Presentations for Schools
Michael’s presentations feature original, tested skills and techniques he’s developed from frontline experience. He often combines elements from several different presentations into one that will fit your needs and time format. Michael is a speaker—but he knows it’s listening that makes great presentations. He will be delighted to reach out personally about customization.
Please note: Most of the following presentation topics can be adapted for Keynote and General Sessions as well as workshops and other interest sessions.
Please contact him so he can learn how to best meet your needs.
Jump To:
Frontline Skills Topics
01 Growing Great Qualities in Kids
05 How to Grab & Keep the Attention of Media-Saturated Students
06 Teaching Problem-Solving, Responsibility, & Resiliency
07 Better Beginnings, Collaborative Communities with O.U.R. Time
School Team Leadership Topics
11 Continual Development of Staff
12 Building Excellent Teamwork & Collaborative Communication
14 Magnificent Meetings That Matter More
15 TIME MANAGEMENT for People Who Don’t Have Time to Take a Time Management Course
16 There’s No Such Thing as a Born Leader/Teacher
Frontline Skills Topics
01
GROWING GREAT QUALITIES IN KIDS: The L.A.S.E.R.B.E.A.M. Technique to Developing Outstanding Character, Social-Emotional Skills, & Bringing Out the Best in Young People
We say that we can build great character and boost self-esteem. But how do we make sure we are really doing that every hour of every day? Based on Michael’s best-selling book, this exciting, original session demonstrates exactly what to say and do to develop outstanding character, social-emotional skills, and life skills in young people.
Saying “Be nice!” and “Show some respect!” doesn’t work. Michael’s warm, positive, highly acclaimed L.A.S.E.R.B.E.A.M. Technique has been taught to tens of thousands of youth leaders, teachers, recreation and out-of-school program leaders, youth professionals, parents, and others throughout the world. No “theory.” These are practical, hands-on skills that can be used immediately every day.
You Will Learn and Practice
How to identify exactly what behaviors we want to develop in young people and how to use positive communication and modeling to teach them
The three-step DLP approach: Get beyond, “Good job!” to provide credible and useful feedback and praise that teaches not only teaches that we value certain behaviors, but also why we do
Developing outstanding behaviors that demonstrate great character traits and qualities such as kindness, persistence, teamwork, confidence, responsibility, respect, and other keys to lifelong learning and success.
02
“WHY DON’T YOU BEHAVE?!” — The Brandwein Key System Solution to Handling Negative Behavior in Young People
When a young person says, “You can’t make me!” or “They did it first!” do we and staff know precisely how to reply? When facing bullying, put-downs, teasing, and whining, what must we do immediately instead of just saying, “It’s not allowed!”? Most important: Do we know how to respectfully get young people to listen the first time? What do highly credible adults do and say to build that trust?
Michael’s Key System demonstrates practical tools that have been praised nationally for answering these questions with skills that will be used right away.
The most challenging thing we must learn when working with young people is how to handle undesired behavior, and this skill-packed, energetic session is highly popular because it makes this easier and ensures success with practical tools that fill in the gaps in other approaches — particularly in boosting our credibility and being much more specific about how to teach what we want young people to do to replace ineffective behavior.
You Will Learn and Practice:
Michael’s original and creative techniques — his Key System — in three clearly explained steps to handle behavior with greater confidence, calmness, and expertise
Four specific skills to show that we mean what we say about behavior expectations
The big secret to teaching young people positive choices that replace negative ones
How to reduce stress and increase confidence while growing relationships that support good choice-making
03
TALKING IT OUT: Superb Communication Skills to Build Positive Relationships, Model How to Express Feelings, and Facilitate Problem-Solving
When we say, “I understand” or “I hear you,” how do we make sure they believe us? Based on Michael’s three Emmy® award-winning programs for public television stations across the U.S., this fast-paced, skill-boosting session demonstrates his inventive, highly effective techniques that use listening to build stronger relationships and positive connections with young people, while teaching them essential skills for success in life.
This is not “theory” — you will use these tools immediately and every day. The big bonus: You will also find this greatly helpful in working with other team members, parents, and in other relationships in your life.
You Will Learn and Practice:
Using listening to build positive connections with young people so they really feel heard, understood, and valued, even when we disagree
How to teach them to express their feelings respectfully and clearly, including hard ones such as anger, disappointment, lack of confidence, and fear
Helping them learn how to solve problems and conflict by talking it out
How to reduce tension and increase cooperation
04
ARMS ESCALATION: How to Boost Student Participation & Learning Right Away
You’ll use these proven, original, practical, nationally acclaimed techniques every day to get more hands in the air for discussions and group learning and to make students more eager to learn. This session is packed with original techniques to create a positive environment where you’ll feel more confident about getting through to all students, not just the ones with arms up all the time. These powerful skills work with all ages and subjects and will recharge you with the excitement of teaching young people.
