Episode #56: Outrageous Teaching Like a PIRATE in a Class on Fire with Dave Burgess

November 14, 2018|Posted in: 21st Century Skills, Agency, Books, Change, culture, Future Ready, Joy, Leadership, Making a Difference, Mindset, Models, Passion, Podcast, Professional Learning, Purpose, Thought Leaders, WHY1 Comment

Dave Burgess is the New York Times Best-Selling author of Teach Like a PIRATE, co-author of P is for PIRATE, and the president of Dave Burgess Consulting, Inc. which delivers powerful, inspirational, and innovative books, keynotes, and professional development.

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I have had conversations with many of Dave and Shelley’s authors and now see that it is all about passion. I was honored and very excited to have a conversation with Dave and learn his story. Listen and enjoy.

 

You and your family

I was born and raised in San Diego, CA, and live there with my wife, Shelley, who is an educator and runs our consulting business with me. We have two children. My son, Hayden, is a senior in high school, and my daughter, Ashlyn, is a sophomore. We are just getting into the college applications with our son right now. His top possibilities are University of Miami and UC Santa Barbara. He’s a big-time scuba diver and into marine science so he wants to be on a coast somewhere.

The only time I did not live in San Diego was the five years I went to school at UC Davis as a psychology major which is a great major for educators or even in business. Understanding the mind and how people think is a critical thing.

 

Your journey as a student and an educator

I was a good student and did very well in school, but I was not highly engaged in or on fire about school. I was good at playing the game of school. I knew what I needed to do and I did that. I had some good and bad teachers. I was good at jumping all the hurdles and going through all the hoops I needed to do. My gateway into teaching was as a basketball coach.

The first job I ever held was for three summers with the John Wootten’s Basketball Camps in Thousand Oaks, CA. I came out of college doing various things and different entrepreneurial ventures and then took a job as the boy’s junior varsity basketball coach at high school.

I enjoyed working with the kids so much and coaching that I went back at night to get my teaching credential. Then I became a History teacher in the social studies department at the school where I was coaching and became the girl’s varsity basketball coach. It all started with basketball. I also met my wife, Shelley, in the night classes where we were both getting our teaching credentials.

Empty Kids Into the Gift Shop: Homework thoughts from Dave Burgess https://youtu.be/3CocrqSNGNM

 

Being on Fire

I do miss the day-to-day banter with students along with the kind of relationships you can build when you see someone every day for 180 days. But I am really on fire about what I do now and going around speaking and publishing. I don’t want to go back but I do miss the interactions with the kids.

I want kids to be on fire about school and knocking down the walls to get into a class. How it all started for me as teaching like a pirate was when my department chair reached out to me about being head of professional development. He asked me to put on PD about all the cool stuff I do for kids. About all the things I do in my room that no one understands. He said something that changed my life. “I don’t think you can, because I think the success in your classroom is just you and personality driven.”

“Too many people wait until they are ready to present. You are never going to be “ready.” Take that opportunity when it comes to you and then you get ready.”

I took that as a challenge. I knew I could teach this so I told him to sign me up for one of the workshops for my peers in the district. Then I walked away thinking “I don’t have a workshop, anything written down, or organized in any way.” I got relentless about writing everything down that I thought was successful in my class. But that wasn’t good enough because that was everything that I do. I had to take a step back and figure out where these ideas come from, to begin with. Why does this one work and not this one? It forced me to be more intentional about my teaching.

So that’s why I encourage people to present, submit sessions and proposals for conferences whether it is in your district, school site, or a local or national conference. When you are put in a position where you have to stand up in front of other people and present your magic recipe or secret sauce, it will force you to be more intentional about your teaching. You will so much more reflective. It made me such a better teacher.

Another thing, I signed up for my first professional development workshop before I had a workshop. With that deadline in mind, I came up with it. Too many people wait until they are ready yet. You are never going to be “ready.” Take that opportunity when it comes to you and then you get ready.

 

Teach Like a PIRATE

That’s how I came up with Teach Like a PIRATE. I wanted to come up with a theme and build it for my workshop. I wanted to be able to model and demonstrate some of the things that I do in my classroom in the workshop. I wanted teachers to feel what it was like in my classroom. If you list yourself as an engagement person and write up a workshop description that says you are going to teach teachers how to create a wild and outrageously engaging classroom that has kids knocking down the walls to get in, you better have a pretty dang good workshop. So I wanted to have a theme.

