Learning Archives - Page 2 of 2

Games for Learning

Twelve a Dozen Screenshot via Game Revolution

This is what I’ve found this year: It is easy to add games to my classroom. It’s not, however, easy to use games for learning, either to support student learning as an intervention or to extend student learning. More importantly, it’s not easy to teach students to learn from games. Or at least the students I am teaching this year.

What I’m noticing is that many of my students are used to being passive consumers of game entertainment. They are mostly casual gamers, but some of them use systems like the X-Box to play FIFA Soccer. Otherwise they play games like Angry Birds and Fruit Ninja. Not that there’s anything wrong with either of these games. They’re fun, and can involve strategy. I even know someone who does a physics project that’s entirely centered on Angry Birds. But, the tack my students have taken on these games is, as they call it, “spray and pray”. They seem to lack the patience and problem solving skills that many of my friends who play RPGs or puzzle games seem to have cultivated, and that I even noticed in my youngest sister when she started gaming in middle school (I was in grad school at this point). When playing games like Dragon Box 12+ or Twelve a Dozen, my students quickly give up and try to sneak over to play 2048 or decide to take some selfies. However, I have another group of students who become totally immersed in these games. They stop by at lunch and ask if they can borrow my iPad to play Twelve again. They discuss strategy. They’re enthralled by Dragon Box and have even started making connections between the game and algebra tasks. What’s the difference between these two groups?

I know my approach hasn’t been different with them. I introduced the games in the same way, gave the same preview, and provided similar supports when they asked questions. Perhaps it is that one group is 7th graders and one is 6th graders, but I have a second 7th grade group where a majority of the students are more like the 6th grader group–engaged and interested in solving problems. It could have something to do with learned helplessness. It could also have something to do with the students’ respective understandings of what games are, and how their particular learning styles interact with the characteristics of my chosen games, and how my students’ experiences with school frame their educational gaming experiences.

According to Jane McGonigal in her book Reality is Broken, games are defined by four characteristics: a goal, rules, a feedback system, and voluntary participation (p 26). Each of these characteristics impacts a person’s engagement with a game–whether it’s a board game, a puzzle, an iPad app, or a complex MMORPG.

A Goal

McGonigal defines a goal in a game as the specific outcome a player wants to achieve. This goal, she says, is what gives the player a sense of purpose. In Twelve the goal to get the main character, 12, home after an explosion in the city of Dozonopolis that destroyed the super-computer. In Dragon Box it’s to help the dragon hatch–it will only come out of the box to eat when it is alone on one side of the screen. But the idea of a goal becomes more complex when we’re talking about using games for learning. For example, I have a goal for my students beyond the explicit goal of the game. I want them to sharpen skills and begin to develop answers to our essential questions: How do patterns in the world help us to make meaning and become better learners?, How can I use known information to figure out new information?, and What strategies can I use to work through a problem when I’m stuck? I chose these games specifically because, in addition to having an engaging explicit goal, the implied goals of the games (the learning goals) matched up with my goals for my students. But are the explicitly stated goals of the game enough to give my students a sense of purpose? Sometimes yes, sometimes no. But if they don’t understand the implicit goals, will they be actively engaged with the game enough to achieve the implicit goals? This is where I’m getting stuck.

Rules

I really like McGonigal’s definition of game rules: They place limitations on how one can achieve the goal of the game, forcing gamers to think creatively and apply problem solving skills. This is another point where my students start to get stuck. I posted a while ago about how being comfortable with being uncomfortable, confused, or not knowing was an important skill for students to learn. In both of these games, the rules and obstacles reveal themselves slowly and new rules are added as the games progress. For students who aren’t comfortable with working their way through confusion, these games can be very frustrating. I don’t want to choose different game though. I chose these two specifically because I wanted my students to work on answering essential questions that lead them toward being comfortable with working their way through confusion to be problem solvers. Not having the skills or understanding of problem solving techniques to work their way through this, however, is making it difficult. This is another spot where using games for learning gets tricky.