You Will Learn and Practice:
How to involve more students more of the time
Reaching students who never or seldom volunteer
Leading fabulous discussions that engage and motivate
Teaching students to listen and communicate with each other, not just the teacher
Developing a greater depth of learning
Responding to strong and weak answers to maximize deeper learning, thinking, and communication skills
How to handle “I don’t know” in more effective ways
Helping all students reach these expectations, Instead of just expecting and “grading” participation
Using Michael’s special “platforming” technique in every class to build on success
“You were a breath of fresh air, Michael, and I am happy to tell you that people have come to me and other administrators to let us know that they have been using your suggestions not only in the classroom but at home as well and were experiencing success. You definitely left a lasting impression.”
05
How to Grab & Keep the Attention of Media-Saturated Students Without Having to Set Your Hair on Fire
It’s the law: “Without attention, there Is no learning. None.” And we know how much harder it is to get attention in this world. After this fun, skill-packed, creative session, you’ll never again have to shout, “We’re not going to start until it’s quiet!” (You may never start…) The days of “Can I have your attention, please?!” will be over forever.
Michael draws on over 50 years of successfully seizing the attention of young people in and out of schools and he models and demonstrates terrific, original, expert secrets to motivating increased and respectful attention and participation in groups of all sizes. You’ll use these tools to build great learning environments and more motivated students.
You Will Learn and Practice:
The single most important attention-grabbing secret and dozens of easy ways to use it
How to get rid of ineffective techniques and replace them with those that work every time
The A.R.T. of Michael’s “Attention Redirection Techniques”: the counter-intuitive, fool-proof way to get large, noisy groups quiet in an instant—and why “If you can hear me, clap once…” doesn’t cut the mustard, or any other condiment
Making the attention-getting process one of the best parts of the lesson or activity
Michael’s “Grand Openings” — immediately effective ways to begin that establish the best atmosphere to learn and collaborate
“Exhilarating, practical ideas; this workshop will give you ideas that can be used immediately to make a classroom come alive for all students. Don’t miss this one!”
06
Practical & Powerful Techniques to Teach Problem-Solving, Responsibility, Resiliency, & Independence to Young People
More teachers, youth leaders, parents, and others report that today’s young people of all ages need even greater support in learning how to be independent and handle challenges. This session demonstrates Michael’s special three-step C.D.C. technique to help young people think more for themselves, with greater confidence.
You Will Learn and Practice:
Exactly what to say and do to help young people learn how to solve problems, handle mistakes and challenges, and get what they need with greater independence, resiliency, confidence, and calmness
How to reduce whining and increase critical thinking skills
Teaching young people the specific “language” to use and questions to ask that lead to effective, persistent problem-solving
Reducing “rescuing” of young people and increasing the use of daily—but often “invisible” — opportunities to practice responsibility skills
07
BETTER BEGINNINGS, COLLABORATIVE COMMUNITY WITH O.U.R. TIME: Fast & Practical Ways to Involve Young People in Building Positive Group Cultures of Great Respect, Reflection, Responsibility, & Kind Relationships
Adults often ask, “Who knows a rule?” in a well-intentioned effort to “go over” the school rules. It’s boring, based on a bossy model, and ineffective. Michael says, “People take better care of what they help create.”
This one-of-a-kind session demonstrates his original, simple, and powerful methods to expertly guide young people to create a group Code and culture and how to communicate with each other to solve problems and make their group experience a great one.
You Will Learn and Practice:
How to lead young people to be responsible for defining positive community expectations with more specificity, positiveness, and group “ownership”
A step-by-step approach to facilitate fun, daily, quick, interesting discussions with groups of all ages
How to provide young people practice using the kind of communication that helps us express ourselves and make and keep friends (enormously important in an age of terse, electronic chatting)
Developing greater collaboration and teamwork, with increased respect for different views and opinions (skills in great demand in an increasingly diverse world)
Greater accountability/responsibility for solving behavior problems and other challenges the group will face—while celebrating the group’s great choices every day
“The feedback I have received regarding your engaging presentation has been incredibly positive. Already in our schools, I have seen and heard staff of all levels using your strategies. You have an extraordinary ability to influence individuals in ways that make schools and the world a much better place.”
08
MISTER ROGERS ROCKS! — How to Apply His Research-Based Wisdom to Build Self-Worth, Kindness, & Great Life Skills in Young People of All Ages
Let’s build a better school Neighborhood! There has never been a more important time to apply the principles of kindness and the powerful approaches and teachings of the legendary Fred Rogers. Inspired by the educational research-based and profoundly influential practices of this pioneer in youth development, Michael has developed this exciting, unique session of his own specific and practical techniques and strategies you can train staff to use —and use yourself — with young people of all ages to learn, grow, and become their best.
