Dr. Thomas B. Moore is the founder of “Education, Inc.”* (ed-inc.net) and author of the associated blog For the Greatest Good.

Dr. Moore began his education career in 1991 as a band director in Arkansas after graduating from the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville as an alumnus of the Marching Razorback Band and Hogwild! Pep Band. Dr. Moore taught middle school and high school band and music instruction in Arkansas, Texas, and Tennessee.

In 2004 Dr. Moore began his education administrative career as a high school assistant principal in Texas and later moved to his home state of Missouri where he served as an assistant junior high school principal and as a high school principal.

In 2010 Dr. Moore began working with Missouri school districts as a consultant in data analysis and over three years authored eight manuals designed to identify key concepts and strategies teachers could use to raise student test scores on the annual Missouri Assessment Program. Between 2010 and 2013 Dr. Moore worked with thousands of teachers in over 160 Missouri school districts.

In March 2013 Dr. Moore was diagnosed with leukemia (Acute Lymphoblastic Lymphoma) and underwent a bone marrow transplant thanks to a generous, anonymous, unrelated donor, and spent the next several years in recovery and regaining strength in body, mind, and spirit. Much of the downtime was spent doing research in education and outside of education, constantly reflecting on the visible and invisible barriers to student learning as well as possible solutions that might positively impact current and future students.

When COVID-19 so drastically affected in-person education in the spring of 2020 and created an unfathomable new dynamic for education, many of the latent vulnerabilities and dynamics between teaching and learning became more evident. On the negative side, preventing in-person education revealed the importance that human interaction and relationships have on student learning, and what happens when the human element is extracted completely. On the positive side, technology advanced from a place of sparsity to ubiquity as students and teachers found avenues to interact while separated. The necessity of the situation compelled an experiment that likely would not have occurred perhaps for decades in terms of virtual teaching and learning.

What we discovered as a profession was that technology can assist, but not replace, effective teaching and instruction. Even though teachers and students could see and hear each other, it wasn’t the same, either instructionally or emotionally. It was during this time that Dr. Moore, along with thousands of other conscientious educators around the United States and around the world began to ask new questions about schools, teaching, and the future of education.

Over the course of Dr. Moore’s education career, he also embarked on various entrepreneurial ventures in several industries. These experiences presented ideas and information not often encountered by professional life-long educators. By being exposed to literature  in business, psychology, and neuroscience, Dr. Moore has been able to combine proven ideas in other areas through the lens of educational needs on from the vantage points of a teacher, an administrator, a parent, and an entrepreneurial problem solver.

One significant set of ideas has to do with two unrelated events in 1990 that have created an unlikely database of information for educators that could be paradigm shifting. The problem is too few educators are aware of the information and tools that have been discovered and developed, and have created incredible outcomes for businesses in the private sector, but have not yet found their significance for education. The first event in 1990 was the invention of the fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) technology that could measure brain activity at a remarkable level of accuracy in real time. The second profound event, unrelated to technology, was the concept by Yale professor Dr. Peter Salovey and his graduate assistant doctoral student John Mayer of Emotional Intelligence. While their initial publication on their research made little splash in the world of Psychology, it caught the attention of New York times reporter and PhD in Psychology, Daniel Goleman.In 1995 Dr. Goleman published his groundbreaking New York Times bestselling book, Emotional Intelligence: Why It May Matter More than I.Q.

Since then, and in combination with the outstanding research among many neuroscience departments in our nation’s incredible colleges and universities, the critical nature emotions have to do with cognitive intelligence and learning has been nothing short of amazing. Nobel Prize winning researchers, including Daniel Kahneman and the late Amos Tversky combined emotional intelligence, neuroscience and economics to identify the real nature of human decision-making, and it turned previous conventional wisdom on its head!

Kahneman and Tversky identified more than 150 human behaviors, including “loss aversion” and “prospect theory” of how humans make decisions far less logically than had been assumed based on whether the decision was based on gaining something or losing something.

In addition to Kahneman and Tversky, Salovey and Mayer, and Goleman, many other researchers not only made great discoveries of the human brain, how humans make decisions, and (most importantly to educators) how humans of all ages learn. Learning these compelling ideas and hundreds of others, Dr. Moore had only one question: Why aren’t these ideas, tools, and skills being implemented at the original sources of learning, the world’s classrooms?

After considering multiple venues through which to share this information, Dr. Moore decided the most efficient venue would be to create an on-line platform intended to inform teachers and other important educators, including counselors, social workers, principals, substitute teachers, bus drivers, school custodians and lunch workers, and everyone else who works to help students learn. The goal is to provide information, ideas, tools, and skills in an efficient platform that promotes teacher well-being and to reinvigorate the joy and energy with which every educator began their career.

When teachers thrive they make better decisions for their students, exercise more patience with students who struggle to learn or struggle to behave in the classroom, and they pursue new creative ways to meet both educational and personal needs of the students they serve. In the last two decades teaching as a profession has been asked to take on many more obligations yet given fewer and fewer resources. Functions once divided between family, church, and government have converged upon the school district, and eventually to the principals and teachers at each campus. As exciting as our culture can be, and as incredible as innovative technology is, they are not in isolation and new problems, like shortening attention spans and respect for authority, have become unintended consequences that have affected classrooms disproportionately, it seems. If the trend continues without correction, finding enough teachers will be extremely unlikely, and finding a necessary number of highly effective teachers will be nearly impossible.

Seeing this inevitability, Dr. Moore is offering a targeted solution, or at least an attempt at one. Many teachers teach, not because it is a good job (which it is) or for good retirement and time off (which it has), but because it is their mission! It is for those teachers this blog is directed and other resources will be created and offered. We hope you will join forces with Dr. Moore to affect, in a very positive way, the future of our communities and our world as we all dedicate our energy “For the Greatest Good.”