Reacting to the Past: Looking Back

Last night, a student told me, "You know why I liked giving speeches in your class?  I got to do it being someone else."  She explained that she'd been required to give a speech this week in another class, and found it to be a terribly nerve-wracking experience.  But she hadn't had that reaction giving her speeches as part of the Reacting to the Past game.  Playing the role of Robert Owen, arguing for workers’ rights and against child labor, she was eager to speak and passionate about promoting her causes, even fearless in countering the arguments of others. Because she was playing a role.  Playing.

And there, in a word, is the strength and power of the Reacting to the Past pedagogy. A role-playing game allows you to be someone else, to take on a different persona for a while.  And that can be incredibly liberating.  Lee Sheldon, a screenwriter, game designer and professor of media studies, has written extensively about using the structure and mechanics of role-playing games to enhance learning, most notably in The Multiplayer Classroom: Designing Coursework as a Game.  Jane McGonigal and James Paul Gee are two others who have explored how the mechanics of games can motivate learners.  Essentially, it’s less scary to take a risk if it isn’t “really” you stepping out on a ledge.  But the learning that is taking place, the skills that are developed and the experiences that students have: that’s all them.  They’ll take that with them even as they leave their temporary persona behind.

So, it worked!  So well that some students argued vociferously to extend the game past the four weeks scheduled.  In the end, we didn’t do that, because we’d addressed all the issues I set out to explore and I didn’t want the playacting to become the sole reason for the game.  But it’s clear that the playacting was an effective element of the game’s ultimate purpose.  In my first post on this topic, looking forward to a game not yet played, I wrote that the experiment would fail or succeed on whether students agree to accept the game elements of their activities.  They would have to agree that, within the confines of the class, the consequences of their decisions and actions mattered and collectively agree to "let's pretend."  I saw evidence all the way through the game/class of that sincere commitment. My student's comment to me last night was just icing on the cake.

A Scary Story

It’s nearing Halloween, so I thought I’d write about something scary this week.  How about “States Demand That Colleges Show How Well Their Students Learn”?  Or “Not enough to graduate college: Now there’s an exit exam.”   Perhaps this will send a chill down your spine:  “Assessment: It’s the Law,” an article on the new requirement in Iowa for annual review of university assessment data by the College Board and the state legislature. 

We’re probably all familiar with No Child Left Behind and the measure and punish strategy it instituted in K-12 education in the US. The demand for “accountability,” with the underlying assumptions that teachers can’t be trusted to do what is best for their students, has been a favorite political theme for over a decade.  While NCLB has largely been considered a disaster by teachers, parents and students, vilifying teachers and schools has been a winning strategy for too many politicians. And nothing succeeds like success, right?  So we’d better be ready.

It would be nice to think this won’t happen, that state and federal busybodies, and the public at large, will take our word for it when we say that we know our students are learning.  That learning is so ineffable an achievement that it can’t be measured by anything other than the finely-tuned instincts of a professor.  Trust us. 

Yeah, good luck with that.  

The only way to head off the ham-fisted efforts of those who believe that anybody can teach, that teaching is nothing more than measuring test results, is to get ahead of those efforts and bend them in the direction we want them to go.  No one is more concerned about the effectiveness of our efforts than we are.  No one.  But without clear, tangible, convincing and continuous evidence to that effect, we’re vulnerable to claims by educational profiteers (financial AND political) who can point to the all-too-real shortcomings in student achievement and then, rather than accounting for the many variables that affect student learning, simply point at us and insist we do a better job.

One big obstacle to a greater understanding of what we do and how we go about it is the solitary nature of teaching.  While it may not SEEM solitary to be interacting with over 100 students every semester, the fact is that the vast majority of those interactions take place in a federally-protected private place, a black box, as far as the general public is concerned.  Students go into the class, and they come out with a letter grade.  And the “trust me, I’m the professor” argument is quickly losing its magic.

The push to develop learning objectives for classes and programs is one recent and widespread effort to counter that “black box” effect.  And assessment reporting can be another, if we make it what WE want it to be, rather than letting some political body define it for us.  If WE define the goals we consider most useful and valuable for our students, and if WE choose the assessment methods we think best suited to demonstrate the achievement of those goals, assessment becomes our process and our achievement. 