Pirates appealed to me. Pirates are…

• Unconventional
• Reject the status quo
• Willing to sail into uncharted waters
• Risk-takers
• Rebels
• Mavericks

I’m abnormally drawn to acronyms and came up with passion and enthusiasm and then realized there was a P at the beginning and an E at the end of the word: PIRATE

I got excited about the workshop and started submitting proposals to any conference in any state. I paid my own way to the conferences, flights, and hotel rooms. I was going into debt doing my thing but I had to do it. I wasn’t getting paid when I first started. A lot of people say that they are not going to present at a conference unless they are getting paid. I did so many conferences for free or paid to present because I wanted to go where anyone would listen to me. When I showed up no one knew then. People forget that when this started no one knew what Teach Like a Pirate was. I was just a crazy guy walking around the conference center dressed as a pirate.

I made my descriptions sound like you were going to Disneyland. Most sessions sound like they are going to the dentist’s office to get drilled. I literally walked around the conference center and recruited people and invite them to my session. My sessions were different. It was about lighting the rooms up on fire. Being outrageous. My goal when I stepped in front of people was to douse myself with gasoline of enthusiasm, spark it with flames of inspiration, and light up the room. That’s how it all started.

 

Disrupting Publishing

A person working for a publishing company was in the audience at one of my sessions and wanted me to write a book based on my workshop. She offered me a publishing contract but I did my research. I couldn’t believe what they offered as my take compared to what they got. They wanted to remove my creative part, the personal stories, and take control of the process. They asked where the research studies and where was the data. They told me that no administrator would buy my book, but I had a secret. I am married to an administrator.

This was my story, my manifesto. So Shelley and I did a ton of research and formed our own publishing company. We published Teach Like a Pirate right from our laptop on the kitchen table. We love our authors. Many wanted to write a book but did not want to start a publishing company. A crazy thing happened when Teach Like a Pirate took off. I was a full-time practicing classroom teacher when I wrote it. Half of the book was written on my son’s desk in his bedroom at a time in his life when he wasn’t able to fall asleep at night without someone in the room. It is now published in Spanish, Russian, Korean, 2 forms of Chinese, and we’ve sold over 350,000 copies. It was a wild ride.

Authors started coming to us so we decided to disrupt the industry. We tried combining the best of the publishing world and self-publishing and created a hybrid model. Authors have creative control and have their voice and their books come out the way they want. We have a full team and give our authors support during the whole process and help promote their book through social media.

 

Dave’s Contact Information

@burgessdave on Twitter
@dbc_inc on Instagram

Websites: https://daveburgess.com/ – https://www.daveburgessconsulting.com/
Dave’s YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/outrageousteaching

#tlap chat (8 pm CST every Monday night!)

 

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Dave Burgess is the New York Times Best-Selling author of Teach Like a PIRATE, co-author of P is for PIRATE, and the president of Dave Burgess Consulting, Inc. which delivers powerful, inspirational, and innovative books, keynotes, and professional development.

He specializes in teaching hard-to-reach, hard-to-motivate students with techniques that incorporate showmanship and creativity.  At a recent ceremony in Washington, D.C., he was awarded the BAMMY for Secondary School Teacher of the Year by the Academy of Education Arts and Sciences.

Dave delivers the ultimate professional development experience for your teachers that is perfect for all circumstances from truly inspirational opening keynotes to full-day hands-on workshops.  It is a high-energy, interactive, and entertaining experience that will leave your staff unbelievably inspired, motivated, and with the practical skills to dramatically increase student engagement.

His presentations are a unique blend of outrageously energetic performance art and magic, mixed with an inspirational message of how and why to become more passionate in the classroom. All techniques and methods are modeled and fully explained so as to leave no doubt about how to apply the methods in the real world. Participants will leave with a tool-box full of dynamic presentational ideas that they can immediately use to improve their lessons.

As a teacher in San Diego, California, he was a 2001 and 2012 Golden Apple winner in the Grossmont Union High School District and the 2007-2008 Teacher of the Year at West Hills High School. He was voted a faculty standout for 17 consecutive years in categories such as Most Entertaining, Most Energetic, and Most Dramatic

 

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Music for podcast citation:

“Super Power Cool Dude” Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License  http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

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