You Will Learn and Practice:
Developing positive self-concepts and self-esteem
Growing kindness and caring behaviors
Building confidence and creativity
The powerful skills people use to show patience and enrich relationships
Exactly what we can do to “believe” in our kids in ways that build their trust in themselves and treasure their individuality.
09
DUMPING THE DISSING: How to Stop Put-Downs, Bullying, Teasing, & Other Disrespectful Behavior While Creating a Safe & Respectful Environment for Learning & Growth
One of the key conditions required to assure successful youth development and learning is safety — not just physical, but emotional. When anxiety goes up, learning and the willingness to participate go down. This unique session demonstrates precisely what to say and do to confidently handle important negative behaviors, including name-calling, teasing, verbal bullying, and other disrespectful behavior.
You Will Learn and Practice:
Michael’s original training tools and activities train staff to be professionally “on” this issue with clarity and credibility
How to get staff to practice these techniques immediately
How to handle difficult behavior with greater credibility and calmness (big bonus!)
NOTE: Please see 02 “Why Don’t You Behave?" for a more comprehensive presentation on handling undesired behavior. That session works best if you have 2-3 hours and includes techniques that are great for Dumping Dissing. The Dissing session itself focuses on a specific and important subset of undesired behavior and can be presented in about 60-75 minutes.
School Team Leadership Topics
10
PURPOSEFUL PLAY: Quick, Cool, Original No-Prop Games that Teach Young People (and Staff!) Skills for Life & Leadership
Teachers and other school staff often know a bunch of games or gimmicks to break up a lesson or school day. This active session takes us beyond that. Michael leads us in one of his original and creative presentations of easy, fast games that go “beyond fun” to teach social-emotional skills that enhance learning and support lifetime success. You’ll use these with all ages, indoors and out.
Two Things Make This Unique Session Really Stand Out:
Each activity is mission-directed: Students will be having too much fun to know that they are practicing essential social-emotional and life skills like communication, making friends, positivity, resilience, leadership, respect, collaboration, and more
BONUS: While learning the games, Michael demonstrates outstanding game leadership techniques that can be used with any activity or lesson we lead, including clear communication, grabbing and keeping attention, maximizing participation, and more.
11
Continual Development of Staff: Superb Coaching Skills to Maximize Staff Performance
This session teaches Leadership Team members Michael’s renowned, two-step Continual Development of Staff Method, or CDOS, for coaching others. Imagine the difference we could make in the impact and success of our program if we could take those “middle/average” staff and boost their skill level throughout the season! And wouldn’t it be great to take the superstars and keep them motivated and challenged so that the job has even greater value to them, and so they want to come back?
Michael shows you how with proven, immediately useable tools for the leadership team to produce outstanding, positive, supportive coaching of all staff.
You Will Learn and Practice:
How to create an easy-to-use structure in which continual work on performance goals is the norm: “Everybody’s working on something” for growth all the time
Making feedback more useful so it produces positive changes
Overcoming resistance to coaching, even by veteran staff
How to cut through the stress that leadership team members have about providing feedback
12
Building Excellent Teamwork & Collaborative Communication
Team leaders of all types will use these practical techniques every day to build more open communication and stronger professional relationships, which in turn encourages best performance and program improvement.
You Will Learn and Practice:
Boosting everyone’s ability to be more flexible and open to change
Reducing talk behind backs
Increasing constructive expression of what people really think, creating an environment where it’s safe to present new and different ideas that will enhance our service to others
How to develop more positive relationships for great teamwork
13
CONFLICT COMMUNICATION: How to Deal with Disagreement, Conflicts, & Hot People without Antacids
One of Michael’s most requested presentations! This internationally acclaimed session demonstrates practical, essential skills you will use every day to (1) handle conflict with greater confidence and calmness and (2) build more open and collaborative communication for outstanding teams. Deal with greater confidence and credibility with contrary positions, disappointed and upset people, and more.
You Will Learn and Practice:
Precisely what to say and not to say when resolving disagreements
How to act with respect and improve relationships even when there is conflict
Resolving conflicts constructively with less stress
How to immediately boost your persuasiveness and problem-solving using expert techniques to tailor responses to the needs and concerns of others
Providing excellent customer service for positive partner and caregiver partnerships
Increasing more open and honest communication for ongoing improvement
14
MAGNIFICENT MEETINGS THAT MATTER MORE: How to Plan & Lead Outstanding Staff Meetings
Meetings — boring? Not after this fun, energetic session. This is like finding undiscovered treasure! Meetings are even more important and valuable than we thought — the WAY we run meetings can provide big benefits to our entire program in some surprising, usually unrecognized ways. These payoffs include the opportunity to use meetings to model great leadership.
