The thrill of playtesting

It's exciting watching someone play a game you've invented! 

For a long time now, I've been having my students invent and playtest each other's games.  In addition to a great communicative opportunity both within and about the game, the students feel good because the games are then donated to high schools.  For many, it's possibly the first truly communicative work they've done in English.

Recently, the show was on the other foot: I got to playtest a game I invented.  Now I can see why it's so exciting!  It's a little scary sending your little game out to be played without your supervision, but watching other people arguing and enjoying themselves playing a game you designed...wow!

Tweeting literature

Juliet was 13 years old and Romeo wasn't much older.  If they were living now, they'd be tweeting. 

One interesting way to get your students to focus on the thoughts and motivations of the characters is to imagine what they would tweet. 

You don't need to use actual twitter online either; cutting up strips of paper and sticking them on the board will work just as well.

@tybalt
I'm going to kill you @romeo! #houseofmontague

@romeo
You can't kill me @tybalt. I'm married to @juliet, your cousin! We're family! #houseofcapulet

Brainstorm with "wall-wikis"

A wiki is a collection of pages with information on a topic which everyone can contribute to, edit and learn from.  Usually it's online, but why not do it offline?
Stick a lot of papers on the wall.  It's best if the teacher can "seed" the wiki by giving a few pages with examples or parts of examples.

I wanted my students to think about different kinds of structures for writing essays, letters, articles, stories etc. so each one got its own page.  For some, I put the whole structure, for some part of the structure, for some only the title.  I left the room for an hour (unavoidably meeting) and when I came back, the pages were full of ideas and students had even added new pages I hadn't thought of!

No English in primary

Thoughts on the new law that says kids in Ecuador don't learn English until 8th grade?

More from the great Chris Crawford

"An excellent game allows the player to interact heavily with his opponent, to invest a great deal of his personality into the game.  This requires that the game offer the player a large number of meaningful options, enough options that the player can express the nuances of his personality." (The Art of Computer Game Design)

Substitute game for lesson, player for learner and opponent for subject matter and we have the perfect definition of a great education!

Can games have educational value?

Chris Crawford, in his book The Art of Computer Game Design says that young animals and children learn by playing.  Watch a lion cub chasing a butterfly; yes he's playing, but he's also deadly serious.

Children, too, learn by playing.  In my own search for a preschool for my daughter, I instantly eliminated any that had "learn through play" or any equivalent as its slogan.  If they really have to state the obvious, then it's probably clear that they mean "play" the way adults think children should play with directed "circle time" and teacher-led songs and stories.  (My daughter is enrolled in an Emmi Pikler school, similar to Montessori in its approach in that an environment is set up in which children choose to do what they want.)

"In light of this, the question "Can games have educational value?" becomes absurd.  It is not games but schools that are the newfangled notion, the untested fad, the violator of tradition." (Crawford, 1982, p16)
Interesting way of flipping the issue, isn't it!

Control issues: puzzles vs games vs toys

Chris Crawford, in his book The Art of Computer Game Design, says that

• In a puzzle, the designer has total control of the user's experience because there is only one solution.
• With toys, the designer has no control over the user's experience because toys are open ended.
• With games, the designer can design but not directly control the user's experience because there are many different ways of playing a game, yet it isn't totally open-ended either.

Which one should teaching be like?

"A day where learning and assessment are the same thing!"

"If a learning system is well designed, you don’t finish it without the guarantee that you’ve learned it already. (…)  We could imagine a day where learning and assessment are the same thing, that is we build such rich learning systems they already assess themselves."  James Gee
 http://connectedlearning.tv/case-studies/boss-level-quest-learn-connected-learning-public-school

How do you know when you've learned something, when you've really understood something?  Most people would say it's when you can answer questions about it.

...but what if the definition of learning isn't so much that you can answer questions but that you can ask questions? 

What if, instead of having students answer questions on a test, the test would be that they get to ask questions about the subject...and keep on asking more and better questions?

Learning is no longer about possessing knowledge, but about expanding it.  If students can take what they learn and run with it, then that's how the world will grow. 

So why do teachers still feel like we have to be the be all and end all of a student's education?

Game: products of slavery

I know, slavery doesn't seem like a very suitable topic for something as frivolous as a game...but who said games have to be frivolous?
I aim to shock my students into realising that when it comes to consumerism, "winning" for half the world often means "losing" for the other half.  We may have the best clothes, coolest phones and highest rated status symbols that make us the envy of our friends...but at what cost to those who manufacture them?

