring the research, science, and design principles behind meaningful engagement. (After all, you don’t publish four books on “fifty ways to give a kid a sticker.”)

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.

The work has been recognized along the way. 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.

But the real measure of success isn’t awards.

It’s the teachers who return: not for another workshop, but for a sustained partnership in the work of designing learning that actually sticks.

Traditional one-shot workshops may spark ideas. But too often, those ideas fade before they ever reach the classroom. EMC² Learning tells a different story. Year after year, over 80% of our members renew, choosing sustained growth over isolated moments of inspiration.

In short? That’s not just fun and games. That’s playing with purpose.

You were one of the best Keynotes I’ve ever experienced! (And I’ve been to ISTE & PETE&C). Thank you so much for coming and blowing our minds. You’ve now impacted hundreds of thousands of our students.

I swear every time I see @MeehanEDU present I walk away wanting to gamify everything. Like literally everything.

Best two days of PD I’ve had in 13 years of teaching. And I could not have meant it more. I am so grateful and thankful!!

Just wow. Thank you @MrMatera we can't wait to take your Gamification suggestions back to #njhunited!

Thank you! Your presentation was absolutely spectacular! Your energy and passion filled that room. I'm so excited to gamify my program, can't wait to get started!

Thank you @MeehanEDU! You spoke right to me and the educator I strive to be!