Paul Solarz

Paul Solarz is an American educator and author known for his work on student-led classrooms and 21st‑century skills. He taught 4th and 5th grade for about twenty years at Westgate Elementary School in Arlington Heights, Illinois, where he advocated for student‑centered teaching practices and helped students develop collaboration, leadership, and other modern learning competencies. Solarz is a National Board Certified Teacher and earned a master’s degree in Curriculum and Instruction from Illinois State University and a bachelor’s degree in Elementary Education from Winona State University.

Solarz is the author of Learn Like a PIRATE: Empower Your Students to Collaborate, Lead, and Succeed, which offers practical strategies for creating student‑led classrooms that promote independence, engagement, and self‑directed learning. He later published Optimized Learning: 180 Mini-Lessons that Transform Today’s Students into Confident, Capable and Collaborative, Self-Directed Learners, further extending his focus on mastery-based learning and learner agency. His classroom and writing have earned recognition including being named a Top 50 Finalist for the Varkey GEMS Global Teacher Prize, the 2014 Educator of the Year by Illinois Computing Educators, and additional honors such as Qudwa Fellow and VAEI Teacher of Excellence.[