My D&D Classroom
Posted 1st September 2008 at 09:36 PM by Gears
Howdy all,
I'm kicking off this blog so that I can keep others posted on an experiment I'm running this year in my classroom: using D&D to teach history.
I'm a teacher at a fairly unusual school that takes pride in its many non-traditional teaching methods. I teach history, primarily to jr high and high school students, and over the past few years I've been working more and more games into the classes. These experiments with gaming have all been extremely well received by both students and parents/administration, so this year I'm doing something even more radical: building entire classes around a D&D based curriculum. It will either be the greatest year of my teaching career or it will put me out of a job. Maybe both.
I'll be running ongoing campaigns in class that will be punctuated by student presentations on various historical and literary topics that our game touches on. These presentations will allow students to earn experience points for their characters as well as lead them to a deeper understanding of the game setting.
The games I'll be running this year are set in Medieval France, Dark Ages Scandinavia, Warring States China, and Rome at the time of Julius Caesar. Each of these settings is obviously requiring some tweaking and house-ruling of the D&D4 rules, and I'll hopefully be able to share some of my rules modifications through this blog as well.
I'm hoping to get constructive comments and new ideas from the community, and hopefully to encourage other teachers out there to try something similar if I can actually pull this off. I truly believe RPGs can be powerful educational tools if they can be adjusted to work smoothly in a classroom environment.
Wish me luck!
I'm kicking off this blog so that I can keep others posted on an experiment I'm running this year in my classroom: using D&D to teach history.
I'm a teacher at a fairly unusual school that takes pride in its many non-traditional teaching methods. I teach history, primarily to jr high and high school students, and over the past few years I've been working more and more games into the classes. These experiments with gaming have all been extremely well received by both students and parents/administration, so this year I'm doing something even more radical: building entire classes around a D&D based curriculum. It will either be the greatest year of my teaching career or it will put me out of a job. Maybe both.
I'll be running ongoing campaigns in class that will be punctuated by student presentations on various historical and literary topics that our game touches on. These presentations will allow students to earn experience points for their characters as well as lead them to a deeper understanding of the game setting.
The games I'll be running this year are set in Medieval France, Dark Ages Scandinavia, Warring States China, and Rome at the time of Julius Caesar. Each of these settings is obviously requiring some tweaking and house-ruling of the D&D4 rules, and I'll hopefully be able to share some of my rules modifications through this blog as well.
I'm hoping to get constructive comments and new ideas from the community, and hopefully to encourage other teachers out there to try something similar if I can actually pull this off. I truly believe RPGs can be powerful educational tools if they can be adjusted to work smoothly in a classroom environment.
Wish me luck!
Total Comments 5
Comments
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Heya Gears! I share your belief that RPGs can be powerful educational tools. I'm not so sure about building an entire class around them, though. How much class time do you have? Do you feel that you are leaving out a lot of material, both skills and content, compared to what you might be able to help the kids with if you were using more direct teaching methods?Posted 2nd September 2008 at 06:10 AM by Ycore Rixle
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All i ever remember history being was facts being regurgitated to us, us copying down said facts from the blackboard and then answering some questions on it.
If you can give kids a glimpse into the past by describing the areas they are in (i think visual aids may be key) and key events then that would be great.
How about a project where the kids research a person, give a brief presentation and then the class get to put questions to him/her, perhaps in groups of 3-4 and then one person plays the character and the others provide support in answering questions, this allows shy kids to opt out of roleplaying but still contribute.
If the characters were all connected by some event even better.
Anyhow sounds like a darn good idea.Posted 8th September 2008 at 06:27 PM by Shabe -
An extremely ambitious and interesting experiment! I applaud your efforts. Here in Sweden the National Museum of History held a summer long LARP allowing people to LIVE through history itself and it went very well.Posted 9th September 2008 at 01:35 PM by Angellis_ater -
Scandinavia, the RPG Education Promised Land....
I keep hearing wonderful things about RPGs and LARPs being integrated into education in Scandinavian countries. The things I've heard about this school are particularly interesting.
My grandfather was from Sweden. That must be where I get my 'roleplaying gene' from....Posted 9th September 2008 at 07:38 PM by Gears - Hehe, well - we do have a state funded "Roleplayers Association" that doles out about 3000 skr a year to Gaming Clubs (approx 500 dollars) +100 skr (about 17 dollars) per member in the age 7-25. So we have a large number of organized gamers here in Sweden.Posted 9th September 2008 at 07:43 PM by Angellis_ater
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