But if we want to keep the beast from the door, the only option we DON’T have is to do nothing at all.

Reacting to the Past: Week One

Last week was my first experience with running a Reacting to the Past game.  After a week and a half of preparation, it was time to trust in the system and let my students loose on the material to see what would happen. And it was so great!

Day one was introductions, to ease everyone into the idea of playing a role.  All the students were asked to do was to research their character so they could each give a short introduction to the class.  While a few students are playing historical characters like the industrial reformer Robert Owen and the inventor and capitalist Richard Arkwright, most were assigned types rather than specific people: weaver, blacksmith, magistrate. The roles are pretty generic, but many of the students weren't satisfied with that.  Nearly everyone has chosen a character name. One student decided he was an immigrant from Ireland and did his entire introduction with his best Irish accent.  Another (a quiet girl who rarely speaks in class) decided she was an orphan now sixteen years old, newly released from the workhouse and ready to fight for the rights of the child laborers.  Several came in costume, including one determined student who did extra research to convince me that a baronet's widow might run his estates after his death.  When she arrived in class in a full 19th-century gown, I understood why she was so determined to play a "Lady Farmer" instead of the "Gentleman Farmer" as written.

As the introductions proceeded, the working class grew lively, applauding those who expressed sympathy for the factory workers and hissing the gentry and merchants, who largely maintained a haughty calm.  As soon as the introductions were over, the class exploded into clusters of conversation as merchants bargained

with the gentry to rent land for factories, the vicars and newspaper editors solicited souls and submissions

respectively, and the weavers withdrew to the local pub, The Whorl and Spindle, (the classroom next door) to plot their strategies.  They were tasked with developing a proposal for establishing a minimum wage and

arguing for it at the Town Hall the following class period. In both classes (Tuesday/Thursday day and Tuesday night), the weavers were fired up and ready to fight for their rights and a living wage.  But while the night class had faith that their cause would prevail via legal means, the day class weavers are more bloody-minded.  I suspect Ned Ludd will ride in Manchester before too long.

The second class period of the week was held at the Town Hall, presided over by His Honor the Magistrate. As usual, I found it hard to keep my mouth shut, but I really tried, letting the magistrate run the show, organize and regulate the speeches and determine the rules of the debate.  And they didn't need me at all. It was obvious that most of the students had done their research, bringing up events, laws and statistics that highlighted the misery of the weavers' life or (from the merchants) the promise of industrial production.  The arguments were passionate and the concessions hard-fought. Both sets of weavers won a pay raise, though not nearly what they were requesting.  How will this affect production?  Only time (and the game master) can tell...

So the energy in the class is really high and everyone is "playing along."  My concern that my students would be too cool to commit to role-playing have been allayed. I'd seen the videos from the Reacting to the Past Consortium, chatted with other professors in the RTTP Faculty Lounge on Facebook, and even played a game myself at last January's conference. I knew the games COULD work.  But it's a relief to see it working before my own eyes, with my own students.  More than a relief, actually. I was euphoric as each class ended last week. It was so much fun to see my students so engaged and passionate about class.  About nineteenth century economic and social strife, no less!  That beats a lecture, any day!

Playing Rain

I started a new video game yesterday.  It's the middle of the semester and I needed a mental vacation, so I bought Rain for my Playstation 3.  It's a puzzle game with a visual style reminiscent of French noir films.  A young boy pursues a shadowy girl though the rain-swept streets of a deserted urban landscape, while both are hunted by ghostly monsters.  The game play revolves around the fact that every being in the world is invisible unless bathed in rain. Hiding is as simple as ducking under an awning.  To progress, you have to figure out how to climb, crawl or run through the urban maze, while using your invisibility and cunning to avoid frightening skeleton animals and the primary antagonist, called the Unknown.  The game received largely positive reviews, mostly for the artistry and storytelling.  The only real criticism has been that the game is really pretty easy.  And it's kicking my butt.

You have to understand, I don't play many video games.  I don't like them.  I don't want to play war or be a criminal or a cop. I'm turned off by the misogyny and violence that is packed into just about every game available.  The fact that the pinnacle of video game achievement is expressed in Grand Theft Auto V infuriates me.  I want striking graphics, complex storylines and, most of all, a positive and engaging emotional arc. So games I'll spend my time on are few and far between.  In fact, I've only found four so far I've liked enough to buy: Flower, Journey, The Unfinished Swan and, now, Rain.

