EMC² Learning is home to a thriving community of thousands of educators from schools all around the world. Week after week, we are consistently blown away by their commitment to creativity and student-centered instruction. Truly, there are hundreds of members of the EMC² Learning community who are more than deserving of a shout out. But for the sake to time, we’ve narrowed down our field to just a small handful who have really been doing some incredible work in recent weeks. Here are five educators who are raising the bar for their students in their classrooms with resources from the EMC² Learning community.
A Second Grade Math Class Goes “Hands” On
Lacey Lemley is a second grade teacher from Cleveland, Tennessee. This week, her second grade students tried their hands at the celebrated social media sensation #EggDashChallenge activity, which she adapted to serve as an instructional tool to help teach them how to determine the correct time by reading the position of the hands on the face of an analog clock.
A New Way to Play in Middle School Band
Damon Wille is a middle school band teacher with a love of playful learning and an imagination that rivals even the most creative minds from a galaxy far, far away. In recent weeks, he’s seen tremendous results in his classroom thanks to a pitch-perfect review game that he dreamed up that uses lesson design strategies available from EMC² Learning while blending the familiar gameplay of old-school dungeon maps with the intergalactic fun and excitement of Star Wars. But don’t be fooled into thinking that the whole affair is merely fun and games! Mr. Wille’s game-based activity is actually designed to draw students deeper into the world of his course content — and it is garnering incredible results! As he explained…
“The engagement levels today were insane! And the best moment – a kid who hasn’t played a scale correctly all year nailed it and won the dungeon! Kids nearly put that boy on their shoulders! The most celebration I’ve ever had! Sounded like a football game!”
Damon Wille, Middle School Band Teacher
Yo Ho Ho! An AP Pirate’s Life For Me!
Stewart Parker teaches Advanced Placement Human Geography in Winter Park, Florida. He runs a tight ship, but the fact that his AP class attracts a boatload of serious scholars doesn’t mean that this savvy teaching vet is relegated to sailing the shallow waters of traditional lectures every day. This week, Stewart plunged his classes into the stranger tides of a #QRBreakIn — which places rival bands of learners on self-paced teams of their own with the power to sail from port to port throughout a massive sea of activity centers in search of sunken treasure. Here’s what the Captain himself had to say:
“It’s a stations review but with a twist. They don’t rotate, they spin the wheel to “collect” items for the treasure hunt. There’s a vocab station, a video station, a models drawing station. This makes the review way more enjoyable and competitive. The students LOVE when we do things like this. Reading an article and taking 10 unique notes? When it’s a race, they do it! Such an awesome strategy!”
Stewart Parker, AP Human Geography Teacher
Who Says Grown Ups Can’t Play Too!?
Coleman Brown is an instructional technology facilitator based out of Greenville, South Carolina. Greenville County Schools is the largest school district in South Carolina and the 46th largest in the US. And last week, Coleman had the opportunity to lead a group of principals and administrators from GCS through a spirited game of EMC² Learning’s Clothespin Bumper Cars. Coleman’s video of the event really does a remarkable job of capturing the palpable excitement that this activity helped to generate among session attendees, and he added that this approach to peer-to-peer share out was “a great way to model academic discourse for staff and students.”
Playing With Purpose for Real Results
This week, EMC² Learning is proud to recognize the incredible work of third grade teacher and adjunct college professor Dr. Jen Toney, a Sharpsville, Pennsylvania educator who was recently honored with the “Extra Mile Award” by the Pennsylvania Association for Educational Communications and Technology. Dr. Toney is a world class educator with a love of playful pedagogy, who has shared her wisdom as a past presenter at the 2022 Hive Summit — and she credits EMC² Learning with helping her to rethink her approach to student-centered education. As she writes: “Thank you @MeehanEDU & @mrmatera for writing #EDrenalineRush & #EMC2Learning #FullyEngaged! I am inspired by your words and work!”
The activities featured in this blog post are just a handful of the 600+ resources available in the EMC² Learning library. This entire library is available to Engagement Engineers and members of the Creative Corps, 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.