#412 – EduProtocols, with Jon Corippo

In this lively and thought-provoking episode, the Unpacking Education podcast team is joined by Jon Corippo, cofounder of EduProtocols, to explore how educators can teach better, work less, and achieve more. With a wealth of real classroom experience and a passion for brain-based pedagogy, Jon shares the inspiration behind EduProtocols, providing teachers with repeatable, tech-savvy lesson frames designed to increase student engagement and academic growth.

Teach better. Work less. Achieve more.

EduProtocols, on the home page of their website

Resources

The following resources are available from AVID and on AVID Open Access to explore related topics in more depth:

• AI in the K–12 Classroom (article collection)
• #EducatorVoices (article collection)
• Create Community and Nurture Connections to Support Deep Learning (article collection)
• Establish a Feedback System to Keep Everyone Informed (article collection)
• Accelerate Learning by Focusing on Assets and Opportunities, Not Deficits (article)

Better Practices, Better Results

One of the episode’s most powerful ideas is the challenge to move beyond outdated practices and embrace better, more research-aligned instruction. Jon Corippo passionately advocates for replacing worksheets and lectures with engaging, feedback-rich learning experiences. At the heart of EduProtocols is the belief that effective teaching doesn’t have to mean more work—it just requires smarter design. As Jon puts it, “Teach better means teach in ways that are more effective . . ., work less means no working off the contract hours if possible . . ., and achieve more means the kids are actually growing.”

Drawing from educational research and his own journey through classrooms, coaching, and leadership, Jon urges educators to reframe how they use their limited time. Instead of “stop and drop” approaches that leave students behind, the instructional lesson frames from EduProtocols foster repetition, immediate feedback, and joyful engagement—core ingredients for classroom-wide growth. “The kids are being incredibly patient with us,” Jon says. “They want feedback. They want relevance. We just need to meet them where they are and make learning irresistible.” This episode offers not only strategies but a mindset shift—an invitation to make school both more effective and more human. The following are a few highlights from this episode.

• About Our Guest: Jon Corippo is the cofounder of EduProtocols. After starting out as an advertising major, Jon transitioned to teaching. He says, “When I became a fourth grade teacher, I said everything I had done in my life has just been so that I could actually do this.” Later, he became an IT director, worked for the Fresno County Office of Education, and was a tech integrationist, curriculum director, and school leader.
• Improved Scores: During COVID, he returned to the classroom so he could integrate the best practices that he had been researching, developing, and training others on. Jon says, “My classes’ ELA scores doubled from 23% to 48%, and my classes’ math scores quadrupled from 9% to 41%.” With those successful teaching results in hand, he’s been flying out to schools as a consultant, sharing effective strategies that achieve academic results. He says, “I show people how to teach better, work less, and achieve more in real life.”
• Teach Better: Jon says, “Teach better, for us, means we’re going to teach in ways that are more effective.” He stresses that we can’t keep doing things the same way and expect better results. With EduProtocols, the approach is to teach better by using new techniques that work, grading less and only during the school day, and not needing to plan lessons after hours.
• Work-Life Fusion: It’s okay to love your job and take it beyond the school day. While we need breaks, and we always need to be mindful of our time, it’s okay to acknowledge that teaching can be a passion that transcends being just a job.
• EduProtocols: Jon’s company has developed “repeatable pedagogical practices you can use with any grade level or any subject.” These protocols also outline how to give feedback based on the techniques and how to put grades from that work in the gradebook.
• Elementary Example: Jon shares an example of how he might use a strategy called “The Fast and the Curious” with fourth graders who still haven’t learned their multiplication times tables. Using engaging technology, he gets targeted feedback that allows him to pinpoint instruction toward gaps in learning. Jon says, “We’re going to accelerate . . ., but the acceleration is based on feedback and targeted feedback.”
• Secondary Example: Jon then shares a secondary school example of teaching Latin roots in middle school. Using Gimkit, he gives students a pretest to find out that they already know 45% of the roots. This allows him to again be more targeted with his instruction moving forward.
• Research Base: The instructional lesson frames from EduProtocols are built based on research, including that of Robert Marzano and John Hattie. However, rather than limiting a learning strategy to one slice of research, Jon and his team have packed multiple research points into each activity, allowing them to increase the impact of each. For example, an activity called “Cyber Sandwich” includes seven different Marzano success indicators.
• Not Lecture: Jon’s approach is very active and student-centered. He points out that lecture is the least effective strategy, and student boredom is one of the most significant obstacles to learning. EduProtocols are designed to avoid both.
• Not My Style: Jon warns that teachers may need to move out of their comfort zone to become more effective. Saying, “That’s not my style,” is not a good excuse for avoiding research-supported strategies that can improve student performance.
• Ebbinghaus Effect: This research tells us that students need multiple repetitions of the same content to make learning permanent. This concept is also called the forgetting curve. Jon points out, “Ebbinghaus’ research shows that if you do something four times over four days, four weeks later, your retention will be in the low seventies. . . . If you do something multiple times, it gets locked in.”
• Feedback: Jon says, “When you deny kids the feedback aspect, what happens is they disassociate with the work. That’s why, when you hand their essays back five days later, they don’t care. That time in their life is gone.”
• Repeatable Strategies: EduProtocols’ instructional lesson frames work best when they are repeated often throughout a school year. Students learn them, and they become second nature.
• Snorkl: Jon likes this AI tool because it gives “rich, detailed feedback immediately.”
• Challenges: Jon says, “The two largest challenges I’m seeing everywhere are attendance and engagement, right? The kids are head down. The kids are bored.” We need to connect differently with them in order to compete with the feedback-rich, interactive experiences they have outside of school.
• Smart Start: This is Jon’s approach to stacking the beginning of a school year or course with orientation and routine-building experiences. This time period also allows teachers to get to know their students and be better able to engage them with examples and activities that align to their interests.
• Energy Matching: When students are excited and fired up about something, Jon believes in engaging that energy with an equally energetic response. Use their energy to channel learning and drive motivation. He says, “I’m playing off the energy that’s already there.”
• AI: Jon feels that we need to embrace the opportunities brought by AI in the classroom. He especially likes such tools as Snorkl and Padlet. He warns against binary choices, saying, “It’s not AI or block.” Instead, he says, we need to ask, “What tools can I use to make my feedback immediate, to make my kids enjoy the classroom more?”
• Me Time: Jon strives to use the last few weeks of the school year to try new learning strategies and experiment with new digital tools. It’s a way to test them out before the next school year begins, and he’s not afraid to tell the students that it’s new for him. That involves them in figuring out if it’s effective or not. Then, he takes the strategies that were effective and fine-tunes them the next year.
• A Need to Adapt: Jon advocates for change when current results are not what we desire and do not reflect the amount of effort and energy that has gone into that approach. He wants educators to say, “Let’s change our technique so that my love can equal the academic results that I’m looking for.”