So, I'm far from an expert gamer, something that I'm reminded of every time I play. While game reviewers (master gamers all) dismissed Rain as not challenging enough, I'm sometimes brought to the point of apoplexy by my confusion.  Because I don't know the rules.  Not the rules of the game system (push this button to jump, this one to run.) Those are presented clearly at the beginning of the game. And not the rules of the world in which the game exists (monsters will be attracted by footsteps splashing in water, you can track your progress while invisible by watching the litter stirring on the ground.) The game is designed to teach you those things as you play. What I don't know are the underlying rules of how video games are structured and presented to the players.  I just haven't played enough games, racked up enough experience, to know the way the (virtual) world works.

This means I don't see the only possible exit from an alleyway because every possibility looks plausible to me.  Oh sure, it's clear after I've found it (or looked up the cheat to find it.) But I haven't evaluated enough game situations yet to recognize the signs that indicate "important" details from "background."  It took me a couple of hours of play to realize that a shift in camera angle was signaling a significant element in the environment.  Or that the cutscene that introduces each new chapter contains foreshadowing of events to come. How many other clues am I missing as I play, leaving me blundering about hoping to run into the thing I need by sheer chance? How many times have I died in the game so far (dozens!) because I just didn't know what I was supposed to be doing?  

Many of our students arrive at college in the same state of bewilderment.  The vast majority aren't master students, and many are first generation college students, venturing into a world as strange and alien to them as the sodden streets in Rain are to me.  They don't know the unspoken rules that underlie our world.  They haven't read enough to know how to distinguish the important ideas in their readings from the supporting text, so they highlight everything...or nothing. They pack up their books as the clock winds down, already looking ahead to what's next, and don't heed those reminders at the end of class that are critical for keeping up-to-date with the work.  They don't see a quick visit to a professor's office hours as the quickest way to dispel confusion.  Of course it is obvious, when you know the way college works.  It seems ridiculous to even have to explain it. But if you don't know how to filter the significant information from the clutter?  Well, at least you don't die, as I have so many times on a dark and dirty virtual street.  But on the other hand, death in a video game is never final.  I can always try again, and again, and again, until I figure it out and move on to the next challenge.  The consequences of a student missing the unspoken rules of college life can be far more permanent.

This is why I'm so interested in how learning takes place in video games.  Because you DO learn the rules of the game as you play, or else you'd never be able to move up to more challenging levels.  And unless you are a hyper-analytical college professor, you're not even aware that you are learning.  You just get better, bit by bit, until the tasks that stymied you when you started to play are now effortless.  Those skills are now so much a part of you that you don't even have to access them consciously.  Nearly every time I encounter a new challenge in Rain, I fail it.  I die.  And it is SO frustrating! But the game doesn't stop there.  I do it again.  And again and again, until I've got it.  I'd like to see our students "play college" in the same way, to absorb the rules as they go, trying and failing and trying again without fear and without penalty until they can't even remember what it was like not to know how to play the game.

Reacting to the Past: Looking Forward

This week I started a new unit in both section of my HUM 205: Technology and Human Values.  Last January I attended a training conference on a game-based pedagogy called Reacting to the Past, and I’m ready to give it a try myself.  I think...

Reacting to the Past is a teaching method that uses elaborate role-playing games set at pivotal points in history to allow students to explore the “big ideas” of the humanities.  There are games set during the French Revolution, the trial of Galileo, the struggle for Indian independence and at the Council of Nicea, over twenty in all.  Students take on specific roles and work to achieve individual goals within the context of the game, by researching the issues and making both written and oral arguments to persuade others of their point of view.

