Learn Like a PIRATE: Empower Your Students to Collaborate, Lead, and Succeed

Collaboration. Empowerment. Student Leadership. These buzz words get a lot of press, but what do they really mean for today's students? Can students really handle the responsibility of leading the class? Can they actually learn what they need to if they are working together so often? Won't all this freedom cause chaos in the classroom? Not if you're teaching them to learn like PIRATES!

Peer Collaboration builds community and supports teamwork and cooperation.
Improvement-focused learning challenges students to constantly strive to be their best.
Responsibility for daily tasks builds ownership in the classroom.
Active learning turns boring lessons into fun and memorable experiences.
Twenty-first century skills engage students now and prepare them for their futures.
Empowerment allows students to become confident risk-takers who make bold decisions.

In Learn Like a PIRATE, teachers will discover practical strategies for creating a student-led classroom in which students are inspired and empowered to take charge of their learning experience. You'll learn strategies for:

• Crafting active, relevant, and motivating lessons
• Creating opportunities for student leadership
• Providing effective and beneficial feedback
• Instilling confidence so students can take risks
• Increasing curiosity and passion for learning

Incorporate the techniques and strategies Paul Solarz uses in his student-led classroom and watch your students transform into confident, collaborative leaders.

"In Learn Like a PIRATE, Paul Solarz explains how to design classroom experiences that encourage students to take risks and explore their passions in a stimulating, motivating, and supportive environment where improvement, rather than grades, is the focus. The particular techniques (and the underlying philosophy) he offers are highly consistent with teaching practice at the distinguished level in my Framework for Teaching. In that model, I tried to describe, at the distinguished level, classrooms in which the teacher has created a community of learners, with the students themselves assuming much of the responsibility for what occurs there. Mr. Solarz offers specific ideas for how to accomplish that."- Charlotte Danielson, author of Enhancing Professional Practice: A Framework for Teaching

"As I read Learn Like A PIRATE I regretted that I was not teaching in the classroom where I would be able to work with students in the thoughtful and imaginative ways that he suggests. It is rare that we have a firsthand report of the day to day practicalities of transforming classes into places where students can become self-directed, curious, interdependent learners. Paul has succeeded in sharing his passion for authentic 21st century teaching as well as inspiring us to imitate and invent our own models for preparing our students for an increasingly complex world of invention and problem solving."
- Bena Kallick, Co-director of the Institute for Habits of Mind