We often think of games and gamification as a way to pull in reluctant or struggling learners, but as games become more than just a fun way to practice math drills (who around my age that’s reading this didn’t relish the opportunity to play Math Blaster?) or spelling words, some of these students end up at a disadvantage again. And it’s not because they can’t do what’s being asked. Many of these students are proficient problem solvers in other areas: video games, skateboarding, soccer, building go-karts, designing art projects, planning events. It’s possibly because they aren’t comfortable with the possibility of failure and trying again in school. Even if the gaming environment is supposed to be a safe one for making mistakes and for trying and retrying, as McGonigal asserts, the other difficulties many of these students have encountered in school is making these games for learning something that doesn’t connect them to the problem solving that they’re used to, but brings them back to school where they may have learned that not getting it the first time is failure.

The question now becomes: How do I pull these kids in? How do I scaffold this before and during game play so that they can use the games to help build their capacity for problem solving and their tolerance for working through the unknown? Perhaps I should be modeling game play more and talking through how I work my way through obstacles. Maybe we just need more time with non-digital games (which I use a great deal as well and have actually experienced similar challenges with), so I can do more of that modeling. I can also do more to model how in-game supports can help me work through problems and figure out how to work within the rules of the game. For example, Dozen has a hint button, and Duolingo (a gamified language learning app) will translate words for you as you’re going through practice mode if you tap them. I, wrongly, assume that as frequent game players my students understand these types of supports or know to look for them, but that’s not necessarily the case. I think we also need more conversations about growth mindset and about positive self-talk in order to improve their self-regulation skills.

A Feedback System

Feedback systems tell us how close we’re getting to the goal. It can be something as simple as a progress bar or points, to more complex forms of feedback like text or voice feedback. Feedback keeps us engaged in games because it tells us how we’re doing and lets us know if we’re breaking the rules. One thing I have noticed is that the students who are less engaged in the games haven’t necessarily picked up on the feedback that’s being provided. In some cases, it seems like there’s a genuine mismatch between the student’s learning style and the type of feedback they’re receiving. But in others, it seems like I need to do a better job of teaching them how to use the feedback that’s being provided.

I have one student who struggled with Twelve a Dozen. This game has a narrator that gives feedback on your performance, ranging from informing you of new rules or obstacles to overcome to telling the player that it’s time to rewind and try again. The narration is also captioned. The narrator serves several purposes: reconnecting the player to the goal during a long term game, explaining rules, and giving feedback. Since it serves so many functions, it is important to listen to, even if it is a little annoying (think of the Paperclip from older versions of Word, crossed with a fussy British nanny, with a dash of dorky mathematician humor). This child turned off the sound (because he found the narrator annoying and thought it was unnecessary) and didn’t read the captioned version, so he had no idea that he was getting feedback on the way he was trying to solve the problem (“Maybe we should rewind and try something different”). There are also more subtle forms of feedback that my students miss that involve changes in color on the screen or a simple “Yuck” from the dragon in Dragon Box. Players have to be closely attending to a game and be an active participant in the game in order to realize why the dragon is saying “yuck” instead of “yum” and adjust their game-play appropriately.

I’m not sure if the difficulties my students are having using feedback for determine what they’ve learned and what they need to do next is something that they’ll learn through experience, or something I’ll have to teach them. Either way, it seems that in order to learn from gaming, they need to be able to read and take in feedback from the games.

Voluntary Participation

This final characteristic of games is, I think, one of the most important when we want to use games for learning. Being a voluntary participant in a game, according to McGonigal, means that you buy into all of the above and are agreeing to the goal and the rules. And as I said above, my goal for having a student play a game (and the implied goal of the game) may not match up with why a student is playing a game. When that happens, can learning happen? I think so, but it’s more challenging. I think games really have the power to draw learners in and engage them in difficult work in a fun way. But I think we also need to start scaffolding their abilities to engage with the goal, the rules/obstacles and the feedback system in order for them to truly be voluntary participants and use games as tools for learning.

