Gears

Another quick update on using D&D in my classroom this year:

Things are continuing along dandily. One of my classes has begun modeling, researching, and painting figures for use in our games: a mixture of Old Glory historical figures and a few Reaper goodies tossed in as well. All of the figures are 13th century medieval, but students have picked different cultures to focus on: one is doing a variety of Templar/crusader types; another is doing Germanic medieval soldier types; one group is doing Saracen warriors; another group is doing Mongols; etc.

One issue I've run into, which I'm looking to rectify, is the learning curve on 4th edition. My classes that meet twice a week have picked the game up really quickly, and now plow through skill challenges and battles with only the occasional rulebook reference (I've printed off some power cards, which helped tremendously). My classes that meet only once a week, usually for only one hour/or 1.5 hours, are another matter. Some students are taking to the rules, but I can tell that many students need half our class time to refresh their memories on the rules each week. I may simply need to give it more time, but I'm also seriously considering another option:

Kickin' it Old School.

I've gotten out the BECM (no I for me) Basic D&D boxes, and been giving them a good hard going over...and my gut is telling me that this classic system might be a better fit for classes with limited time to learn and play. Is it just my nostalgia talking, or do others find these rules pretty fast and intuitive?

As an added bonus, the lovely old school rules for hiring followers and establishing a realm would allow for some great historical scenarios to be explored: whether in the Dark Ages, High Medieval Europe, or Ancient Rome, I could see these rules working as a great basis for roleplaying that shifts over the course of the year into more of a high-level strategy game....

So my D&D classroom may soon be running different editions in different classes...I'll keep you updated as my methods continue to develop.

Also: anyone know of resources for using Basic D&D in historical settings? My gut says someone out there must have done this sort of thing over the years....

A quick update to let everyone know that my D&D classroom has launched and I've now completed two weeks of my lean, mean, gaming/educating hybrid machine!

Well okay, the first weeks have been largely classroom teaching and discussion on the game settings. Students have chosen and personalized their characters. Reading assignments have been assigned. Presentation topics have been handed out. We have actually only begun to play in two (out of six, hopefully to become eight later in the year) classes....

But things are going swimmingly. The biggest lesson I've learned is that premade characters are always the way to go in the classroom. I had hoped to have one class with a longer time slot generate characters in class, using the character generation process as a springboard for discussing various types of jobs, cultures, and social strata in medieval europe...that didn't work so well. D&D character generation is just too complex to pull off in a class of eager chatty students. Too many options to explain, to many variables to consider. I quickly took that class down the same route I used in the others: hand out premade characters, let the students choose one, and then let them personalize their choice by picking a historically/culturally accurate name, an alignment, and a bit of backstory. This allows you to hit the ground running, but still lets students feel a bit invested in their character. The fact that you get to sneak in some cultural research into the students' creating of background stories is just gravy.

My fears of D&D paranoia amongst students and/or parents have thus far proved groundless. Four students have actually had their parents go out and buy them a Player's Handbook. Another student joined my class in the second week because his parents heard I was using D&D, which excited them quite a bit. I had one student ask "Doesn't that game make people commit suicide or something?" I replied that I've been playing it since the 7th grade and have not killed myself even once. She shrugged and said "Cool. Can I be the one that makes pacts with demons or whatever?" End of controversy.

I've picked up a few of Goodman Games' DM Campaign Record books to use alongside my Lesson Planner. They're really turning out to be handy little teaching aids. I highly recommend them if you're looking for a campaign workbook/reference booklet of some sort.

That's all for now. I'll try to find time to give a more detailed update on a specific class or two in the near future. Start of the school year is pretty hectic though, so my available blogging time is likely to be minimal for a few more weeks....

Well, it seems I've got another week until my school year starts. We've been moving to a newer, freshly refurbished building for the new year and it now seems that the work crews have discovered some unpleasantness in the ductwork that will require a lot of tearing out and replacing. So start of class has been postponed for a week. This after having already postponed class for a week due to renovations taking longer than expected.

But it's all just as well. I've got loads of work to get done before the start of class, and now I have a much better chance of getting some of the fancier flourishes I'd hoped for ready on time. I'm making up play mats for students, painting up miniatures and models, and cooking up some neat handouts for use in gaming.

On with today's topic: It has been very sensibly asked why I'm trying to replace traditional teaching methods as much as possible with gaming. I'd like to answer that.

