John Nielson is an instructional coach and classroom teacher. He empowers teachers to transform their classrooms using regulation skills and multi-disciplinary projects. The result can be dynamic learning spaces for everyone.
BetterEd Coaching helps teachers and kids make the most of their time in the classroom working specifically in two areas. BetterEd provides teachers with the tools to help students regulate their nervous systems so they are ready to learn. BetterEd also helps teachers create, implement, and manage integrated, multi-subject units (PBLs) to fully engage all learners in the classroom.
The overwhelming variety of student needs fuels most teachers’ feelings of burnout. Co-regulation tools help teachers identify students’ neurological state in the moment, and gives teachers tools to nudge those students back into a window where they are able to learn. The tools are non-disciplinary, relationship-building, skill-building for the child—and easy for teachers to use, even in a classroom of 30 kids. And, for the most part, co-regulation tools allow teachers to spend more time as their best selves everyday.
Integrated multi-subject units or projects are cool. They are engaging for students, fun to teach, and effective ways to increase learning. But multi-subject units also take planning, management, communication, and organization to pull off. Most teachers are never taught how to implement integrated, multi-subject learning in their classrooms, unless they are willing to learn by trial and error. BetterEd aims to change that.
When teachers create a project (any kind of project—STEM or STEAM, Project Based or Problem Based Learning, Passion Projects, Multidisciplinary Unit, etc.), they own it. BetterEd facilitates and guides the creative process. Then we march through what it will be like to use the project in the classroom. We work through management, expectations, schedules, timing, assessment, differentiation, special needs of students and parents, products, and any other issues that come up. At the end of this preparation day, teachers will be fully prepared to launch their own projects. Later, when they are working their magic in the classroom, we support them as instructional coaches. And after it’s all done, we reconnect to help them plan future projects—because once teachers figure out their system, they will want to plan more (and more and more) integrated, multi-subject units.
John has been a classroom teacher for 22 years. In that time, he had multiple classrooms of grades 3-5 and one year of high school. He also taught in a private, multi-age classroom for middle schoolers.
John was an instructional coach, trained by Jim Knight, for eight years. In that time, John worked with teachers and administrators in grades K-12.
At the heart of John’s teaching and coaching work was always a desire to find more success and joy from learning for the kids as well as the teachers in the classroom. Often, this was accomplished through projects that were integrated (had many subjects combined into them). In education speak, they were called project based learning or problem based learning (PBL’s), or STEM or STEAM projects (Science, Technology, Engineering, [Art,] and Math), or integrated projects, multi-disciplinary units, or integrated units. The precise name is not entirely important, all of these integrate multiple subjects and are of high interest and engagement to students (which translates to higher learning) and energizing for teachers to teach. If, and it is a big if at times, they are prepared and managed well.
Why are these integrated projects so successful, you ask? Kids do not remember the day they did page 73 in the textbook and the worksheet that followed. What they do remember are the hands-on experiences where they were given choice and the ability to create and work in their differentiated ways. Integrated projects, of all names, do this. But not every teacher is trained to teach them and not every teacher is confident in how to make the integrated projects come to life from start to finish.
This is where John’s experience and coaching history are serendipitous. Using his years of coaching teachers and years of his own successes and failures to draw upon, John facilitates the creative, project building process. Teachers are working with their curriculum and their standards. The resulting multi-disciplinary experiences become what teachers want to teach or possibly need to teach. They will be successful and enjoyable for both the teacher and the student.
Through coaching, John found that working with teachers who share students throughout the day (commonly a middle school or upper elementary practice) can be a cohesive, team-building process. This co-teaching or team teaching is equally as powerful for students and teachers but takes very different levels of coordination, management, and communication by the teachers in charge. Building the project, creating expectations, agreeing on the flow, management of the process, and creating means of communication are all amazing team building activities for the teachers.