Nearly 2000 words later, I’m still in the same place that I started. I know that games are a powerful tool for learning and that I think they have great potential for engaging my students, but I’m not entirely sure how to make that happen. I think the most helpful thing I can do for them is to keep working with them to build their perseverance and their problem solving skills, as well as do more modeling of how I engage with games and learn from them.

How do you use games for learning in your classroom? Any advice for how to help students become active participants in game play, rather than passive consumers of game entertainment?

Goal Setting for Everyone

Goal setting is an important part of the learning process. It is important for our students and for us for professional growth. I wanted to include more goal setting for students this year, and also set some goals for myself.

Goal Setting for Students

I’ve been spending some time at the beginning of this year getting to know my students, both as people and as learners. One of the first things we did as a class was to watch this video on growth mindset from Khan Academy. Then, we discussed goal setting and I handed out these great sheets designed by 3AM Teacher, and we proceeded to set goals. I love these sheets and they’re well worth the price tag on TPT; however, I would recommend not using the sheet that explains what SMART goals are, especially if you teach middle school. The tagline for Relevant is “Hello, Lover”, which caused a seemingly endless fit of giggles from my 6th graders, and some “ew, that’s gross” comments from my 7th graders. The rest of the handouts, however, are wonderful for guiding students through the goal setting process.

It seemed that for many of my students, this was the first time they were encountering SMART goals, so it was challenging. Although we talked through the process and I modeled how to set a goal that was specific, measurable, achievable, and relevant, we started out with things like “To get better at writing.” Several probing questions later we got closer to a SMART goal: “I want to write longer paragraphs with fewer spelling mistakes”. Sometimes the goals aligned with what their teachers the previous year had set as goals for them, and sometimes their goals were different. What’s important is that they know what they’re working toward (and have a purpose for it), and I know what is important to them, and can begin to incorporate it into my instruction.

Overall, the first effort was successful, but I think the next time I work with them on goal setting this year it will be even better. We’ll be able to really evaluate if our goals were specific enough and measurable enough for us to be able to evaluate our progress, giving them a clearer idea of SMART goals look like, and, I’m hoping, helping to motivate them. They did have some difficulty identifying steps to help them achieve their goals. I think that was partially my modeling wasn’t great, and partially that they’re still not sure what that means. I’m hoping some reflection will help us to create better plans, but I also realize that as an adult sometimes it takes me a lot of time to formulate a plan, so maybe they just need more time.

Goal Setting for the Teacher

I just had my beginning of the year meeting with my principal. As a “probationary teacher” (meaning not yet tenured, not “on probation” as if I did something bad…), I have a meeting at the beginning of the year, and then she observes me twice and we have follow-up meetings on those observations. This year I set goals for myself in three areas: instruction and management, coaching, and self-care. I’m going to follow the same format I asked the kids to (but without the fancy paper). I’m going to share my instruction and management goals here. The others will come another time.

1. Improve my behavior management for my more challenging group.

I have one group (who I adore), but they are very challenging in terms of their behavior. There are a lot of reasons for this. Some of it is group dynamic, some of it is the combinations of individual learning differences. Some of it is what we as educators know to be true about kids who are in programs like the ACS/Learning Support program at my school–after a while students make the decision that it’s better to be bad than to be dumb, and they act accordingly. Some of it is that more intimate environment that we work in allows a certain level of comfort for them which has enormous benefits, but also students sometimes feel that the Learning Lab is a place where they can “let it all hang out”, and they let all the pent up energy out. But some of it is within my control. I want to be more systematic about the approaches I try this year, and really keep track of what’s working and what isn’t. Even though I know that it takes several weeks before one can see if a behavioral intervention is working, sometimes I jump the gun.

My plan: Create a way to reflect in writing, even briefly and bullet pointed, on what happened during each lesson with these students, how I intervened, and what structures and supports worked. I’ve had a colleague suggest ClassDojo, which might be helpful for tracking data, but I’m not sure how effective it will be as a system.