1. Send students to visit http://www.productsofslavery.org/.  Each student is assigned one product to look at.  They copy onto cards only the information containing examples of the passive voice, for example
  "During the rainy season from January to March in Ecuador, children working in gold mines are cut off from services such as schools and the conditions in the community become even more isolated."  
(That's just because that's the focus of my grammar lesson, but if you're not doing that, you can just have them write down the most shocking information)

2.  The next day they play the game

• They play in groups of 3-4 with a board of ten squares (draw a snake and chop it up into 10 pieces). 
• They each have $200 to start and the aim is to tend the game with as little money as possible.  The winner is the one who has spent all $200 or who has the smallest amount left.
• As they land on each square, they pick a card from the "product" pile.  They may choose to buy or not to buy it, they may choose to ask for information about it or not (if they want information, they look at the corresponding card in the "information" pile).

Shock: The winner will obviously be the one who has bought the greatest amount of unethically produced products.  Have the students journal their thoughts about that.

Using football to explain Israel

What better way to explain Israel to Latin Americans than through football?

But this game was different in one key respect: they had to play with 5 footballs.

I gave them a minute in their teams to discuss strategy, then they played until it disolved into chaos (about 45 seconds!) When I brought them back into the classroom I asked who won. Not surprisingly, that generated a huge argument over who made how many goals with which balls. I asked how many balls had to go in to count as a goal, so do you win if you get 2/5 balls in or do you have to get in all 5? That stumped them. Then I asked if each player focussed on one ball or if they all focussed on all of them. They said at first they tried to focus on one but then they got mixed up and didn't know where to look.

 I said "Welcome to Israel, kids."

Then I assigned an issue to each football and showed how it got batted around between the different factions (the Palestinians, Iran, the settlers on the West Bank, the ultra-religious Jews, and the United States)

reframing failure as iteration

Psychologists are expected to go through therapy themselves on the theory that you have to know what it feels like to be on the other end. 

That was the purpose of my lesson last night:  to have teachers try to answer questions they routinely expect their own students to answer. 

"What's the main idea", we ask our students.  Are we sure they know what a main idea is?   We aren't born knowing, so it would be better to ask a more specific question to help guide them toward the main idea.

Another typical question-type focusses on details, but often it focusess on the wrong ones.  An old children's joke goes:
There's a bus going through the city.  The first stop it picks up 6 passengers.  The next stop it picks up 4 and drops off 2...  This goes on for a while as the second child busily tries to keep up with the passenger count until the joker asks with glee...What was the bus driver's name? 

How often do we ask students to focus on details that aren't entirely relevant?

I asked everyone to look at the following video and answer the questions below:
http://www.edutopia.org/made-with-play-game-based-learning-iteration-video (If you want to read more, look at the related blog post on edutopia here:
http://www.edutopia.org/blog/boss-level-student-led-learning-rachelle-vallon)

What key words, phrases or concepts would you need to know to understand this video?  How do you know they're important?  How can you find out what they mean?
We listed Rube Goldberg machine, iteration and ownership because these words were important to understanding the video, they recur frequently in the video and they are useful to know (we rejected the term "boss level" because it's a phrase that's too specific to the school in the video).

What is/are the main idea(s)?  How do you know?
We focussed on the idea that learning happens best through trial and error.  Not coincidentally, that's the title of the video and related blog post: "Reframing failure as iteration allows students to thrive".

Which details are important?  How do you know?
Anything to do with how the students work through the iteration process was considered important here: the fact that they work in groups, the fact that the teacher adopts more of a hands-off approach, the fact that they have to show their work to other groups as the various stages of iteration, etc.

All of these questions would fit into the second stage of a listening lesson which looks like this:

• Before listening: introduce the topic (Bloom's taxonomy levels 2-4)
• During listening: guide students to comprehend  (Bloom's taxonomy levels 1-2)
• After listening: students react to the text in some way:  (Bloom's taxonomy levels 4-6)

Ethics in research

For my course on Research Methods at the University of London, my classmates and I were asked to observe an online community and explore the question of identity considering the following questions:

1. A basic description of the environment you were looking at - what content does the environment contain and what sort of activities go on within it?
2. What types of data would you be able to generate through online observation of this site and what limitations would you face if you were solely using this form of data collection in this setting?
3. What other data collection techniques might be employed to explore the concept of identity within your selected site? What are the potential advantages/ disadvantages of these techniques?
4. What particular methodological and ethical challenges/ questions does the empirical setting that you have selected raise?

