The Educator's ATLAS: Your Roadmap to Engagement

by Weston Kieschnick

Think back to your most engaging experience as a student. What made it so exhilarating and memorable? What made it so effective? Such questions about student engagement obsessed Weston Kieschnick from his earliest days as a teacher. Today, Kieschnick travels the globe to keynote and coach educators on the topics most relevant to student success. In the intervening decades, Kieschnick refined his teaching craft, observed the most captivating teachers, and studied the best speakers to reverse engineer a student engagement formula. The result is the ATLAS model—a simple, five-point roadmap for capturing student engagement in the first moments of class sustaining it all the way to the last. The Educator's ATLAS holds both learner needs and teacher wisdom in equal importance. Central to this is a definition of student engagement that—once and for all—clarifies the teacher’s actionable role. Teachers will finish this book with a plan in hand and the full confidence that they are ready to be engagement pros. And as is always the case with Kieschnick’s books, readers will laugh and have a lot of fun along the way.

Genres: Education, Teaching

208 pages, Paperback

Published May 5, 2022

Reviews

[Melinda Murphy · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book would be a great read for a new teacher or a future teacher as part of a student teaching program. For veterans it is an excellent reminder of how each element of a lesson plan is an opportunity to engage students in learning - and a reminder that they have the power to create that opportunity for all students.

Kieschnick gives solid guidance to developing an engaging lesson with all the essential elements in a straightforward and realistic manner. He does a nice job speaking to the research that supports the framework he builds without drowning the reader in research studies and edu-speak.

[Kyle Berry · Rating 4 out of 5]

Another solid entry by Kieschnick. I've enjoyed applying the ATLAS model to my lessons and I do believe it is having a positive effect on how things are going. I would recommend this book not only to math teachers but to teachers of any subject. The model makes sense mostly because the author does such a good job making it make sense.

[baker97 · Rating 1 out of 5]

Had to read this for work. First note: he claims to be "close" with his pastor (and reveals he is basically a nominal Roman catholic), yet unashamedly uses some vulgar language and endorses, even teaches, evolution as essential to understanding education. Other issues include repetitive and sometimes unclear writing, and bad pacing. For example, he suffers a bit from Linked in word salads and phrases that have no actual meaning. He also takes forever to get to the meat of a chapter and interact with real data. I am not well read in educational literature, but a common feature of other reviews is that there is nothing new in this book. I read nothing that I had not at least tangentially heard of.
Benefits of this book could be that it is a good introduction/overview for lesson planning. The early chapters could also be instructive/inspiring for preachers who need to work on sermon or Bible lesson delivery. Would recommend to the occasional person in unique career situations. Would not recommend to most.

[Brittany Libell · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book sparked a lot of new ideas for me in how we engage students throughout an entire lesson. I enjoyed Weston’s examples of ATLAS in action and wish that there had been more examples. I was slightly disappointed that the final chapter included only one math exemplar and it had been used in an earlier chapter. Other than that, I truly enjoyed this book.

[Kim Walker · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent read on engagement of students. I enjoyed the refresher! Sometimes as educators we forget how to make sure students are interested and paying attention! Thank you Mr. Kieschnick! Great book!

[Davina Frazier · Rating 2 out of 5]

His formula is not original. It is pretty much the structure you read of how most lessons should go. This book is more so for novice teachers.

[Nicole Smith · Rating 3 out of 5]

I love the concept and the practical applications. There were a lot more words in this book and they needed to be.

[Lori Ruthford · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book

[Dave Moyer · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some useful information that could help people who are looking for a system to organize instruction around student engagement, but not a lot of new ground here.