Achieving Rigor and Enjoyment — Productive Struggle with Playing and Designing Game Based Teaching and Learning Ecologies
This blog post is written by Shakhnoza Kayumova an assistant professor of STEM education and research at UMass Dartmouth.
I am a learning-scientist, teacher-educator and researcher in STEM Education and Teacher Development program at UMass Dartmouth. In my classes, pre-service teachers are positioned as inquirers of their knowledge and practice. We engage in drama and simulations with my pre-and in-service teachers about what they are learning, in what ways they can translate their knowledges into practice, and document those practices in a way that they can reflect, evaluate, and transform their knowledges and practices in a playful manner.
Last spring I heard about the INSPIRE workshop at MIT. I was excited to participate in the workshop because of my interest in possibilities for co-design, develop, implement, and evaluate spaces of teacher education and learning. During this workshop, we learned about games and simulations that are being developed at the Teaching Systems Lab and the Woodrow Wilson Academy of Teaching and Learning. These games and simulations are designed to be “practice spaces” help teachers and preservice teachers engage with key skills in their teaching. One of the games we played was called Committee of N. In Committee of N, groups of players are dealt a hand of cards from a deck that has different perspectives on school structure (e.g., bell schedule), theories about learning (e.g., constructivism), and the purpose of schooling (e.g., bulwark of democracy). The players then have to design a school based on the information on their subset of cards. Often the cards that are dealt to a team have conflicting ideas, prompting the group to discuss those ideas and come to a common understanding of those concepts. Committee of N integrates many abstract concepts that are often used in education, such as “constructivism, constructivism, and “whole child education.”
I decided to integrate Committee of N to one of the ESOL (English as a Second Language) courses I teach at the Masters level. In this particular course, preservice teachers and inservice teachers from different backgrounds and contents areas learn about theories of language acquisition and combine them to theories of learning in order to develop knowledge and skills to apply them in their classroom pedagogy working with culturally and linguistically diverse learners. I wanted the teacher candidates and in-service to engage with concepts presented to them in the cards as they think about designing a learning environment for a school or a classroom with a large population of culturally and linguistically diverse learners. My goal was to use the game as an entry-point to open up a conversation with my students about how different and at times contradictory perspectives and values about education and learning co-exist together at the macro, meso, and micro levels. However, as the students in my class began playing the game, it became obvious to us all that many of the educational perspectives and concepts that we “think” we “know” and take for granted were actually very abstract. For example, when we talked about whole child education we quickly realized that everyone had a different idea of the term and none of our definitions or understandings were based on existing research literature. It was interesting to observe for everyone how when some of the designs perspectives based on “whole child education” approach, in practice would reflect behaviorist approach to teaching and learning, while others’ would reflect rote-learning, or direct instruction. These design based contractions allowed teachers and teacher candidates to unpack theoretical ideas in practice and we came to the conclusion that neglecting a shared understanding or literature could result in contradictory practices. Taking the abstract concept of “whole child education” and having to enact that perspective in a concrete school and classroom learning design enabled us to unpack these ideas, resulting in a great conversation.
After this rich conversation that stemmed from using games as learning tools in my classroom, I began to wonder why we don’t use games as tools to teach more often. Part of this notion may be the idea that games are fun or easy, that rigorous learning can’t also be fun. My students had fun playing the game and seemed to enjoy the process. However, there was also this sense that learning was a important matter and therefore had to be approached with “seriousness.” I find this dichotomy to be historically situated in Cartesian duality of reason vs. emotion. We learn from fun, we learn from games, we learn from sorrow, we learn by reading, and thinking. I find it important that teachers and teachers candidates do experience learning in these heterogeneous ways so they can validate and enact diverse ways of knowing and being in the classroom learning. For instance, there were parts of the game when my students felt frustrated or struggled with some of the conceptual challenges. I have tried to celebrate those challenges and reposition them as generative and aa productive struggle. During these productive struggles, students engaged in thoughtful conversations. They connected theoretical ideas and practical approaches to the everyday teaching and learning scenarios.
Playing the game was a different type of fun — productive and generative fun. In the context of the game and playing the game, the students were deeply engaged in thinking about and discussing theories of learning in a way they would not have otherwise done had they just read about the concepts. Thinking about these ideas is not easy, but it can be an excellent opportunity to learn. In the class, we were also studying many other abstract concepts. After doing the game in class, I challenged my students to pick four of the readings we were doing about language development and to create a game like Committee of N so they could understand those concepts. I’ll share what we learned through that experience in a future post.