Who can help: I have several colleagues who can help me with this. This is one area though, where observation won’t be effective–adding another person to the mix completely changes the dynamic in small group teaching. Maybe videos?

2. Better integrate the technology I have available to me into my lessons, including finding more ways to leverage “regular” technology as assistive technology for my students.

I am extremely luck to have a number of tech resources, both in terms of hardware and devices (1:1 laptops/MacBooks, my personal iPad, student smartphones, student e-readers, interactive whiteboard) and in terms of software/apps: Schoology, Google Apps, and a variety of tools provided by the school for use by both students and teachers. With so much available, it’s easy to get bogged down in all of that technology and end up just using it, and not necessarily purposefully, rather than integrating it into instruction, so I decided to focus on just a two things:

Creating digital portfolios to track progress toward student learning goals using my iPad, the student laptops, and a TBD app. I’ve been reading and rereading Matt Renwick‘s awesome book, Digital Student Portfolios, in order to get some ideas. Being able to curate evidence of student progress toward their IILP (International Individual Learning Plan) goals will really help with decision making for placement, and help foster conversations with parents. It will also make students think about I think Schoology might be the way to go, but I’m not sure how well it will work–it’s designed to be a learning management system, not a portfolio. I might be better off making individual Google Sites for each student.
Using Schoology to help provide support materials for students. Basically, I want to flip the front loading of content and supplemental curriculum support that used to be the main activity in Learning Lab so I can focus on skill building work.

I don’t have a plan for how to implement this yet. I’m still working on it. But I do know that I have a few educational technology specialists at my school who can help.

I’m excited to pursue these goals this year and share what I learn along the way.

Do you teach goal setting to your students? Do you set professional goals for yourself? How do you track your progress?

Is Confusion Productive?

Two weeks ago when I was at CGC Miami, we had a couple of conversations where the idea of confusion came up. One was when we discussed what happens in one’s brain when learning happens–not fMRI scans or anything, just feelings, attitudes, etc. Then we had another discussion about what learning looked like in a classroom. The word “confusion” came up in both contexts. A woman who was sitting at my table was taken aback when several of us mentioned confusion as something that we expect to see in our classrooms when learning is happening.

“It’s like yesterday,” she said (clearly, I’m paraphrasing from my memory for dramatic effect). “All of the words people use to describe learning are so negative. Learning is positive. We should be using positive words.”

Many of us began to defend confusion as an essential and productive part of the learning process. We were not, however, successful in convincing her, and ended up leaving it off of our chart, though two other groups ended up including it. It led me to the question: Is confusion always negative? Can confusion be productive in the classroom? If so, how do we coach students through confusion and through to deeper learning and understanding?

What does learning mean and how does it relate to confusion?

I think a big part of whether or not we, as teachers or as learners, are comfortable with confusion has a lot to do with how we define learning. If we define learning as remembering a series of facts, then confusion is unacceptable. It means that we as teachers are not being clear and we need to find a better way to present the content. However, if we are defining learning as making connections, developing concepts, exploring dilemmas, and adding the skills necessary to do all of this to our repertoire. When we define learning this way, confusion is inevitable. In this definition we are making sense on concepts and ideas. We’re working in an area that might not be comfortable for us, but once we work our way through the confusion, we know and understand so much more than we did before.

