After coming to this conference for over 20 years, he is the best speaker I have seen.
Trevor is a teacher, author, speaker, and founder of Epic PBL. His books The Epic Classroom and The Collaborative Classroom have helped teachers worldwide to create purposeful and dynamic learning experiences. Trevor has taught in middle, high school, and college classrooms, and currently teaches pre-services teachers at Grand Valley State University. He was a national faculty member for the Buck Institute for Education, and is one of the Andrew Gomez Dream Foundation speakers. His work has been featured in the Huffington Post, Edutopia, EdWeek, and WeAreTeachers. Trevor's inspiring and informative videos have been viewed over 35 million times. At the heart of Trevor’s work is the conviction that every student has the potential for greatness, and that every teacher can be equipped to unlock that potential.
A strong why allows us to withstand any how. This keynote explores how having and articulating a greater underlying purpose to work inspires deeper engagement and more joy in the process, for students and educators. Using research and storytelling, Trevor helps educators understand how embedding purpose in curriculum, relationships, and their own careers can have a profound impact on their students and themselves.
A recent US survey shows that the main reason people are fired from their jobs is that they lack soft skills: critical thinking, communication, collaboration, adaptability, and confidence. Trevor equips teachers to craft learning experiences so that students develop these critical skills while learning 'hard skills’ and academic content. Students do purposeful work while becoming better communicators, collaborators, problem solvers, and citizens.
Some students are written off as “bad kids” or “too far gone.” School and home experiences have made them difficult to reach and teach. However, by learning their stories, building trust, and engaging them authentically in the classroom, connections can be made and futures can be changed. With inspiration and SEL instruction, Trevor shares proven practices to create an engaged and meaningful classroom for all students.
Trevor inspires and equips educators with actionable ideas and proven best practices to facilitate successful collaboration. Authenticity and trust are the heart of strong student teamwork. When students are engaged in meaningful, relevant group work, collaboration is no longer a struggle but transforms into an anticipated, dynamic practice with rich outcomes and deeper learning.
Definition of Epic: 1. A story or narrative centered around a hero 2. Spectacular; impressive; memorable. If learning is not memorable, should it even be considered learning? For too long, traditional education has used outdated practices to deliver complex and well-intended content to students with very little hope of that subject matter being retained. It often looks like this: Lectures are given --->Students write the information down ---> Students take a test on that information ---> Information is discarded from the brain ---> Repeat. In the The Epic Classroom, Trevor Muir presents a project based learning method that uses the power of storytelling and brain science to give educators practical and proven practices to achieve real student engagement. In return, learning that is permanent and memorable. Any teacher, in any subject area, and in any grade level can use the story-centered project based learning framework of The Epic Classroom to transform their classrooms into settings where students are engaged, challenged, and transformed. In this book you will discover - How to increase student engagement - How to plan and execute effective high quality project based learning experiences- Specific strategies for leading engaged students - Outlines and tools to plan, manage, and assess projects - Methods to increase academic performance in students.