Just when you thought it was safe to go back into the waters, each summer, something absolutely wild happens on television screens around the world.
Suddenly, millions of people start caring deeply about sharks. We’re talking, like, really deeply.
It’s not because a brand-new shark species was discovered. It’s not because millions of Americans suddenly decided to fire up their dusty old DVD of Jaws (though we certainly wouldn’t blame them for doing so). And it’s not because marine biology suddenly topped the charts in pop culture or the iOS app store.
It’s because for one week every year, Discovery Channel’s Shark Week makes learning about sharks feel like a major event.
And that, teachers, is the secret sauce.
Take a look at just how decked out the former Discovery Channel building in Silver Spring, Maryland, got itself gussied up for Shark Week just a few short summers ago…
Pretty JAW-some, right?!?
Shark Week doesn’t just show shark content. It creates a larger than life, must-see event. It builds a week-long tidal wave of hype and hullaballoo. It teases what’s coming next. It leans into theme to thoughtfully engage its audience across all sorts of platforms. It turns science into a spectacle. And you can do the same in your classroom.
So, What Can Teachers Learn From Shark Week?
Here are five high-impact ways to bring that same energy to your instruction (with a few ready-to-use EMC² Learning resources designed to help).
1. Theme Work Makes The Dream Work
Shark Week doesn’t introduce brand-new content each year. But it does take a thoughtful moment at the start of each new summer to represent it ever so differently. In 2020, the “Saving the Blue” theme for the week gave the entire ordeal a conservation bent. Three years later, Hollywood A-Lister Jason Mamoa (eponymous star of the box office sensation “Aquaman”) played host and gave the week a larger-than-life, superhero flair. But again and again, this brilliant annual showcase of our favorite ocean dwellers uses one unifying theme to turn routine programming into a national obsession. Teachers can do the same.
Whether you’re teaching figurative language or the periodic table, the real magic comes from the wrapper. Frame your lesson as a deep-sea expedition, a haunted house escape, or a cosmic journey through space—and suddenly, everyday instruction becomes immersive.
Why not build hype for an upcoming unit with a movie trailer (crafted on iMovie)?
Could a themed timer be enough to make your students feel like they are literally underwater?
How much more excited would your students be to enter an immersive world of learning if they arrived into class and saw the desks had been completely rearranged (or the lights were turned off, or there were cryptic posters hung about the classroom), all thanks to a clever splash of teacher creativity?
While it sounds silly, these little imaginative tweaks can be super effective. Students lean in because the theme gives their learning context, stakes, and flavor.
From the way that we see things here at EMC² Learning, theming isn’t fluff. It’s a strategy. It helps students connect, remember, and care. And when paired with the right content, it can make your classroom feel less like a checklist—and more like an adventure.
2. Make It a Multi-Day Spectacle
Just like Shark Week stretches excitement across multiple days, EMC² Learning’s Text Quest transforms a regular unit into a full-blown classroom saga. In this resource collection (like the pirate-themed “Black Flag Buccaneers”), student teams battle it out in daily challenges like the Daily Debate and Bonus Battle, unlocking rewards and climbing the leaderboard as the story unfolds… and keeping tabs of their daily progress on the weeklong leaderboard as they go.
Each day builds on the last, creating momentum, competition, and buy-in—without sacrificing rigor. And just like our favorite Shark Week lineup, suddenly those one off experiences suddenly start to feel like much, much more than a single lesson. It’s a journey. And best of all? You can extend or adapt it as far as your content takes you.
3. Feed Students' Hunger for Curiosity
Shark Week isn’t a passive watch party—it’s a choose-your-own-adventure. Some viewers tune in for the science, others for the thrills, and some just want to see a Megalodon. The magic is in the variety. And that exact same strategy works wonders in the classroom.
EMC² Learning’s Scramble Centers offer modular, fast-paced learning with an ocean of choice. Students leave their seats and dive into the content, collecting activity cards one at a time from a central pool. After tackling a task back at their desk group, it’s right back into the current to grab the next. The more they explore, the more they learn—and the more points they can earn.
No two student teams move the same way, and no two groups will tackle the same path. But that’s exactly the point. Everyone’s engaged in meaningful, on-task work. The waters are swirling with hungry students, chomping at the chance to tackle different challenges and show what they know. And just like a shark on the hunt, students are constantly in pursuit of something new.
It’s kinetic. It’s customizable. And it turns your classroom into an active ecosystem of curiosity and collaboration.
4. Send Your Classes on a Deep Dive
Shark Week doesn’t settle for surface-level facts—it plunges into the depths with sonar, submersibles, and suspense. In that spirit, we created EMC² Learning’s Database Deep Dive, a fully editable Google Slides presentation designed to help teachers (and students!) bring that same energy to academic research.
Instead of assigning a standard annotated bibliography, students become research explorers, piloting a state-of-the-art submersible on a mission to recover academic “artifacts” from the depths of trusted digital databases. Each source is logged, each annotation becomes a voyage abstract, and each step is mapped on a stylized expedition chart. Students even log “sunken treasure value” for each find.
The way we see it? This type of resource is research reframed: not as a scavenger hunt, but as a high-stakes expedition. It sharpens information literacy, fosters deeper curiosity, and invites students to go beyond the Google search bar into those deeper waters of meaningful scholarship.
Because when students are cast as explorers rather than paper writers, they don’t just cite sources. They discover them.
5. Harness the Power of Fear (and Fun)
Let’s be honest: part of what makes Shark Week such a hit is the fear factor. The unknown. The lurking danger. The primal thrill of knowing something could go terribly wrong. It’s what keeps people watching—and it’s what resources like Shake Shifters tap into in the classroom.
In this tense, high-stakes review game, students race to survive as the land beneath them literally disappears. One wrong move, and it’s overboard into shark-infested waters. Designed with a gritty, last-person-standing tone, Shake Shifters is part survival game, part academic drill—where strategy, speed, and smarts are the only things keeping players afloat.
But here’s the twist: just like the very best of Shark Week’s example, resources like these are not just about chaos. The “game” subtly reinforces content mastery by forcing players to think fast, adapt under pressure, and make high-stakes choices—all while staying engaged in a suspenseful scenario that feels more like a board game than a ho-hum review.
So long as we take the appropriate precautions never to create needless stress in our students, a fun (and strategic) injection of playful fear can be a powerful motivator. And with Shake Shifters, you channel it toward something far more productive: focused, fast-paced, unforgettable learning.
The activities featured in this blog post are just a handful of the 1,000+ resources available and on their way to arrive shortly in the EMC² Learning library. This entire library is available to all members with an active Engagement Engineer or Engagement Engineer PLUS account, and is included with your annual site membership. We hope you’ll consider joining us as an Engagement Engineer to unlock a full year of site access. For complete details including our exclusive limited time offer for annual site membership, click here.