When I was a tyke going through the school system, I had a number of different history teachers. None of these teachers were terrible, but none are likely to have inspirational films based on their lives either. They were in most respects Typical History Teachers. They had us fill out worksheets; read chapters from our textbooks (always followed by answering review questions, of course); color and label maps; memorize dates when Important Bits of Paper were signed by Equally Important People; write out lists of Presidents, Kings, and other Great Heads of States; and also watch the occasional video, (or even, god help us, film strips). It was a very standard history education, and I believe I learned essentially nothing from it.

There's a reason most Americans are somewhere between Entirely Ignorant and Actively Hostile when the subject of history comes up: it isn't taught very well. It doesn't have the immediate applicability of math or grammar. It doesn't have the pyrotechnics and physicality of the sciences. It's stuck in an almost entirely abstract world of facts and figures.

This is really unfair to history. History is the world of stories. It's full of cool places, people and events. When we make it into a movie or TV show, people often pay attention. When we put it on HBO with all its warts intact, it wins critical awards. When we put a shiny new display in at a Museum, people will actually plan a whole day to come and see it. People do like history. They just don't like the way it's taught at school.

I actually got very good grades in history. I found it easy to remember whatever data was required long enough to regurgitate it onto a test paper. But it quickly faded from memory, and it left no real lasting mark. When I reflect on my history classes in jr. high/high school, I can only recall with clarity three lessons:

1. A project where we were all assigned to research and build a model of something from medieval or renaissance history. I chose to build a siege tower and castle wall and do a report on siege warfare. I can still tell you many facts I learned on that assignment. I kept the model proudly on a shelf in my room until I left for college.

2. A game we played in class one day meant to simulate the feudal system. Certain kids had slips of paper worth various amounts of land, and the rest of us were minor lords who ran around pledging service to the landowners in an attempt to get as much land as we could. Towards the end of class, we all stopped wheeling and dealing and made a big chart showing the web of loyalties that now bound us all in awkward and often contradictory patterns. It really made an impression on me, and in later years whenever studying feudalism, that chart and game always popped right back into my head.

3. A very brief discussion of the French & Indian war. It was actually a picture in our textbook of a battle that made the impression, because it reminded me of some plastic toy soldiers my brother and I had been given by our aunt one 4th of July. I went home that night and set up a big battle like the one in the book, and I've always remembered the French & Indian War because of it. I remembered who fought who, and that it was fought just a few decades prior to the American War of Independence, and that it featured a rookie season George Washington.

These three meager lessons are all that stuck with me from years of education. As I left high school, I had no real interest in history. I wanted to be an animator for Disney or possibly an architect. And then a funny thing happened on the way to the university. I started playing video games.

My brother had always been a video game enthusiast. I had been much less of one. But then I found in a single summer Sid Meier's Pirates, Koei's Bandit Kings of Ancient China, and Microsoft's Darklands. All of these games were set in purely historical settings (okay, bandit kings *did* have one or two wizards running around...but that was out of a cast of hundreds, and the wizards honestly didn't have much impact on play). Anyhow, these games really sucked me in and made me want to know more about the characters and places involved. I started going to the library and hunting down books on assosciated topics. I started learning chains of cause and effect between people and events that defined the various scenarios in each game. I started learning more of the background behind the spots on the game map. I looked up the actual fates of the characters I'd become familiar with in the game. It was like delving into middle earth or narnia, but with a whole library full of additional appendices. I had finally discovered history.

During my first year of college, I got very into Koei's 'Liberty or Death' game. I was fascinated by the little portraits of the hundreds of historical personalities, the various regional battle maps, the political options to raise support through pamphleteering and courting the favor of foreign powers. Once again, I started going to the library to find out the full story of these video game characters and events. I decided, on a lark, to take some classes on colonial America. I had a truly great professor who knew how to tell a story and answer a question, and soon I was taking graduate level courses on a topic that had nothing to do with my actual major.

Long story short, I ended up as a history teacher. And I will happily swear on any convenient holy text that games were what made all the difference in leading me to it. At some point, I realized the few things that had really stuck with me from my years of prior education were hobby or game-like activities. There was a connection here between method and subject matter.

That's my experience, and that's why I'm so keen to get games into the classroom. I do not by any means think my experience is universal. I do however think my experience is far from unique. I am also convinced that in this age of video games outgrossing hollywood and collectible card games staking out a sizable portion of the elementary school playground, my experience is likely to be more common now than it was when I was in school. Games are a mainstream part of our culture. They are a major part of how kids in this culture interact with the world around them. I think the time is right to aggressively move gaming into the education process.