Today I asked my students to consider the ethical implications of studying them in our Facebook group.  Most of the answers involved two issues:

Invasion of privacy:
They all seemed very upset at the idea that I would be able, as their FB "friends" to see their more personal posts.  This is valid, but my argument was that they accepted that risk by becoming "friends" with them.  (On the other hand, I didn't give them much choice, did I!)
Furthermore, this makes for a very interesting side lesson on internet safety: if I, their teacher can see their posts, so can everyone...now and for all time!

Judgement:
As their English teacher, I should focus only on their use of English.  One student gave the following example: if I ask them to post a link to a song with a summary and I dislike the singer they chose, that shouldn't influence their grade in any way. 
However, what if I ask them to write a story and one student chooses to write a story about something I intensely disapprove of such as rape?  How far should I allow my personal feelings about the topic to influence how I mark the student?  I am human, after all.  Furthermore, do I not have a duty as a teacher to give my opinion?

Thanks Advanced II for your insightful thoughts!  You're wonderful!

Theory of Fun

"One of the undisputed classics in the games field" says the blurb on Raph Koster's book "Theory of Fun in Game Design".

I can see why. 

Koster studied widely in the arts: literature, art, music and his idea is that games are in fact an art form, and if there hasn't yet been a Shakespeare of game design, it's only because the field is so young, but the potential is there.

I agree.  Any field where you create things is, in my book, an art form.  Video games, like rock n' roll before it, do have a bad rap: every school shooting and mass murder is linked to violent video games.  And they can be incredibly violent which doesn't really do the industry any favors.  That doesn't mean that the form itself is necessarily evil or even crass.  If Led Zeppelin's "Stairway to heaven" or Pink Floyd's "Another Brick in the Wall" doesn't reach high art, I don't know what does.

My problem is that the whole book is one giant ego stroke-a-thon for game designers.  Look, Grandpa, I may not be contributing to society as a firefighter or a teacher for special needs kids...but game design is important!  Jane Mcgonigal even used the word epic!  Seriously?

I can't really see that killing aliens or stealing cars is epic or important any more than Bruce Lee movies challenge our preconceptions of the world we live in. 

But I do think that games have the potential to become educational tools of the highest degree because they can demand what all high art demands which is intense, participatory experience.

"Naches"

Naches is a Yiddish word that means "pride" or "joy." Typically naches refers to the pride or joy that a child brings a parent. For instance, when a child is born people will often say to the new parents "May [your son or daughter] bring you naches." The "ch" is pronounced gutturally - so it's not "ch" as in "cheese" but rather "ch" as in "Bach" (the composer).
http://judaism.about.com/od/glossary/g/Definition-Of-Naches-Yiddish.htm

Teachers obviously get naches from their students, but wouldn't it be cool if we could engineer situations where students get naches form each other?

Now, the idea of pairing a strong student with a weak one is as old as the hills, but usually that system makes the weak student feel ashamed and resentful and the strong one bored and resentful.  Why don't the strong students get naches from watching the weak learn?

My guess is the original task wasn't challenging enough. 

The task has to be difficult enough that the strong student had to work hard to solve it.  Then when the weaker one has a go, the strong one realises that the other student isn't stupid, he's finding it just as difficult.

At the same time, the task has to be fun and stimulating enough so there's a sense of pride in having solved the problem.   That's the tricky part.  I remember math problems at school being difficult, but I didn't feel a whole lot of pride in solving them, more like "thank God that's over!"

A "lusory" attitude is having a sense of play.  That's what makes the difference between a challenge and a difficult task.  So the question becomes, how can we inject a sense of play into our classroom activities? 

I don't know yet, but I've just bought a book called "Theory of fun for game design" by Raph Koster, so maybe he'll know...

Andres' lesson: key points

Teaching is a series of choices.  There are no correct or incorrect choices, but there are cost-benefit analyses that can be made.

Examples of choices include:

• Calling on individual students to answer:

This can be high-cost for the student if they make a mistake in front of the group.  This can be mitigated if the teacher knows the student has the right answer and says so, as n "Maria, you got number 3 right, can you share it with us?"