I have a favorite quotation about this kind of learning. I wrote it out neatly and put it on the front of the binder I had in grad school (yes, when I went to grad school people still took notes on paper and put handouts into binders). I hung up a copy in my first classroom/office, and have continued to hang it on the wall of every classroom I’ve had since. I even include it in the first Power Point slide for my grad students on their first day of literacy intervention practicum. (PS–If my crafty sister is reading this blog, I would love a pretty cross-stitched version of this to hang in my intervention room for my birthday…hint, hint)

Generally, we touch on many apparent irrelevancies, and learning implies that at most times we are at least partially confused. Just as one cannot think one’s way into growth, there are times when we are not aware, indeed cannot be aware, that what one is doing is providing the basis for significant growth and discoveries. – John Miller Chernoff (1979)

This quotation is not from an education book. It’s from an ethnomusicology book called African Rhythm and African Sensibility that I bought for a college course called “Political Economy of the Music of the African Diaspora” (yes, I went to a hippie, artsy college. What of it?). Because of this one sentence, I have moved a book that I probably won’t reread, that has margins full of the pretentious notes of a college senior (most of which seem to be about Todorov’s Double Bind), from place to place, apartment to apartment, for over ten years.

I have found this quotation both relevant and inspiring to me on my journey as an educator (how many veteran teachers remember at some point during their first year of teaching how all sorts of seemingly disconnected ideas from student teaching and education coursework suddenly came together in an ah-ha! moment?), and relevant and inspiring to the students I teach. I originally hung this quotation up in my room as a reminder to me that being confused and being uncomfortable (which I often was during my first year of teaching) meant that I was probably laying the groundwork for learning, growth, and discoveries. I didn’t intend it to be inspiring to students–it seemed too long and too complex. But when I had a student ask me about it, and then ask if she could copy it into her notebook, I knew that (1) I had underestimated my 6th graders, and (2) that it is important to let students know that being confused sometimes is OK and that learning is all about working one’s way through confusion and out to the other side.

For confusion to be productive, we need to get comfortable with being uncomfortable

A big part of letting students know that it is OK to be confused is helping them get comfortable with being uncomfortable. Without this, it is almost impossible for confusion to be a productive part of the learning process. But how do we get students comfortable with this?

For starters we need to create a safe learning environment where it’s OK to fail. Learning needs to be seen as a process that we’re all working through at our own pace. I think standards-based grading and letting students have do overs, retakes, etc, also takes us toward this. I have definitely seen anxiety about grades keep students from diving in to something that they’re not necessarily comfortable with or stopping them from grappling with a difficult topic and jumping right into “Can you help me?” or “What do I do next?” This is a challenge that I see not only with my middle school students, but with my graduate students as well. If students are constantly worried about getting the wrong answer and thus a bad grade, how can they work through confusion and into growth?

Students need tools to work through confusion

I really agree with CGC that we need to teach students how to learn, and for me part of that is teaching students about problem solving, perseverance, and resilience. I don’t want to get into a discussion of “grit” (for some reason, the term really annoys me), but I do want to start a conversation about teaching these skills. It’s something I’ve always found tricky, especially since in the past I’ve worked with kids classified as EBD (having emotional or behavioral disorders) that had a really low tolerance for frustration. Teaching them these skills was a much different, and much slower process (and it sometimes involved calling in the crisis para…)

There are some things that I’m absolutely sure about. In order for a student to learn these skills we need to embed them into our general curriculum. As teachers, we need to model these skills repeatedly, and think aloud about how we use positive self-talk in order to get ourselves unstuck when we’re confused or have a problem. In reading, teaching things like self-monitoring and fix-up strategies, and in math giving them tools for each of the process standards. The good people at The Math Learning Center who did our training this past June had some great ideas about hanging questions up on the wall that students can ask themselves while working through problems. There’s also a great post here with some ideas. And next week, I’ll be following up on these ideas with a post on self-regulation and Self-Regulated Strategy Development (SRSD), which is something I’ve been doing a lot of reading about this summer.

But what about more complex problems? Or times when the information we’re taking in doesn’t make sense because it conflicts with something we know or believe to be true? How can we help our students, as the professor of the aforementioned class put it, “enter the contact zone” so learning and knowledge transformation happen? I think we need to make all of these areas come together: comfort with being uncomfortable, a focus on the learning process, a de-emphasis of grades, and explicitly teaching how to work through problems.

What do you think? Is confusion productive in the classroom? What tools have you given your students to work through confusion on their own?