Improving Student Engagement and Achievement … the Anti-Boring Way

(The video at the top of this post features a classroom teacher reflecting on how she uses the Anti-Boring Toolkit in her classroom.)

Are you a classroom teacher looking to increase student engagement?

Has the COVID craziness burned you out and now you need a jolt of inspiration?

Does your school have COVID relief funds that are going unspent right now?

I was blown away by what this classroom teacher shared with me about how significantly the Anti-Boring Toolkit has improved her teaching practice.

Read on to find out why.

Kar is a French, Math, and Art teacher in Ontario, Canada. She’s also part of the Anti-Boring Learning Lab.

Recently, I invited her to reflect with me on how she teaches the Anti-Boring Toolkit in her classroom, and wowser—did I learn a lot.

What surprised me most (though maybe it shouldn’t have) was how learning the Anti-Boring Toolkit helped her differentiate her curriculum.

“But how?!” I asked. “I don’t directly teach differentiation for teachers.”

“Because I learned the brain science behind learning,” she answered. “When you understand the brain science, you can’t help but restructure your teaching toward differentiation. And then the kids can’t help but be more engaged.”

That moment stuck with me.

So often, differentiation gets framed as a separate skill set—a thing teachers are supposed to layer on top of everything else they’re already doing. What Kar described was different. Learning about how learning actually works changed the way she designed lessons, not just how she modified them after the fact.

In the video above, Kar walks through exactly how she uses the Anti-Boring Mini-Lectures with her students—how she keeps them short, purposeful, and rooted in what students actually need to do with the information. You’ll hear how those shifts supported a wide range of learners in the same classroom, without turning planning into an impossible puzzle.

What I love most about her reflection is that none of this came from chasing engagement tricks or flashy activities. It came from understanding learning science, executive function, and how students build meaning—especially neurodiverse learners who often struggle when instruction is overloaded or unclear.

Her experience is a reminder that when teachers build a stronger learning toolbox—grounded in brain science and student-tested strategies—engagement and achievement tend to follow naturally.

A version of the following article was originally published here on May 27th, 2022.