• Having students read aloud from the board or from a text:

Not everyone is good at this.  The student might mispronounce, or else read in such a monotone that no-one really understands.

• The use of technology:

This is a biggie: the benefits can be enormous of course, but what if the internet connection chooses that moment to break down, or if you somehow lose your page?  It's worth planning for this, either by practicing with any unfamiliar equipment or techniques beforehand or by having a plan B in case something goes wrong.

• Explaining a new word:

You can translate, explain, have the student look it up in a dictionnary, have everyone look it up online etc.  What to do and why?

...and the hardest decision of all:

• Help a struggling student or focus on the others:

Anytime a teacher spends helping someone is time not spent paying attention to anyone else.  The question here is how to buy time to help that student?  Asking her to see you after class is one option, but that might be embarassing or difficult for her.  Other ways involve putting the rest to work on a task while you make the rounds of strugglers and fast-finishers to support and/or push them.

Playtested game: Bloom's taxonomy

Instructions:

Take turns rolling the dice.  When you land on a square, uncover the word but don’t let your partner see it.  Write the word under the appropriate heading on your paper, but again, keep the paper secret.  The first one to get 15 words in the correct categories wins.  At any time, your partner can challenge you to prove that the last word you wrote is in the right category.  First, justify your decision orally.  If your partner still challenges, you may look at the list.  If you are correct, your partner misses the next turn.  If your partner is correct, you must give him/her the word.

The game board looked like this, but with each word covered by a little removable sticker.

Arrange	Defend	Dramatize	Give example(s)	Justify
Select	Paraphrase	Memorize	Use	Generate
Solve	Reorganize	Explain	Test	Identify
Classify	Define	Analyze	Modify	Discover
Criticize	Value	Design	Infer	Develop
Describe	Compare	Judge	Construct	Choose

http://www.clemson.edu/assessment/assessmentpractices/referencematerials/documents/Blooms%20Taxonomy%20Action%20Verbs.pdf

Knowledge	Comprehension	application	analysis	synthesis	evaluation

The comments on the game were:

• Players need a way to see where you are on the board and what words you've alreay played.
• Players need to understand the concept of "challenging" their partners
• Since the verbs can go in more than one category, make it clear that the final judgement rests with the list on the link above.

The purpose of the game, as I discovered while students were playing it, is not so much to find the "right" answer as to consider the meanings of the verbs in different activities.  Therefore, right after the game would be a good time to discuss task types that go with the different verbs, and see if there were any that might go under more than one heading and why. 
The main takeaway aim of the game is for teachers to realise that there are different ways to measure different types of knowledge, and that by using as many of these different verbs in their classroom instructions as possible, they will be tapping into a far wider array of possible types of activities than by relying on the book alone.

The serenity prayer for teachers

"God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
The courage to change the things I can,
And wisdom to know the difference."
      American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr^[1] (1892–1971)

Most teachers I know are very good at the first two.

The problem is the third: knowing the difference between what you can change and what you can't.

Case in point: attitudes

"Group 3A is just lazy."
"Wow, level 2 works really well!"
"Maria is really smart."
"You always have to explain things 3 times to Mario, and even then he manages to misunderstand."

These are things you CAN change, and usually it starts with your attitude.  Maybe group 3A doesn't work the way you want them to for a reason.  Maybe your mistake with Mario is explaining thing: he might do better if he's left alone to figure them out for himself.

Case in point: class management

Have you ever seen, even if only on TV, classes where the teacher asks a question and all the kids raise their hands excitedly?  Is that what you think your class should look like? 

It won't and it shouldn't because learning is messy. 

Sometimes I open a book (well, my ipad) on the bus, read one sentence and it inspires a whole chain of thought.  By the time I come back to Earth, my ipad is asleep and I've reached my stop. 
Now, imagine the scene if I were in class:
Teacher: "What do you mean you've only read one sentence in the last 20 minutes?"
Me: "But I understood it REALLY well!"

This is one of the things you CAN'T change.  People learn in different ways at different times and we have to respect that.

March 8th

Happy Women's day!

I asked my students to participate in #CNNwomen tweetchat last Friday.  For every tweet they made, I pledged to donate $0.50 to CENIT, a center that helps street girls and their families in Quito, Ecuador.  So far we've only made $5, but I'll keep up the project.
The idea is to join an international conversation in English...which is the magic of twitter!