In this fast-paced session, you’ll learn creative and practical techniques to go beyond “announcements” and checklists. Make even 5-minute check-in meetings exciting mini-events that not only inform but support the mission of the school and program.
You Will Learn and Practice:
Getting people to pay attention and participate
Developing staff professionalism
How to grow skills in staff with special techniques to involve them in the leadership of meetings
How to do fast ongoing staff development to extend your training beyond the usual professional development
Modeling outstanding skills that staff can use with young people
“Exhilarating, practical ideas; this workshop will give you ideas that can be used immediately to make a classroom come alive for all students. Don’t miss this one!”
15
TIME MANAGEMENT for People Who Don’t Have Time to Take a Time Management Course: The Real Secrets to Getting Things Done
This nationally acclaimed, creatively presented, no-nonsense session demonstrates six groups of outstanding tools that has received rave reviews by education and other professionals for their flexibility, practicality, and ease of use. Boost your productivity right away while reducing unnecessary stress. You don’t have to use all of the techniques every day – just when you need them. They can be applied quickly and tailored to your individual needs and work habits.
You Will Learn and Practice:
Special techniques to defeat procrastination and reduce interruptions
How to increase productivity and efficiency
Getting more accomplished and never have a day when you got “nothing done”
Organizing what needs to be done in a new and better way that replaces the usual “to-do” list with something simple that helps you produce high-quality work more efficiently
All of the above topics work great for Keynotes—and here are a few more…
16
There’s No Such Thing as a Born Leader/Teacher: How to Grow Leadership & Other Outstanding Skills and Qualities in Ourselves and in Young People
Join us in applying the number one leading secret to leading others. A nationally award-winning educator, author, and speaker demonstrates exactly how to further develop our own skills as team leaders and team members, and how we can use these techniques and more to build the most essential qualities in the young people we serve.
Michael brings his trademark “use it immediately” focus and his energetic and creative delivery to provide us with specific and practical methods to support ourselves and young people with lifelong success. To be terrific leaders and educators who continually develop new and stronger skills in ourselves and others, we need to become the most expert at one thing: focusing on skills instead of qualities. This energizing session shows exactly how to do it. We will:
Demonstrate to ourselves a surprising critical error in how we’ve been trained to look at successful people;
Use “Olivier’s Law” and two specific steps to immediately improve individual and team skills;
Learn and practice a simple but powerful “reverse engineering” technique to identify and use skills that develop better working relationships with others; and
Take home over 200 immediately useable examples of what outstanding leaders say and do that will make a positive difference in our own work every day
17
THE REAL TRUTH ABOUT STICKS AND STONES: Recharging Our Batteries, Handling the Challenge of Change, & Developing Leadership in Ourselves & Young People
This session presents a fresh and often surprising look at the conclusions we’ve made about ourselves, why we believe them, and how they unconsciously hold us back by limiting our choices. We’ll see how this applies to the young people we serve. In this fun, invigorating, no-nonsense presentation, Michael demonstrates how to listen to ourselves with greater skill and replaces a less-helpful approach about people’s “styles” with more positive steps to help us be more flexibly effective. He uses a creative, highly entertaining approach to present a practical set of tools to help us:
Handle stress and keep balanced
Be more open to learning new things, dealing with change, and continuing to grow professionally
Work better with others
Resist burnout
Meet challenges with more flexibility and skill
Handle change in positive ways
18
Putting More Muscle in Our Mission: The Practical, Specific Secrets to Building Qualities, Character, and Social-Emotional Skills in Young People for Success in Life, School, & Youth Programs
Michael loves keynotes that present practical skills that we can use every day to make a difference. Based on Michael’s best-selling book, Growing Great Qualities in Kids, this nationally acclaimed session illustrates his original techniques to more skillfully identify the specific behaviors that demonstrate the character qualities we want young people to develop.
Using highly credible, specific, and positive communication we then can make lifelong differences in young people of all ages and types. “Be kind” and “Show respect” isn’t enough. You’ll learn ways to make sure that you are really growing character, leadership, and social-emotional skills including kindness, persistence, confidence, resilience, respect, responsibility, teamwork, and many more. This keynote will leave you feeling recharged and revitalized!
Interested in Presentations and Programs for Other Groups?
Whether you’re a parent, educator, or another kind of caregiver, Michael has presentations and programs for you! Click on the box below to find the presentations for whatever group you’re looking for: