Although the concepts taught here are simple, they are not easy to achieve.  The success of the course is a result of the building of trust between instructor and students and in turn, among students.  Each lesson builds that trust while sharing a simple but highly effective technique used by the most successful people in the world.  

Click here to see what some recent students thought about the Strategies program.

Many people wonder if the reason the course worked was because I was teaching it.  As much as it flatters me to hear that, it’s the material and the way it is taught that makes the course shine.  My replacement has done incredibly well and he had the memory of my place in the school to contend with.  Since I left, several other teachers in my school have taught the course successfully.

I strongly believe that any teacher with a good attitude about teens and a heart can take the words I’ve written and make them come to life.  Teaching is one of the toughest jobs I’ve ever had so I wanted to make the materials available for teaching this course as complete and easy to use as possible.  Plus, whoever teaches the course will have a year of email support to help them achieve their goals with their students. 

Teachers who want additional resources may purchase the book I wrote detailing my teaching style entitled, "When Am I Ever Going to Use This?  101 Ways to Survive and Thrive in the High School Classroom" available as an downloadable E-Book.

When was it decided that school should not be fun?  Why would kids want to go somewhere every day for twelve years that is so inherently serious all the time? 

We live in an entertainment driven world and as a society we seem to honor most the people who entertain us – actors, musicians, athletes.  But we expect our kids who are constantly bombarded with the media in all its forms to sit and listen to one human speaking.  We as adults have problems doing that! 

Think of how it feels to sit in a long after school meeting or professional day with a less than inspiring speaker.  And as stressful as life is for most of us these days, most of us don’t have the types of emotional challenges that many of our teens have to overcome.

There's enough research now that shows that learning in a sterile and often harsh environment does not empower students to shine or even retain what they're learning  Research has also shown that we learn best in a fun, positive supportive climate Strategies creates on a daily basis.

Let’s lighten the load a bit for our students while challenging them to do their best.  Let’s add a little fun to their learning.  You’ll be amazed when you see how much students thrive when they begin to enjoy school!

My favorite quote about teaching from Eric Butterworth is “Tell me and I forget.  Show me and I remember.  Involve me and I understand.”

Speaker and businessman Alex Mandossian said at the recent Mark Victor Hansen (co-author of the "Chicken Soup for the Soul" series) “Mega Speaking Seminar” that according to a study at Yale University, his audience:

• Will forget 40% of what he told them in the following forty minutes. 
   

• They will forget 30% more in the next 24 hours.  
   

• A week from the date he spoke, another 20% will have been forgotten. 
   

• They will lose 90% of what they had heard that day.  90%!!

The cure for that memory loss?  Activity.  Learning with activity aids retention. Some of the most well known motivational speakers in the world have taken this knowledge to design seminars for their audiences that are filled with activity.  They recognize the value of this style of learning and realize that it's part of what brings people back over and over and keeps their business thriving.
 

Kids today want what they’re learning to connect with their lives NOW.  They can’t see far enough into the future to understand where they’ll need to know history or the Pythagorean Theorem.  But if you can show them how it connects with their lives now, they become eager students. 

Many say that students of previous generations had to learn seriously and that may be true.  But those generations didn’t have the distractions that kids today have.  We can either keep trying to make them like we were and keep losing them to all the things that interest them more than school or we can find a way to use those things to connect with them and entice them to learn. 

Seeing the reactions students had to knowing their learning styles taught me an important lesson.  Students want to be in on what’s going on.  They want to know why we do what we do.  The little two year old who asks “Why” has evolved into the high school student who asks, “Why do I have to learn this?” or “When am I ever going to use this?”  If we can answer that question convincingly, we move closer to having them become active participants in their own education. 

Awareness of that simple distinction changed the way I taught. I had always been pretty forthright with my students but I now began to share the ‘why’ of everything I did or at least made it comfortable for them to ask.  It was more than students knowing which standard the lesson addressed.  It was knowing why this mattered to their lives now and later. 

Many of the methods I used to teacher this course were discovered in business seminars.  People who speak at these incredibly large and expensive seminars are very effective at educating the members of the audience as well as keeping them motivated and entertained.  If they don’t do a good job speaking, they’re done professionally. 

A business closes if it’s not successful.  Classroom teachers who are boring and don’t have the ability to teach are still in the classroom for the most part.  It’s not that they’re not trying their best.  It may be that they were never trained to be great speakers.  Whatever the reason, they’re still there. That’s the way school systems are set up.  

I know this because I certainly have had my boring days. I even bored myself so much that I took a leave of absence!  I only wish I had learned these techniques earlier in my teaching career!  But I had the distinct advantage that I got to test these techniques daily with high school students from all walks of life and when I did, the results were stunning.  I've captured these in a new book, "When Am I Every Going to Use This?  101 Tips to Survive and Thrive in the High School Classroom" which is now available in immediately downloadable E-Book format here.