Classcraft: Teacher-Gamers are the antidote to gamification
If your goal is to coast through class, gamify your classroom with an app, watch TV shows with your students, exchange cursory greetings with your colleagues and collect a paycheck, then RPGs in Schools (and, frankly, teaching) is not for you. If this is you, there is a word for what you are lacking: “classcraft”. And, there is a word for you, it’s called a “lemon”.
If you are reading this, you are likely not a “lemon teacher”- as exposed and made famous in Guggenheim’s Waiting for Superman (2010) segment “the dance of the lemons”- nor according to the hush-hush payments that get lemon teachers to leave with clean records, would you admit it.
Anyway, this is not to say that watching a TV show with students or gamifying your classroom makes you a lemon teacher. Far from it! This is just a cautionary tale opening hook to my article (so I can draw your attention to the lemon’s opposite), which I will finish off with a quote from Dr. Caprice Young (former Los Angeles Unified School District school board president and founder of the nonprofit California Charter Schools Association and current National Superintendent of Learn4Life Schools) that will make any parent cringe who has found their child in the care of a lemon teacher:
“One year with a bad teacher puts a kid a year, or two, behind the other kids,” Young says. “If a parent sees their child has a lemon teacher, if they can get them into another school, they will.” 1
And for the record, lemons are not found in just public schools or the USA. My partner and I have pulled each of our sons out of lemon classes in Canada: one we moved from a 3rd grade public school teacher who spoke to the kids through a microphone headset and covered an entire wall (student space!) with checkered pictures of puppies and kittens into a semi-private school with a fantastic teacher. But wait, get this: from that same semi-private (meaning it was half government subsidized) school, we pulled our other son out of a 1st grade lemon class and into a great public school teacher’s care where he thrived.
What makes the opposite of a lemon?
I’m not asking “what makes a teacher normal?” Rather, what could actually advance a child a year or two ahead of other kids, or take a child that is behind and bring them forward into a new sense of self-esteem, build confidence in their learning capacity and support their social emotional resilience? This is what I would call high quality “classcraft”. Most parents who can afford it, pull their kids out of school entirely and homeschool them until their pride and joy are up to speed or ahead of the curve. But, sadly, most people do not have this option.
If you have a school, then fill it with fantastic teachers and focus on the great things community education can provide.
“Okay!?” You say perturbed, “So, where do we get these fantastic teachers?”
There are tens of thousands, if not a few hundred thousand, of them the world over right inside our schools, but perhaps only 2 or so in each school. They are teacher-gamers. Teachers by day and tabletop gamers by night and weekend. And the best news is that their super-powers just have to be activated. Like heroes stepping out from their mild-mannered roles as subject teachers they can take a new role in developing life-skills programs in the schools where they already work.
Teacher-gamers have been there all along, but were not valued by the establishment for their fringe hobbies as gamers. However with the erosion of the subject-teacher’s role and the rise of EdTech and AI in classrooms, these very human and very interesting members of the community are emerging to more prominent positions in schools, because of their vast skillset as life-skills practitioners.
What teacher-gamers need more than parent and administrative support to make their work a success are co-teachers who can grow from the experience of co-teaching and the teacher-gamer’s expertise at bringing out passion in each teachers’ personal arsenal. But what is the backdrop of these emerging heroes in educational environments the earth over? Below, and in the next article, we will see why it is so important to extricate teacher-gamers from any association to gamification.
Not even a decade ago, it seemed like gamification was going to be a quick fix to curriculum woes and student boredom. It wasn’t. Full stop. Especially for kids over 7 years old. Worse, if you look at it carefully, gamification has largely turned from a technique with a fun pretext into a gateway to on-screen education. Yes, I am being critical here, because the insidious reality is that, like with food, if you promise a toy comes with it, children focus more on the acquisition of the toy then on the quality of the food and the benefits of human-interaction and togetherness. Then in the future, the association to the prior experience, as Pavlov demonstrated, is that good behavior is rewarded with a dopamine hit. Is this really what we want from education? As with the fast-food result, too many quick-fixes with gamification on-screen, makes cranky kids who want more and want it now! If you are a parent or not, you see it with kids and smart-phones — they are hooked. We all are. I know that I am not alone in advocating for “slow” interaction that takes real “relationshipcraft”, for food and education- at the very least.
So let me take this a step further: Gamification sliding from the classroom into the online-education-experience could herald the erosion of the human teacher presence if we are not careful. The last thing that we want as educators is to have our role changed to “technician-babysitters” who oversee computer access and help students use hardware and software. That was not what we signed up for.
It doesn’t take a coronavirus outbreak to remind us that growing our own food, being self-sufficient, enjoying a daily mindfulness practice and valuing the teacher-student relationship are critical to holistic well-being. Or does it? What will ensure that future generations will not — by default- get sucked into a computer by gamified software for their education? Like bringing that healthy communal sense of eating together at the table (with no phones and toys!) instead of that fast-food-toy combo dopamine hit, what will bring back that strong feeling of learning and trust with a human-teacher. I have already seen children looking at teachers and treating them as some kinds orc-guardians that are holding them back from their onscreen fix?
#Roleplayinggamesinschools is gaining prominence as more than just a technique to bring the human teacher back into focus as a mentor and motivation for students.
This is the first of an ongoing series of articles concerning “classcraft” — the skill in, and knowledge of, delivering a class.
#teachergamer #wildmindtraining #rpgsinschools
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Zachary Reznichek is a life-skills trainer and teacher-gamer running courses between North America, Europe and South East Asia.
Instagram: teachergamerhandbook
For more on teacher-gamers visit www.wildmindtraining.com or write to contact@teachergamer.com
The Teacher-Gamer Handbook is COMING SOON! Stay tuned for updates on our IndiGoGo Campaign HERE.
Sources:
1 — Barrett, Beth (11 February 2010). LA WEEKLY article “LAUSD’s Dance of the Lemons”. Retrieved from https://www.laweekly.com/lausds-dance-of-the-lemons/.