My students and I are playing “Rage Against the Machine:Technology, Rebellion and the Industrial Revolution," set in 1817 Manchester, as the advent of factories disrupts the home weaving industry there.  We’ve already spent seven weeks discussing the issues that technology raises in modern society: the paradoxes of isolation and connectivity, the demands of the clock imposed on the rhythms of life, the rise of the individual over the collective.  Now they are being asked to take that new-found understanding and use it to deconstruct, or rather RE-construct, a time and place where crucial attitudes and assumptions about the relationship between man and machines were being developed.  My hope is that by inhabiting the characters and “living” the issues, my students will deepen their awareness of the complex relationship we have with the technology around us.  I’m especially eager that they recognize that this relationship isn’t something imposed upon us by the technology itself, that the machines are not in control. I want them to understand that this relationship is created from the decisions and expectations that we bring to technology.  And in the next four weeks we will play that out, allowing competing needs and desires to determine the outcome of the game.  Will the weavers prevail?  Or will the merchants succeed in establishing factories that destroy the home weaving industry?  Will we allow child labor?  A minimum wage?  What is best for the artisans who come from the working classes but may secretly (or not so secretly) aspire to the middle class?  How will the gentry maintain control in an era of merchant wealth?  And what will the vicars say about all this in their Sunday sermons?

Some students are thrilled.  They are excitedly discussing costumes to wear or Machiavellian plots they’d like to put in motion to win the game.  Others are confused or disconcerted by the requirement to be someone else, to learn by playing a role rather than through a more conventional means.  A few are skeptical.  But almost all are getting into the spirit of the game, which means taking this all very, very seriously.  After all, a game only works if all the players agree, for the duration of that game, to act as if the results have meaning and consequences.  So this scheme will succeed to the extent the students buy into it and are willing to accept that “playful” does not mean “trivial.”

Tuesday	Thursday
Session 1: Introductions of Players and Agenda- Setting – 10/15	Session 2: Wage Negotiations – 10/17
Session 3: Market Day - 10/22	Session 4: Town Hall – 10/24
Session 5: Market Day – 10/29	Session 6: Town Hall – 10/31
Session 7: Market Day / Town Hall – 11-5	Session 8: POST-MORTEM – 11/7

Here is the tentative class schedule.  On "Market Days," everyone meets at the Village Green to buy and sell, settle accounts, socialize and scheme.  Everyone can (and all students are expected to) make short speeches on the topics of the day.  The two newspapers will also be distributed on Market Day, filled with short (500-word) essays that various citizens have submitted for publication.  (Students must write two persuasive essays for publication over the course of the four weeks, arguing for or against a proposed law, advertising a new machine for sale or positions to be filled at the factories, or on any other topic that might concern their characters.)  Town Hall is where laws are passed.  Everyone is free to propose a law, and everyone can and should speak for or against those proposed laws, but only the gentry can vote.

The game will unfold over the next four weeks, ending with a post-mortem on November 7, and I aim to take the 9x9x25 opportunity to write up my impressions several times as we progress through the game.  I’ll keep you posted!

Why I Dumped the Due Date (part 2)

"I got my [assignment] done. Sorry about the delay, things are tough, I'm figuring it out. Part of life, right? Or all of life? I certainly appreciate your setup right now." 

I got that email from a student this week.  It really made me feel good.  My student completed the assignment of reading the week's materials, posting a question for exploration in the discussion forum and responding to other students' questions. Would it have been better if she'd done that work in week five, when the conversation was at its peak?  Well, sure, but better late than never!  If I'd enforced the due date, she wouldn't have done the work at all and would have missed that material entirely.

I don't know what is tough in her life, and that makes me feel good, too.  Not that she's having a hard time right now, of course, but that I don't have to evaluate whether the situation is tough enough.  And she didn't feel like she had to convince me. Who am I to judge?  Things were tough, she's working on it, and she got the work done when she could.  Good enough for me.

Or...maybe she's making it all up.  We've all had our share of dead grandmothers. But I don't think she is, because she doesn't have to.  Why do so many grandmothers die during midterms?  Because that's an excuse that just about everyone will accept. (Or used to, anyway, before the modern plague of dead grandmothers!)  But my students don't have to make sure their excuse meets my personal standard of "bad enough." I leave that to them.  Sure students will abuse the freedom to skip a due date (or two, or three, or....)  But they penalize themselves by doing so.  It's harder to catch up in a class than it is to keep up.  And my grading system STRONGLY encourages keeping up, without penalizing those who have one or two late assignments.  I don't feel the need to exact an additional penalty. 

 

Okay, I'm supposed to be writing about how I counter objections to my "no penalty for late work" policy, so here goes. 

It's impossible to keep up with 100+ students' work without due dates.

