Change the Game with EDrenaline Rush

You are in for a thrilling ride today! Check out our guest post by author of EDrenaline Rush by John Meehan!

Fasten your seatbelts and prepare to be inspired!

Guest Post by John Meehan

You’ve seen the photos.

That mild-mannered girl you went to high school with proudly crawling face first through a mud-drenched maze of barbed wire.

Your laid-back buddy from work dumping a bucket of ice water over his head and challenging three friends to do the same.

Your soft-spoken aunt screaming at the top of her lungs, hands flung wildly to the sky as a perfectly timed camera captures the biggest drop of an inverted roller coaster.

Or, picture this: dozens of students, once bleary eyed and disengaged, now racing back and forth in every direction in your classroom, sprinting at full speed to collect brightly colored Easter eggs and solve the complex problems hidden inside.

Wait, what?

Here’s the secret: enthusiasm is infectious! And if our lesson plans could capture the same sort of energy that permeate the thrills and excitement of the world outside of our classrooms, then there is no telling what sort of incredible things our students can achieve.

Hi. I’m John Meehan -- an eleventh grade English teacher and high school instructional coach based just outside of Washington D.C. I’m a theme park junkie, a thrill-seeking mud runner, and a lifelong fan of just about any sort of brain teaser that I can get my hands on. I wrote EDrenaline Rush to capture the same energy you’d expect to find in a day at Walt Disney World. The same challenge you’d feel in an extreme obstacle course race, and the same nail-biting tension you’d encounter when exploring the twisting surprises and hidden chambers of an escape room. Because guess what? We don’t teach content. We use our content to teach people. And great teaching isn’t content specific: it’s grounded in positive relationships and a willingness to work really, really hard on behalf of the people you serve. When folks are genuinely fired up to tackle a challenge, they’ll push themselves far beyond the limits of what they believe can ever be done. And that works for any grade level. Any age group. Any course. And any content area.

To explore each of these concepts in closer detail, EDrenaline Rush is broken down into three main sections:

THEME PARKS -
Tap into the power of theming, learn how a well told story can hide the fact that you’re spending a ton of time just waiting in line, and craft mastery-based rubrics with no red lights that leave students eager to take learning opportunities for another ride.

MUD RUNS -
This section is all about extreme obstacles and peak performance. We talk goal setting, team building, and clever social media strategy to get the learners in your classroom feeling like warriors as they prepare to do battle with any challenge that your curriculum might ever think to throw in their direction.

ESCAPE ROOMS -
Want to see what happens when an ordinary lesson plan becomes a high stakes team versus team race against the clock? The final section of EDrenaline Rush will walk you through designing your own class escape room, using cues from these same pulse-pounding activities to craft stand-alone lessons where students can’t wait to see what’s next.

I’m so pumped to share this amazing project with you, and I sincerely think it will help you change the game in your entire approach to lesson planning. Of course, any good thrill ride comes with a warning label, right? So here’s my cautionary advice for teachers interested in taking EDrenaline Rush for a spin:

EDrenaline Rush is an action-packed playbook of game-changing pedagogy, featuring outrageous stories of high-impact pedagogy and a nonstop parade of educational surprises. It is not recommended for teachers who are comfortable with worksheets or the “same old, same old.” After reading, you may experience increased excitement for teaching, untapped levels of inspiration, and a strong desire to check out neighborhood thrift stores, toy aisles, and yard sales in search of colorful toys and board games for use in your classroom. Educators with a reluctance to put students at the center of their instruction should not ride.

For more information, connect with me on Twitter (@MeehanEDU) or visit www.EDrenalineRush.com