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Join me for a free webinar with Toddle on August 21 to explore how a human-centered approach to AI can transform education. We’ll dive into practical strategies for using AI to spark curiosity, unleash creativity, and streamline planning—all while amplifying your teaching voice.

You’ll walk away with fresh, actionable ideas. Plus, Melissa Silver will share how Toddle AI is helping her school personalize learning.

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😊 More EduProtocols (and more templates)

In today’s 💡 Big Idea below, I’ll talk about the Fast and Curious EduProtocol — and how much I’m loving it in my classroom.

Thankfully, there are LOTS of other EduProtocols to get your students thinking and learning.

In our post, we share 10+ free EduProtocols — and lots of templates to make them happen! They include:

• Random Emoji Power Paragraph

• Cyber Sandwich

• Iron Chef

• 8p*Arts

• Sketch and Tell

• BookaKucha

• Frayer a Friend

• … and more

💡 THE BIG IDEA 💡

🏁 Repetitions, mastery, fun: Meet Fast and Curious

Now that I’m back in the classroom, I’m confronted with a few teaching realities …

1. When the air conditioning quits, everyone suffers.

2. Fire drills are a real thing — and they’re usually not part of our curriculum plan.

3. Students repetitions to make learning permanent.

That repetitions part is important, isn’t it?

So often, I’ll hear people talking about pushing to more critical thinking, deep thinking, rigorous work, etc. But you need the foundational building blocks in place to build to those high levels.

Once, I heard someone say: “If you want students to connect the dots, you have to have dots first.”

So, let’s create some dots …

… and one of my favorite ways to do that is the Fast and Curious EduProtocol.

Wait … what’s an EduProtocol?

EduProtocols are structured, flexible lesson frameworks -- "lesson frames" -- designed to make classroom instruction more engaging, efficient, and effective. They were created by Jon Corippo and Marlena Hebern, both former educators and leaders in educational technology.

They wrote all about them in their book: The EduProtocol Field Guide.

What is the Fast and Curious EduProtocol?

The Fast and the Curious is one of the most popular EduProtocols, especially for building fluency with facts, vocabulary, or quick recall skills.

It’s a high-energy, short-cycle review protocol that helps students learn fast — and keeps them motivated by treating practice like a game.

It’s great for teaching content that needs short, repeated exposures and quick recall. So that could include ...

• vocabulary words

• states/countries and capitals

• elements on the periodic table

• grammar rules

• order of operations practice in math

• historical dates and events

• human body systems and functions

• verb conjugations in world languages

How does the Fast and Curious EduProtocol work?

1. First try — The teacher gives students a quick assessment-type activity, but it's not formally assessing how much students know. Students often do this first quiz or activity without direct instruction from the teacher. It lets students "give it a go," trying to use context clues or previous understanding to figure out the answers to the new material.

2. Quick feedback — This is where Fast and Curious SLAYS traditional paper worksheets. Immediately, students see whether their answers were right or wrong, which beats the feedback loop of grading paper worksheets (one to three days before students get them back). Plus, the teacher gets to see -- in aggregate -- what questions students are missing and which ones they're getting right. It lets the teacher provide instant, data-driven feedback to students so they can correct course right away.

3. A second try — After students have received feedback and coaching from the teacher, they do the exact same quick assessment game they did before — for a second time.

Tools to use for Fast and Curious

The Fast and the Curious applies to any kind of instant "check for understanding" assessment tool, like: Kahoot with groups, Wayground (formerly Quizizz), Snorkl to draw answers, Socrative with open ended questions, etc. The benefit of using these tech-based assessment apps is the quick data it provides and the instant feedback for students. (More on that in a moment.)

Why I’ve been using it

I’m teaching Spanish, and it’s very vocabulary intensive. Students have a lot of new words to learn in each unit. The sooner they learn the vocabulary, the sooner we can use it for the fun stuff — storytelling, conversation, reading, etc.

Like I said earlier … the dots, the foundation we’re building everything else upon.

Fast and Curious gives them repetitions but keeps it interesting.

I think I’m going to stick with it!

I’ve broken down the whole Fast and Curious EduProtocol in a post, with additional resources and lots of details …

👋 How we can help

There are even more ways I can support you in the important work you do in education:

1. Read one of my six books about meaningful teaching with tech.

2. Take one of our online courses about practical and popular topics in education.

3. Bring me to your school, district or event to speak. I love working with educators!