Did you ever want to learn how to modify your teaching to provide students with deep learning experiences, and were looking for guidance on how to do it through the use of EdTech tools such as video games?
This is different from a how-to book on EdTech or books that survey apps or games and how they work. This book gets into the specifics of how to prepare for and conduct evidence-based pedagogy that promotes deep learning in students. It’s not about the game, it’s about the teaching. The games are just a tool.
How might one construct such a book?
You’d need to demonstrate what is possible and how that is different from what normally happens in classrooms. You’d want to show teachers, students, and classes in action:
- What are students learning?
- How does the teacher prepare for and conduct the class?
- What situations occur and how do you handle them?
- What results are they achieving?
- How did the teachers get to the point where they knew enough to teach this way?
You’d of course want to know what apps and games they were using, but also how they found the tools, how they learned how to use them, and what types of adaptations they made.
And you’d want to know how to do this for different disciplines, and a variety of ages and interests of students.
Just as no teacher would just assign students to read The Scarlet Letter without planning curriculum to help students grasp the social context, philosophical questions, and literary devices that make this book such a classic, teachers need to learn how to use games to motivate, inspire, and provoke students for academic purposes.
It's that context that Matt Farber provides in this book.
Farber weaves all this information together while relating how an international group of educators are working together to support each other and break through teaching norms. This group, called The Tribe, shares their expertise, successes, and failures (or opportunities for further learning) in blog posts, Twitter chats (including the #Games4Ed chat at 8:00PM Eastern time on Thursday nights which is moderated by the incomparable Melissa Pilakowski), and at conferences (such as the Serious Play Conference and Games in Education).
One especially valuable section involved Farber observing classes taught by Peggy Sheehy, Steve Isaacs, and Paul Darvasi, describing how these teachers leveraged game-based learning content, what the students did and learned, what actually happened before, during, and after the classes, the level of engagement of the students, and student reactions. While all teachers will recognize many of the techniques used by the teachers (keeping students on task, setting learning objectives, assessment, etc.), we also learn what’s different, how the teachers cede some authority to the students, how to get the students more concerned about mastery than grade achievement, and how to build foundational skills like collaboration and problem solving.
Farber’s hundreds of hours of nterviews with academics and educators provide deep insights into how and why these classroom techniques work to keep kids learning, and where other teachers can step in to try them in their own classes. The people interviewed are readily available on social media, and often active in the Thursday Twitter Chats, to help other educators (or administrators that want to level up their schools) advance their teaching.
Game-based learning in action is the book to read if you want to change your pedagogy not just learn about some shiny new tools.
And if you want to personally interact with Matt and the Tribe, register now to join us for an online discussion on Edchat Interactive in April.