I have a lot of sympathy for this objection. It drove me crazy when a student would hand in a late paper when I wasn't prepared for it.  I'd usually stick into my bag  or tuck it into a book and hope would make its way to the stack on my desk that I'd collected last week.  I still remember the frustration of trying to keep track of the flood of papers coming and going between me and my students in the bad old days BC (before computers.)  Ah, but that was then and this is now, AD (after digital.)  And here I will shock everyone by saying something nice about Blackboard.  Students all submit their work via Blackboard and all I have to do is open the grade book and there it all is.  I grade each class once a week.  Anything submitted that week gets graded.  I don't have to remember if I gave someone an extra three days.  I don't have to remember if I gave that extension three days ago or four.  If the student does the work, I give them feedback on the work and the student learns something.  Students who don't do assignments don't learn from them.  (I also color code my gradebook to help me easily distinguish a pattern of late work indicating trouble ahead.  Maybe I'll write a blog post about that one of these weeks.)  So I keep up quite easily, far MORE easily than if I had to keep track of individual exceptions to a "no late work" rule.

I also discovered that I prefer the variety of not grading 25 or 50 or 100 of the same assignment, all at once!

Some students aren't mature enough to set their own pace in a class. 

True enough, but I prefer to treat them all as if they are rather than treating them all as if they are not. I do have some policies that I use to prod along the slowpokes and chronically disorganized, such as the grading policy mentioned above. I also grade each week and email those who are falling seriously behind.  And I withdraw any student who hasn't completed at least half the work required by the student withdrawal deadline.  If you are THAT far behind, no matter what the reason, you won't catch up and it's better to cut your losses now.

 

If you don't enforce deadlines, students won't work at the same pace and can't get the most out of group work or the classroom experience.

That is an excellent point, and I addressed this point to some extent above.  It's a trade-off.  If I enforced due dates, perhaps more students WOULD keep up and get more out of the class.  But those who miss the deadlines would get nothing out of the assignments they were unable to submit at all.  Is it worth cutting some students off from the work entirely to encourage others to keep up?  Which of those options you choose depends on the value you put on that immediacy of interaction.  But I do think there are coming changes in education that will tip the balance more and more toward giving students access to the class work at their own pace and in their own time.  Increasingly, educational technology is being designed to allow students to work at their own pace, to move ahead if they find the material easy or to slow down and concentrate on a topic that has stymied them.  Classes where everyone is required to move at the same pace, regardless of whether an individual student has mastered the material or not, are going to seem more and more anachronistic to students used to being in control of their own learning. 

 

We're training them for the real world, where late work has penalties.

Coincidentally, two days after I published my last post on Why I Dumped the Due Date, Anthony Aycock wrote an opinion piece in The Chronicle of Higher Education called "Don't Be Hard to Get Along With" in which he contrasts his experiences as an employee and most students' experiences in the classroom.  While I don't agree with everything he wrote, he makes a very good point.  Do we working professionals adhere to a "no late work" policy and expect tangible penalties if we don't meet them?  Should I ask the division Admin Assistants what they think about professors' abilities to meet deadlines?  Hmm?  Now, it is true that not all workplaces are as accommodating, and that's too bad.  Perhaps we aren't living in "the real world."  But it seems pretty real to me. I really value working at a place where, if I forget to fill out my textbook orders until Holly reminds me that I missed the deadline, I just get it done and the order goes in. (Sorry, Holly!)  And I choose to run my classes the same way.

 

There is one more objection that I didn't anticipate when I wrote last week's blog post.  I discovered it as I read the comments to Aycock's article and it isn't very pleasant to contemplate.  I was really shocked by the number of commentators who expressed undisguised anger and contempt about their students.  Lazy. Manipulative. Disrespectful. "Unique little snowflakes." Often these epithets are coupled with the assertion that it is our responsibility to teach these brats respect.  Especially respect for their professor and his or her rules.  But that just seems self-defeating to me, and I noted how often it was those who were most vigorously defending firm due dates who had stories of the most outrageous student misbehavior.  Treat students like they are incapable of conducting their own educational lives and I guess some will strive to live up to that assumption. 

