Learn
TOGETHER
with
POSITIVE
attention
Unlock your Parent Potential and you will unlock your child’s
As a school leader, I know that one of the most powerful influences on a child’s education is you—the parent. While the world around us is changing fast, the essential role you play in your child's learning has never been more important. But here’s the good news: You don’t need to be an expert to make a difference…
I created Parent Potential to support your child’s academic growth by giving you, the parent, the tips we use in training teachers and staff members. These come from some of the best practices I have picked up from many amazing teachers I have encountered in my 25 years in education.
They are simple and designed for you to pick up and go. You will see the bond between you and your child deepen as you become a partner in their educational journey. You will see their confidence grow in class as they become more and more comfortable with the academic discourse that once might have confused them. Just 20 minutes a few times a week is all it takes!
Here’s How It Works:
The Parent Potential program equips you with a deck of Learning Target cards, a guided notebook, and five simple routines designed to help you reinforce, preview, and clarify every Common Core standard for your child’s grade level—in your own voice.
Our flexible routines bring higher-level thinking from Bloom’s Taxonomy into everyday moments—whether during a car ride or a bedtime story.
Want to learn more? Visit the blog It Takes a Village to explore why real learning still starts with a human, a notebook, and a pencil.
Learning Target Cards
The Learning Target deck is available for Kindergarten through 3rd grade. Each card features a parent-friendly version of a Common Core standard, along with the suggested routine to use.
Look for the anchor symbol—these mark power standards: key concepts that serve as foundational threads for learning in middle and high school
The back of each Learning Target card gives you a ready-to-use script to guide your conversation, plus a sample activity to spark your child’s thinking around the skill.
These tools are designed to start the journey—encouraging you to explore, adapt, and build on each standard in a way that fits your family.
After you cover the card, you can decide your child’s level of understanding. If they master it, you can celebrate and put the card away in a special mastery box. (Its fun to find a cardboard box to decorate).
You may see they could use more practice, and here you can create a “spiral” pile or box, where you an shuffle and pull from later in the year.
Lastly you might find a standard that is not going well, these can be pulled out of the deck, and if you want you can email your teacher. This type of information can be very useful to help them make their time in the classroom more efficient.
Notebook
Our notebook is designed to give you a flexible space to approach these targets as you see fit. Our program is designed using the principles of Universal Design For Learning, a teaching theory that addresses how to approach teaching when every student learns in a different way.
In the front is a calendar to allows you and your child to set goals for each month. It is important to note that we set goals based on how many cards you tried together, not how many were mastered.
The notebook is divided into Math and a Language Arts sections. In the Math section, the graph paper will allow you to model and practice a range of problems and capture thinking behind larger projects. In the ELA section there is space for journaling on their book, the Listen and Write Routine, thesaurus and dictionary sections.
With purchase of the Parent Potential program, you will recieve full tutorial videos on each of the following routines. These simple spaces in your week, will become the canvas you can use to build regular conversations around your students every day life. In addition to our cards, you may use these to address homework or review corrected work that comes home. These spaces have been used with parents facing remote learning during COVID, and have been proven to drive academic success.
MODELING
Using an old school teacher framework of “I do”
”We Do” “You Do” you will be able to model your thinking out loud and prompt your student to become independent on certain skills.
DISCUSSION
Using principals of Socratic Seminar, you will be able to use careful questioning and prompting to develop understandings of certain concepts. Sometimes these are around bedtime stories, but sometimes they make for a great car talk.
BEDTIME STORY
You may have already built a space to read stories together as they fall asleep. Using this routines, you will develop questions and prompts that siblings can even ask each other as they build their higher level analysis of literature and informational texts.
Research
This might be the most fast moving routine of them all. It is important to find your preference, some parents enjoy using the encyclopedia or dictionary, some prefer Google, and others want to model how to prompt AI resources. These are all options within these routine cards.
Listen and Write
You speak, they listen and write. From letter names and sounds to writing grammatically complex sentences, there are many skills covered by this routine that help your student be the best reader and writer they can be.
The Next Level
Hungry for more! We have recruited dozens of teachers from around the country to contribute to our Next Level subscription. We will match you directly with them, based on their grade level expertise, and allow you to ask questions and upload images of their Parent Potential Notebook or even homework assignments.
We have also have a curated list of other excellent educational websites and resources teachers use for quick reviews of certain learning targets. Coming soon, contact us below if you are interested!!
It Takes a Village
Teachers, We Need Your Voice!
Submit a topic for a blog post and help show our parents how they can amplify their impact. Share your expertise and make a difference!
Are you a parent with a question?
Reach out through this form and join our Village! Your voice matters in shaping our community.
Our Story
Hi, its Mr.M. I am a career educator, teacher mentor, and school leader. I began my journey in 2004 as an elementary school teacher in Downtown Los Angeles, where I quickly learned that academic success starts with breaking learning down to skill level and empowering students and families to partner with the school.
Over the years, I developed methods rooted in Universal Design for Learning (UDL)—strategies that meet diverse learning needs and make content accessible to all. These practices became the foundation of my work both in the classroom and later as a principal, where I mentored teachers in both charter networks and traditional school districts.
With the introduction of the Common Core Standards and their emphasis on critical thinking, I dove deeper into Bloom’s Taxonomy, an educational framework that describes levels of cognitive learning—from simple recall to complex analysis and synthesis.
My passion has always been clear: to help students and families take the wheel in their learning journey. That belief continues to drive everything I do.
When COVID-19 hit, schools shut down and students were sent home—many without internet or computers. It took months before state-funded hotspots and Chromebooks reached our families. In that critical gap, Parent Potential was born.
I focused on empowering parents to become instructional aides at home. We provided them with grade-level learning targets and simple, effective routines to support learning—no tech required.
By 2022, our school, Everest Value, had set itself apart. Thanks to consistent use of these methods, our students showed significant growth on the SBAC (Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium), the national benchmark for Common Core proficiency.
In 2019, 45% of Everest students were proficient in Math and ELA. By 2022, that number rose to 52.5%—while state and district averages declined. California’s average dropped by 4%, with LAUSD falling below 35% proficiency.
Below is a testimonial from Albert, a fellow parent who reached out during remote learning—and became one of our first success stories.
Like so many parents we found ourselves trying to teach our kids at home with mild success and the focus spent on just keeping the kids quiet so we could work from home. It didn't take long to realize that without any experience, training or patience for teaching the only ones really suffering from distance learning were the kids.
My wife convinced me to ask for help.
In the meantime Chris was spearheading a vocational training for parents unfamiliar with education for the public charter school in Los Angeles where he serves as its principal and substitute math or language arts teacher for any class Kindergarten to Eighth Grade.
I've known Chris for almost twenty years and I always remembered he said, "in third grade, kids go from learning to read to reading to learn." Chris is a raconteur with deep practical knowledge of education and learning. He was kind enough to take my call and explain just a few basic concepts to me. I couldn't believe how much confidence that tiny little bit of knowledge gave me and helped the kids become more intrinsically motivated to learn. Like shining a light.” - Albert