I do not doubt that a game-centered approach to education will cover less material than a traditional 'lectures, readings and worksheets' approach. It will cover less things, but it will do so in more detail. The traditional approach is also a bit misleading; it may cover more material, but I'd be willing to wager heavily that very little of that broad exposure will be retained in any meaningful way. By taking things in a more focused and dare I say it, fun way, I think there is every reason to hope that students will actually retain more learning than they would in a traditional classroom.

Or at least that's my theory. One more week until kickoff, and then I'll be able to start putting things to the test.

Today's post will be a quick sketch of how & why I'm going for a D&D classroom this year. I'll be responding to my fellow educator Ycore Rixle's blog as well, seeing as how we seem to be on opposite sides of this particular chestnut.

Or are we? See, here's the thing that I need to make clear from the get-go: I don't recommend my exact methods or procedures for any classroom but my own. Every classroom and school is different, and what works in one classroom may prove disastrous in another. My hope is that some portion of my experience may prove helpful to other educators out there. Maybe it'll be inspirational; maybe it'll be a cautionary tale of woe. Time will tell.

Before I dive into specific points of my teaching philosophy, I need to explain a bit about my school structure. My school covers grades 1-12, and uses mixed age classes within specific range bands. I tend to teach jr. high/high school level classes, though I do teach a handful of classes to the little 'uns as well. The school divides subjects into 'core academics' and 'enrichment' categories, with the day divided into four class segments per day, with individual classes ranging from 1-2 hours, depending on subject and student age. The idea is that students will take a number of core classes to cover their educational bases and then work out a schedule of other classes around those, much like college students with elective classes. The enrichment classes allow students to delve more deeply into areas they are particularly interested in, and these classes are meant to supplement the learning that goes on in the core classes.

My D&D classes are enrichment classes. That means I'm free to focus on a specific narrow topic rather than having to cover a more typical broad survey of (in my case) history and literature. So bear that in mind as I go on.

I've got some ideas about using games in more traditional classes, but I'll save those for another time. For this year, I'm specifically using D&D to teach only highly focused history with a dash of literature.

Okay, enough scene-setting. On with the debate! I wanted to reply to some of Ycore Rixle's points from his blog:

Class time is indeed valuable, but I am convinced that with my 1-1.5 hours per class, each of which meets once or twice per week, I can run a profitable rpg campaign. Students will have a fair amount of reading, writing and research to do outside of class, and we will occasionally spend our classes on student presentations and quizzes on reading assignments. But I anticipate the majority of class time will be spent roleplaying. I disagree strongly with the notion that roleplaying in class is somehow more alienating or unsatisfying to students than traditional classroom teaching methods. Likely, there will be some students less thrilled with the experience than others. However, based on past experience, I anticipate much higher involvement across the board among students than I would have in a standard classroom teaching environment. When using boardgames and miniatures in my classroom in the past, I've seen students use game rules as an access point to engaging subject matter they'd otherwise show no interest in at all. I'm hoping to see this trend amplified this year.

I think games can work very well as after school programs, but I'm honestly more interested in putting them front and center as a teaching method as often as possible. My first use of gaming in a school environment was through the after school club model, and it was quite successful. But it always left me with the feeling that I was preaching to the choir. I had lots of fun with my club kids, but the kids I really thought might get a whole new angle on learning through games never came. I'm wanting to cast a larger net, and getting games into the daily class routine is now my goal.

I do admit to some worry over parent reactions. There is certainly the potential for someone to suspect I'm pushing a covert agenda for Satan, I suppose. But at this point I know I've got my administration behind me (they've been thrilled with my past classroom gaming and parent responses to it), so I'm damning the torpedoes and going full steam ahead. At the end of the day, the negative stereotypes towards D&D will only be defeated by putting positive experiences with gaming out there to replace them. Judging by the number of students at my school who enjoy Magic, WoW, and other similar hobbies, I think the Regan era fantasy-gaming paranoia is fading fast. I hope to drive a few last nails into that particular coffin.

One place that Ycore Rixle and I are in complete agreement is our belief that D&D is inherently educational. It doesn't need to be 'made educational'. It may need to be modified a bit for purposes of play speed or ease of learning, but the game itself is a solid educational experience if you can get students into it. By using historical and literary settings for student gaming, this educational potential is broadened further still. After all, if you're going to explore a map while your party adventures through the wilderness, why not make it a map of medieval France or ancient China?

That's enough for now. Like Ycore Rixle, I appreciate thoughts, comments, and experiences from others. Hopefully by comparing notes, we can all improve our gaming and educating!

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!