What If Every Classroom Could Feel Like Disney?
A Review of Imagineering Education: A Guide to Creating the Most Magical Schools on Earth
There are books you read and books that read you. Thomas Riddle’s Imagineering Education is the latter; it doesn’t just present ideas, it mirrors back what many of us felt the first time we experienced something truly magical and asks the question every educator secretly wonders:
What if learning could feel like that?
I’ve spent decades asking “what if… ?” questions to help people get curious about learning, innovation, and problem-solving. And I’ve been fortunate to spend many of those years getting curious and asking “what if…?” with Thomas Riddle.
So, when I read his book opening with “What if we designed schools like Disney designs theme parks?” I was already waaaay all in. But Riddle doesn’t just pose the question. He answers it with three decades of educational insight fused with the design principles that create wonder at every Disney park on Earth.
The Magic is in the Method
What makes Imagineering Education remarkable isn’t that it borrows from Disney. Plenty of business books do that. What makes it remarkable is how Riddle translates Imagineering principles into actionable educational design without losing the soul of either discipline.
Disney’s Imagineers don’t just create theme parks; they create immersive stories you can walk through. Riddle shows how educators can do the same thing with curriculum. Not by making every lesson a theatrical performance, but by understanding the design principles that make any experience emotionally engaging, intellectually stimulating, and impossible to forget.
The book walks through concepts like:
Storytelling as structure: How narrative can organize learning the way it organizes a theme park attraction
Emotional engagement: Why feelings aren’t distractions from learning… they’re the fuel for it
Environmental design: How physical and virtual spaces communicate before anyone says a word
Participatory experiences: Why the best learning happens when students become active participants, not passive observers
Each chapter provides both the “why” and the “how” (the theoretical foundation and the practical application). Riddle never asks you to choose between magic and rigor. Instead, he shows you how they’re the same thing from different angles.
Why This Book Matters Now
We’re living through an education crisis that isn’t about test scores or technology. It’s about engagement. Students are physically present but emotionally absent. Teachers are exhausted trying to compete with devices designed by entire teams of behavioral psychologists.
Meanwhile, those same students will wait in line for hours to experience a three-minute ride at a theme park. Why? Because someone designed that experience to be worth the wait. Someone thought deeply about story, emotion, pacing, surprise, and satisfaction.
Riddle’s central insight is this: educators can learn from that design process without becoming entertainers. We can create learning experiences that students genuinely want to engage with and not because we’ve dumbed them down or gamified them, but because we’ve designed them to connect with how humans actually experience meaning.
The Curiosity Connection
What strikes me most about Imagineering Education is how naturally it aligns with a Curiosity-Based Thinking approach to learning. Disney’s Imagineers don’t simply tell you a story, they create an environment where you discover it on your own. The best Disney attractions make you curious, then reward that curiosity with discovery, then make you curious all over again. Those are the same wheels Curiosity-Based Thinking turn.
That’s exactly how powerful learning works.
When Riddle discusses creating “immersive learning environments,” he’s really talking about designing spaces and experiences that pique curiosity and sustain it through discovery. When he emphasizes emotional engagement, he’s highlighting what neuroscience confirms: curiosity is an emotion that drives learning better than any external motivator.
The book provides practical frameworks for:
Designing lessons that start with wonder, not information
Creating physical spaces that invite exploration
Building experiences where students make discoveries rather than receive downloads
Sustaining engagement through narrative arcs that create anticipation and satisfaction
Who Needs This Book
Are you an educator who feels like you’re fighting for student attention every day? This book is for you.
Are you an administrator trying to transform school culture but aren’t sure where to start? This book provides a roadmap.
Are you a teacher who became an educator because you love learning but have started to wonder if that love can survive in the current system? This book will remind you why you started and give you tools to reclaim that purpose.
And if you’re anyone who designs experiences for others (whether that’s classrooms, training programs, museums, or anywhere else people gather to learn) this book will change how you approach your work.
The Honest Challenge
I’ll be direct about the challenge this book presents: it requires you to rethink some fundamental assumptions about what teaching is and what learning looks like. If you’re looking for incremental tweaks to existing practices, you might find Riddle’s vision overwhelming.
But if you’re ready to ask bigger questions about what education could be… that is, if you’re willing to step back and redesign rather than just redecorate, then this book becomes your oracle and your guide.
The truth is, most of us already know what engaging learning feels like. We’ve experienced it. We’ve created it in magical moments with our students. Riddle’s gift is showing us how to make those moments less random and more intentional. How to design for discovery instead of hoping for it.
The Bottom Line
Imagineering Education is what happens when someone with deep educational expertise studies the world’s most engaging environments and asks:
What if we could bring this intentionality to every classroom?
The answer, it turns out, isn’t about budgets or technology or administrative support (though those help). It’s about understanding the principles of human engagement and applying them with the same rigor Disney applies to designing Space Mountain.
Thomas Riddle has written a book that’s both inspiring vision and practical manual. It makes you want to redesign everything immediately while giving you specific ways to start tomorrow morning. It honors the complexity of education while insisting that learning should feel like wonder, not work.
Every educator talks about “making learning magical.” Riddle shows us how the people who literally create magic for a living actually do it—and how we can too.
If you’ve ever stood in a classroom and thought “there has to be a better way to do this,” this book is your answer. If you’ve ever experienced a moment where a student’s eyes lit up with genuine curiosity and wished you could bottle that feeling, this book is your formula.
What if education could feel magical for every student, every day? Thomas Riddle believes it can. After reading this book, I believe it too.
And most importantly, now I know where to start.
Get your copy of Imagineering Education here and discover how to transform your learning spaces into places of genuine wonder.
Stay curious!
Matt
Matt Murrie is the author of The Book of What If...?, The Screaming Hairy Armadillo, and Curiosity at Work. He’s spent decades helping educators, entrepreneurs, and executives harness curiosity to create more engaging, effective learning and innovation.