How NOT to be a boring teacher! Leadership: Teaching and Learning Implicitly

(and what I learned from Wes Anderson)

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The Teacher-Gamer Revolution

11 min readApr 29, 2020

As leaders of the class, teachers are models of control, scope, depth and empathy.

As leaders of the class, the game, and the role-playing, teacher-gamers are models of control, scope, depth, empathy and 36 life-skills.

Part of 2019’s graduating class of student-gamers and their RPGs In Schools Certificates

Regardless of what kind of teacher you are, as I am- and more and more of you are- both of the above, I would like to let you in on a little secret for smoother guidance through material, content, context and learning objectives: keep it implicit. And, no, I don’t mean the dark shadowy hand of “the implicit curriculum” that invisibly guides the behavior of children. Rather, I mean the strategy of keeping your learning objectives implicit by just engaging with your students directly with minimum-to-no signs of educational protocol, lexicon, cues or other verbiage that just makes them feel like they are at school. #RPGsInSchools is a fabulous way to practice or get started doing this and helping you apply it to your subject classes. So, whether you are able to put it into your school as a literacy, life-skills, survival, counseling, mindfulness class or after-school-activity (ASA), role-playing games in schools gives you the chance to spread your leadership wings to explore and swoop around the learning landscape in a new way.

With a universe of opportunities, the story we co-create with students can have just the usual narrative elements we find in any story OR it can be enriched by literary forms and devices as academic as you can make them.

To the multifaceted gem that is teacher RPGs, one key facet is doing it in an implicit way. You don’t have to be explicit about how you are doing everything by, for example, declaring learning objectives to your students. In fact, that is quite boring. So let’s, for now, peel back the curtain and get explicit about teaching implicitly.

Authentic Engagement

The most authentic way a teacher can engage their students is to use student feedback through creative writing as major reference material for what students want to achieve in the class. Instead of telling them what they will learn, create activities that ask them what they know, what they want to know and how they like to learn. Give them the task of drawing a diagram of what the subject looks like to them or of the system as they understand it. Or have them write an analogy of a particular piece of the work that describes it to someone 4 years younger than they. Or if you need to be more explicit, simply ask them questions where they are sure to give you three things and three reasons (what I call “comma because”) in answering any given question. That is not only asking them for authentic engagement, it gives you the opportunity to attune yourself to their aspirations.

The most authentic way a teacher-gamer can engage their students is to use students’ creative writing as major reference material for the story. As long as you have the common adventuring party’s story arc planned out with events, characters and locations, you can substitute student input for those situations, people and places in their backstories. In other words, whatever the students (aka players) created for their characters, can help you!, as you can now interweave anything they have provided into the storyline, the problematic environment and the challenging non-player characters you create. This form of borrowing puts the biggest smile on students’ faces because you are using their input straight into the narrative reality of the game and story.

Although you can get away with a slapdash smorgasbord of stereotypical tropes, you can also work to create something unique with twists, turns, puzzles, riddles, surprises and learning experiences that fill you and your students with heaps of satisfaction as you sort through it together. You will be co-generating plot, characters, setting, style, theme and literary elements galore.

If you are not disciplined enough about getting proper backstories from your players about their characters, you also run the risk of them having thin, stereotypical motives or making you the story delivery machine. These are just things to be aware of.

Everyone is given a different description to provide for today’s adventure episode

Beware the Hidden Curriculum!?

People are skeptical about the word implicit being used in education, because it harkens back to the idea of an invisible hand in the curriculum that gets kids to behave and ultimately leads to them becoming box-checking cogs in the machine of modern corporations.

Whoa! Take it easy. If you know me, or as you get to know me as a writer, you will understand that that wouldn’t even be a remote motive in my curriculum philosophy musings.

The best thing a teacher can receive is an authentic question

I try to remind people that if they sense something so very out of character for a progressive educator, just ask them to explain, as a subject teacher asked me during a training session a few years ago (in 2017):

“I’m not sure what you mean by implicit learning. What is an example of an implicit learning experience in RPGs in Schools?”

