😮💨 If you’ve ever felt like a short-order cook—personalizing everything for every student while slowly running out of steam—this session is for you.
Jake Miller of Educational Duct Tape introduces the Salad Night Strategy: a neuroscience- and UDL-grounded approach to learner agency that shifts responsibility back to students in the best possible way.
Less teacher overload, more student motivation, and a classroom where every learner builds their own path to success.
What if reducing teacher burnout started with rethinking who’s doing all the work in your classroom?
Reducing Teacher Burnout through Learner Agency
In this session, Jake Miller — personalized learning specialist and 24-year educator — uses one of the most memorable metaphors in education PD to reframe how we think about lesson design, learner agency, and teacher workload: the difference between casserole night and salad night.
Jake walks through four models of instruction — one-size-fits-all (casserole), differentiation (box lunches), individualization (short-order cook), and personalized learning (salad night) — and makes a clear, research-backed case for why the shift to learner agency is better for students and for teachers.
The core idea: firm goals, flexible means. When teachers shift from being the cook to being the curator, students become active participants in their own learning — and teachers finally get their workload back.
What you’ll learn:
🥗 The difference between one-size-fits-all, differentiated, individualized, and personalized learning — and why the distinctions matter
🔥 Why individualization burns teachers out while personalization actually protects your workload
🧠 The brain science behind why choice, relevance, and the zone of proximal development drive real learning
🌱 The difference between student autonomy and learner agency — and why you can give one but have to build the other
📐 An introduction to Universal Design for Learning (UDL) and the “essential for some, beneficial for all” principle
🎯 The Clarity Trio — learning intentions, relevance statements, and success criteria — as a foundation for learner-centered classrooms
❓ One powerful question from John Spencer that will change how you design learning: What decisions am I making for students that they could make for themselves?
This is a session about mindset and framework — not tools. If you’re feeling burnt out from doing all the heavy lifting in your classroom, Jake will give you a new lens for thinking about why that’s happening and where to start shifting.
➡️ Presentation
➡️ Jake’s Website: https://JakeMiller.net
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About Jake Miller
Jake is a personalized learning specialist, speaker, author of Educational Duct Tape, and podcast host. Prior to his 4 years as a Personalized Learning & EdTech Specialist, he spent 14 years teaching math, science, and STEM, and an additional 5 years as a technology integration specialist.
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