Teaching Strategies That Get Students Thinking — Without Adding More Prep.
Crush School helps busy teachers find simple, brain-based classroom strategies they can use tomorrow to boost engagement, strengthen memory, and make learning stick.
No long slideshows, new acronyms, or three-hour PD sessions.
Just practical ideas that help students do more of the thinking.
Need something that works tomorrow?
Some lessons look successful from the outside: students are quiet, the slides are covered, the worksheet gets finished, and nobody launches a pencil across the room.
But then the quiz comes. The discussion stalls. Or students act like yesterday’s lesson happened in 1847.
That is the gap Crush School is built to solve.
Real learning does not happen when students sit politely while teachers do all the thinking. You do not need a 47-page framework with arrows pointing at other arrows. You need a few reliable moves for the moments when students are bored, stuck, quiet, distracted, or pretending because the bell is about to ring.
Created by a real classroom teacher
Hi, I’m Oskar Cymerman.
After more than 20 years in the classroom, I built Crush School to give teachers simple, research-backed active learning routines they can actually use — without adding more prep, more meetings, or more educational nonsense to their day.
What you’ll find here
1. Practical Articles
Short, teacher-friendly posts about active learning, retrieval practice, attention, memory, classroom engagement, student thinking, and brain-based teaching strategies that work in real classrooms.
2. The Spark-Wire-Fire Framework
The goal is simple: help students engage in learning, think through it more deeply, remember more of it, and do more with it.
A teaching framework and a book with 100 ready-to-use tomorrow classroom activities suitable for any subject.
Use the activities as bell ringers, lesson resets, discussion routines, review games, exit tickets, checks for understanding, brain breaks, or full class activities.
3. Master Teacher Toolkit
Simple classroom app that helps teachers quickly find activities, build lesson sequences, and plan better learning without starting from scratch.
Built for teachers who need something useful now, not after they attend six more meetings to learn the new ed fad.
Ready to make tomorrow’s lesson easier?
Use them to start class, reset attention, check understanding, or make review less painful.
Simple strategies. Active learning. Better thinking.
Sanity (mostly) intact.
Crush School Testimonials
“The author’s style reminds me of Malcolm Gladwell in that he combines a little science, a little wit and lot of his own brilliant mind to create a book that turns the seemingly obvious, but surprisingly difficult into the totally understandable. ”
“Speaks right to teens. Thank you for saying everything I’ve been trying to tell my son in a language he understands! Easy to read and understand. Short and to the point. Great for the short attention span of teens.”
Featured In
TEACHER RESOURCES
Engaging Classroom Strategies, Active Learning, Managing Cognitive Load, and other Brain-Based Instruction
Flashcards are okay but there's a better way. The Memory (or Mind) Palace Method is a powerful learning and memorization technique that when mastered allows a student to remember 10, 20, or even 30 vocabulary words or concepts (definitions included) with ease.
And, they actually remember what they learned using memory palaces! This series of lessons (which can be used as classroom handouts) walks students through creating their first memory palace, filling it with information they need to learn, and using it to train their memories. It also contains short readings, a video lesson, memory palace examples, and practice drills.
Fair Use
Feel free to use with your students. Please do not share it with other parties or use for profit. All rights by crushschool.com.
8 digital, printable, size 11 x 17 classroom posters:
“Welcome” in multiple languages
“Hi” in multiple languages
Three Equity posters
Classroom Rules: Be Open, Be Kind, Have Fun
“Classroom of Champs”
“Kindness”
ON SALE until August 30th.
NEW BOOK
100+ practical activities teachers can use right away with little or no prep.
TEACHING APP
Build better lessons faster and launch and display them to students instantly.
AVAILABLE ON AMAZON
A learning how to learn book full of strategies students can use to improve their school performance.