That said, I felt the tweetchat seemed to lack depth.  Sure, we all spent the hour affirming that we're all sisters and we have to stand together. 

Then I thought, why do we have to stand together?  Men disagree all the time.  You think Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. agreed on everything?  Isn't part of the definition of feminism that women have the right to their own opinion?  That's why we fought for the right to vote!

Of course, we never heard from the real casualties of sexism: the child brides, the sex slaves, the harrassment victims etc.  I'm sure they spend every minute of every day asking "where are MY sisters?"

Nor did we hear from the pioneers of feminism, those without whom the female success stories that tweeted on Friday wouldn't even exist: Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Victoria Woodhull, Betty Friedan who are no longer with us; Gloria Steinem, even Malala who weren't able to join us.

Feminism, if it is to work, must be temporal, global, and include both genders and all ages. 
Am I a feminist?  YES.  Because the alternative is unthinkable.

Why homeschool?

Whenever I tell people I want to homeschool my daughter, they look at me like...well, like I'm out of my mind. 
"Why do you want to homeschool her?"  loosely translated seems to mean "There are places where they'll educate your daughter FOR you, so why take this on?"
Well, today I came up with the simplest answer.

"I don't want my daughter to have to raise her hand to ask permission to go to the bathroom.  Ever."

This is a huge statement because it sums up the whole idea that adults seem to have about controlling what children do, when they do it, what they learn, how long it should take them...and then blame the children when we realise that's impossible! 

Part of my job is to help aspiring teachers write their graduation thesis, and a lot of them want to prove that this or that intervention will help their students learn.  That's admirable and I support that wholeheartedly.  The problem I have is with the test-experiment-test system whereby they attempt to prove that because of the intervention the students have learned... and that just isn't how learning happens.  Teachers can open doors for students, or to use another metaphor, help them with the wiring, but no-one can actually turn the light on for someone else.  That has to happen in its own way in its own time.
Just like going to the bathroom.

Bloom's Taxonomy

This is a very interesting overview of Bloom's taxonomy: http://www.edpsycinteractive.org/topics/cognition/bloom.html

It seems intuitive to understand that there are different levels of knowledge, so why do school systems get stuck on the bottom?

Making split-second decisions

The act of teaching is essentially instant decision-making which will either increase or decrease learning.

If you teach younger students, often your decisions will involve dealing with misbehaviour.  If a kid throws a paper airplane while you're giving your lesson, you need to decide right then what you will do about it.  Even if you decide not to do anything, that's still a decision; and make no mistake, everyone, including the perpetrator will learn from whatever you decide ("oh he's easy", "she's mean!")

If you teach older students, the decisions usually involve academic knowledge.  If a student asks you the meaning of a word in English, do you translate it? Ask him to look it up?  Ask everyone to look it up?  Why?  Again, there mnay be no right or wrong choice, but whatever you decide will impact the student's learning in some way.

The biggest challenge facing teachers, then, is the issue of TIME: you have to decide instantly.  Putting off a decision is a decision too. 

It may be that if we had more time to make decisions, we'd make better ones.

So how can we buy ourselves more time to decide?

How is a lesson like a game?

In a game there is a clear end point so you know if you're winning or losing. 
In a lesson you have goals or aims to achieve and you only know if you're achieving them if you know how to measure your students' progress. 
(This sounds obvious, but it isn't.  How many times do teachers ask "Do you understand?" and everybody says yes even if they haven't understood?)

In a game you have core mechanics which is what you're actually doing from moment to moment, whether it's kicking a ball to a teammate, moving a chess piece, or clicking a mouse. 
In a lesson you need to consider what the students are doing from moment to moment and how you know they're doing it right.  For example, what are the stduents doing if the teacher is talking at the board?  Most teachers would want to say the students are listening...but how do they know?  The students need to do something to prove they're listening, whether it's answering questions, taking notes or whatever.

Most teachers have an idea of their end point because they have to write it in their syllabus.  The mistake is that the end point is often not written from the students point of view.  For example, there is a difference between "we will do the grammar exercises on page 23" (teacher's aim) and "the students will attempt to correct common mistakes involving the past tense" (students' aim).

Few teachers have any idea of the core mechanics of their lesson, which is why the only way they know how well students have understood is by giving them a test.  Which they fail.  And the teachers wonder why.

When you plan your lessons, how do you think about your end points and your core mechanics?