 

I'm not fond of trendy slogans, but I do try to be the "guide on the side," and that include ceding as much responsibility as I can to the students themselves.  Some might (and do) argue that setting and enforcing due dates IS teaching responsibility.  But I'm after a more fundamental accountability.  As my student said, "things are tough, I'm figuring it out."  Nobody's setting any due dates on that.  It's all up to her, and I'm glad I could help. 

Why I Dumped the Due Date

I didn’t submit my assignment.  Can I still hand it in? 

My brother came into town unexpectedly this weekend, and I haven’t seen him in five years, so I didn’t get my paper done.

If I submit my work tonight, can I still get some points?

I’ve been really sick and haven’t been able to sit at the computer.  Do you want to see my doctor’s note?

I did the work but Blackboard wouldn’t let me upload it.

Need I go on?  We’ve all heard these excuses and many, many more.  And I didn’t even include any of the more outré ones: the alien abductions, the crises of the soul, one roommate murdered by another roommate. (I got that one once.)  There are as many reasons for not getting school work done as there are students enrolled at the college.  More, now that I think of it.  As I prepared to write this, I tried to think of an assignment where all my students met the deadline.  And I can’t think of one.  As Roseanne Roseannadanna would say, “It’s always something.”

So, how to cope?  The hard line, which a lot of instructors favor, is “No late work.”  So sorry that X happened, but the deadline is past and that’s the way it is.  But that’s not REALLY the way it is, in most cases, is it?  Maybe there is the rare teacher out there who won’t make accommodations for a student who has had to fly home expectedly for a funeral, or is dealing with an imminent medical crisis, or other such emergency.  Your class, your rules.  However, years ago I had a student who was being stalked by an ex and had been removed from her home by police one evening for her own safety. It happened to be the evening before a paper was due, and she didn’t get it done.  Am I not going to make an exception for that?  Of course I will.

So the next step back from that hard line is “No late work without a good excuse.”  Homicidal ex?  Good excuse.  Child diagnosed with leukemia?  You bet. Child in the emergency room with the flu.  Mmmm, maybe.  Oh, your first child died of pneumonia as an infant and you’re not coping well with the flu diagnosis?  Well then, fine.  Your family flew into town unexpectedly?  Sounds fun but you should have explained that you have to write that paper.  Your family flew in unexpectedly so you could spend one last weekend with your sister who will be deployed to Afghanistan next week.  In that case…

You see where I’m going with this.  The “No late work without a good excuse” rule means we put ourselves in the role of judging which excuses are good enough.  And I am VERY uncomfortable with that.  We deal with a large number of non-traditional students with families, jobs, health or socio-economic issues that affect their access to education.  Issues that I have been extremely lucky NOT to have to deal with.  I worked hard at school, of course, but compared to most of my students I had it ridiculously easy.  The point is, I’ve decided that I’m no longer putting myself in the position of judging a student’s priorities by my own standards.

And you can’t BELIEVE how much that has lessened my stress level.  This was a completely unexpected consequence of my shift in policy.  I figured, of course, that this would lightened the load for my students.  No more coming, hat in hand, to beg for an extension.  No more stressing over trying to get work done at the last minute.  Sure, great for them.  But for me?  Who know this was such a weight on my shoulders?  I love, love, LOVE telling someone, “Hey, no worries.  Just get it done,” instead of having to decide if it is fair to let student A have an extension and student B not.  Instead of having to keep track of who got that extension and who didn’t.  Instead of having to explain to student B (without violating privacy laws) why student A got that extension.  And best of all, I don’t have to hear the excuses at all. I don’t care to know about your bowel complaint and how it kept you in the bathroom all weekend.  Or the intricacies of your relationship with your boyfriend or whatever else it might be.  Just get the work done. 

I know, I know.  There are a LOT of objections raised whenever I explain this policy to other teachers.  It’s too hard to manage a class if students don’t all submit their work at the same time. Students aren’t mature enough to prioritize and will place playing video games or other frivolities over school work.  We’re training them for the real world where there are consequences for not meeting deadlines.  If you don’t enforce deadlines, students won’t work at the same pace and can’t get the most out of group work or the classroom experience.  All valid points that I’ll have to address in part two of this essay, since I’m way over my 25 sentence goal already.  But my core point is made.  Education belongs to the students. It is their own responsibility to decide how that education fits into their lives and what is most important to them at a particular moment.  Just get the work in when you can.