I was so happy to get this question and I just drew on the over-arcing experience we had over the year of 30 classes (4 hours each) in which all 36 life-skills were touched on multiple times, refined often and almost all acquired over three courses:

If you get players to vanquish an evil mining overlord who is dumping chemical slag into the river, paying local law enforcement to keep complainers quiet, spreading rumors that scare people off the land, and running child labor camps because local crops won’t yield and people need money to buy imported food to survive, well, then you are facilitating a massive learning experience. Just through an adventurous story you are getting people to investigate and figure out the scope of a problem, collaborate to find solutions, have the pleasure of sticking it to the bad guy (aka fight for the oppressed).
In other words, you can’t go wrong if you draw on real world problems:
You cannot go wrong if your villain pollutes the environment, suppresses freedom and spreads civil unrest making the characters responsible for cleaning up and stopping corruption.

Oh yeah, and let’s remind ourselves: And all of this without computers!

Break time! One group taking their turn out in the yard for some 3V3

This is implicit leadership. This is “teaching” through leading and guiding. This is what I believe teacher-gamers would want to be passing on to student-gamers who are just mentees of teacher-gamers. This is what I believe teachers would want to be passing on to students who are just learning how to become teachers of themselves or great learners.

Curriculum Philosophy Bonus Rabbit Hole…

…You thought this article was ending but it is taking a strange and sublime turn…like taking the Fantastic Inner-Journey School Bus Ride down through the trunk of the RPGs in Schools tree into the curriculum philosophy roots.

WARNING: Once you pass this line of the article you are not going to think the same about educational philosophy, because we are morphing the educational philosophy frame to include the umbrella frame of political philosophy — this is like the Hamza “River” that runs 4,000 meters below the Amazon River. Did you know there was such a thing? There is! And once you know about it, you never think the same way about river systems or the Earth again.

This particular set of roots draws from transcendental idealism.

“So where does this thinking come from? What method are you following?”

Great question and as the years go by, the answer gets less and less conventional, thank goodness ! So how about an unconventional conclusion? I will conclude by detailing how I came to this pedagogical determination in two parts:

1.) The actual pedagogical concept of implicit learning comes from understanding transcendental idealism — which could very well be understood as the foundation of Western Mindfulness, if there was such a thing.

2.) My main practical process or “metaphorical recipe” by which I came to the above ideology and use daily to generate theories, experiments and pragmatic curriculum methods.

How I came to understand Implicit Learning

How I came about the implicit learning ideology is through my fascination with Transcendental Idealism. In order to keep this conclusion simple, I will just outline the three main features that all finally fell into place in 2014 with the release of Wes Anderson’s Grand Budapest Hotel.

1.) Immanuel Kant helps to describe what transcendental idealism is.

2.) Henry David Thoreau helps us to understand why to apply it.

3.) Wes Anderson shows us how to apply it.

First, I was trying to understand what Immanuel Kant was describing as transcendental idealism which the internet regurgitates as, “the mind of the knower makes an active contribution to the experience of objects before us”[1]. This was Kant’s epistemological way of putting sensibility and understanding together into a theory of knowledge that says that we are in space and we are in time and both of them are not objects, but they provide us with a context for our consciousness to interact with objects — which is generally subjective.

It’s a puzzle, but pretty much it is trying to understand in a very empirical way how we gain knowledge. Kant was coming up against a block, so he was having to leave the empirical frame, which is what we come to see through Thoreau is kind of what transcendental idealism is all about. This is a taste of Kant from his 18th century philosophical smash-hit tome Critique of Pure Reason that has since put him in the upper echelon of the greatest Western philosophers:

Everything that is represented through a sense is to that extent always appearance, and an inner sense must therefore either not be admitted at all or else the subject, which is the object of this sense, can only be represented by its means as appearance, not as it would judge of itself if its intuition were mere self-activity, i.e., intellectual. Any difficulty in this depends merely on the question how a subject can internally intuit itself; yet this difficulty is common to every theory. Consciousness of itself (apperception) is the simple representation of the I, and if all of the manifold in the subject were given self-actively through that alone, then the inner intuition would be intellectual. In human beings this consciousness requires inner perception of the manifold that is antecedently given in the subject, and the manner in which this is given in the mind without spontaneity must be called sensibility on account of this difference. If the faculty for becoming conscious of oneself is to seek out (apprehend) that which lies in the mind, it must affect the latter, and it can only produce an intuition of itself in such a way, whose form, however, which antecedently grounds it in the mind, determines the way in which the manifold is together in the mind in the representation of time; there it then intuits itself not as it would immediately self-actively represent itself, but in accordance with the way in which it is affected from within, consequently as it appears to itself, not as it is.”[2]

Which brings us to Thoreau, who Wikipedia attributes transcendentalism to his reflections of Hinduism — which I believe is just a pastiche of what his work brings to transcendental idealism with his reflections about Walden, the Gold Rush, Walking and Civil Disobedience. These are much more in line with the idea that nature and goodness inform a person inherently with the virtues needed to be self-sustaining and independent. As Wikipedia defines transcendentalism, it

emphasizes subjective intuition over objective empiricism. Adherents believe that individuals are capable of generating completely original insights with little attention and deference to past masters.[3]

However, I believe Thoreau would consider that nature and our own atavistic bio-diversity, which is the goodness of the design of our human form (body and free-willed minds) are our “past masters”. He had such a “back-to-the-wild” attitude for the simplicity, beauty and harmony that giving yourself over to nature allows it to work on you and together with your own mind, brings you solutions to problems and helps you transcend obstacles.

So thirdly, where Thoreau rendered why he thought all these things in books and gave lectures of why people should give up the corrupting spirit of industrialization and urban subsistence, he was living how he believed people should live ideally. He was trying to model what he was doing, however he was leaving out the human mentor that Wes Anderson has been toiling with at the center of so many of his films — most of which beg for proper adult role-models. All of his characters are on the Hero’s Journey, but are generally challenged by the false mentor or failed mentor. The need of the mentor and the failure of the mentor are so critical to the hero and the Hero’s Journey.

We see this played out quintessentially in Grand Budapest Hotel, where the hotel manager is training a protégé (“junior lobby boy in training”) with the perfection of running a system where even the flaws inform the direction the hotel manager and staff must take to get the hotel to survive under all the conflicts local, societal and specific to its clientele. It is a metaphor — at least in my perspective — about how there are so many people directing and “making movies”, but so few are actual artists and masters that reflect our humanity. So many “professionals” make a living (read: make money) from movies, film and media, like leeches, but they do not advance our human condition through the process. The only way Wes Anderson knows how to address this is to make films where every shot is a piece of art and can stand on its own under scrutiny and at the same time is integrated into the whole without skipping a beat, glitch or question — it is completely implicit. The only question Wes Anderson leaves us with with is: HOW did he do it? We can see what and why, the how is the marvel.

…Ok we are coming up and out of the strange rabbit hole journey of curriculum philosophy roots.

Just like when you learn something for the first time, it is so new and large and strange that the experience has a profound impact on a learner/player, so as a teacher we have to keep that experience fun, magical and intriguing.

Just like when you play an RPG for the first time, it is so new and large and strange that the experience has a profound impact on a learner/player, so as a teacher-gamer we have to keep that experience mystical, magical and mysterious. As this is your story as a reader, it is the story of the player and part of the narrative of the learner.

That first impression, is a sacred moment that any gamer recalls with deep sentiment and powerful clarity. As the person responsible for bringing people into a subject matter of epic proportions, make sure you make it fun, exciting and profound.

[1] This quote is attributed to Kant, but I could not find where he said it.

[2] Kant, Immanuel (1781, 1998). Critique of Pure Reason (Trans. and Ed. by Guyer, P. and Wood, A.W.), B68–69; p. 189–190. Cambridge University Press.

[3] Transcendentalism. (2020, February 26) In Wikipedia. Retrieved from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcendentalism