I teach an art option class in addition to my Humanities teaching load. I love teaching art. It's such a relaxing pause in the day, when I just get to help kids create.
This year, Covid has thrown a bit of wrench into option scheduling. Typically, students rank their option choices and get placed in courses they're interested in. Because we need to keep kids in their homeroom cohorts, we've moved to a wheel approach - the students stay in their homerooms and cycle through every option, spending about eight weeks in each one.
This made me reconsider how I taught art. Typically, I'd teach it in a project-based way, so everyone would work on drawing or pottery or printmaking at the same time, though they'd have choice in what the drew or made or printed. But now I would have students in my class who don't consider themselves artists, and very likely, some who are actually very anxious about making art.
I'd been considering the Teaching Artistic Behaviour (TAB) approach for a while, and this was just the push I needed to jump in. I read Engaging Learners Through Artmaking: Choice-Based Art Education in the Classroom (TAB)by Katherine M. Douglas and Diane B. Jaquith (Alberta teachers, hot tip! I borrowed this book from the ATA library!), and once I learned more about the practicalities of this approach, I was ready. I knew this approach would help everyone find an artform that felt good to them, regardless of their past artmaking experiences, and would meet them where they're at.
The TAB approach can be summarized in three sentences:
What do artists do?
The child is the artist.
The art room is the child's studio.
Being a teacher who lives every day and thrives in student choice, I'm starting at the far end of the choice spectrum. I am planning on having each student create at least one 2D and one 3D project over the course of the eight weeks, knowing many students will do more than this. Allowing them so much choice, I knew I needed to scaffold them through the idea-getting phase, experimentation and learning of the medium, creation, and reflection phases of a project. So I created a graphic that will guide them through the process, which is a morphing of studio art practice, creativity, and design thinking theories.
My plan is to have students conference quickly with me before they move to the next phase of the project, giving me an opportunity to guide their practice, and give feedback.
I know my students will need help with the inspiration phase, as well as learning new techniques and skills. In my Google classroom, I have assembled some resources they can use for Drawing, Pastels, Watercolour Painting, Acrylic Painting, Printmaking, Calligraphy, and Collage & Mixed Media. I'll work on doing the same for 3D artforms as well over the next couple of weeks.
Students are not restricted to these media. If a student has a digital tablet and wants to get better at digital art, sure! If a student wants to make comics, go for it! However, I want every artist to improve regardless of where they're starting from, and to do this, we'll be learning the Studio Habits of Mind vocabulary and what it means. This will play centre stage in assessment, as well.
Every day, I'll do a minilesson to teach a skill or technique. I'm thinking that
My biggest worry is that many students will need me at the same time, and with Covid precautions, we're avoiding movement as much as possible. So I'm making each kid a set of three cards, which I'll laminate. They'll leave the "Happily working" one on their desk unless they need me, in which they'll replace it with the "I need a conference" or "I need help." I've created a little form called "I need something," too, which they can fill out to let me know what they need.
As with anything, I'm sure this process will become refined in the hands of my students, so we'll see what happens!
A couple of years ago, we started our year in grade 8 Humanities by having the students create a user manual. It was good, but it missed the mark in a couple of ways, namely, the students didn't use them beyond the assignment. In an effort to more purposefully set students up for the work they would do throughout the year in Room to Breathe, we hacked it, and came up with From Safe to Brave.
The purposes of this beginning of the year task are:
We all learn more about the people in the room.
We can start to build trust in order to take creative risks. We want to become brave so we can do outrageously awesome things this year.
Students can hone in on the things that fascinate them, and their learning preferences, so they can make good decisions about what they want to read, write, speak, view, listen to, and represent about in Room to Breathe.
We know that establishing a culture of trust in a classroom is a prerequisite for creativity to flourish. Among one of the things my grade 8 team has done to establish a culture of trust at the beginning of the school year is to develop a set of grade 8 norms. We were inspired by a video we saw from Edutopia about a teacher in Maine who did something very similar with his students. We have developed a process that works well in working with our 100+ group of grade 8 students to create a list of ten norms that guide us through the year.
We explain norms to our students as what is "normal" in a given situation. Norms change based on the activity - what's normal in the stands of a major league hockey game is different from what's normal in a library. We explain that we want a set of norms that will serve us in whatever situations we might happen to be in.
We work with our students over the course of the first week to take them through a divergent and convergent process to guide them through the norm creation.
Day 1: Brainstorming
At our school, we teach in teams, with two teachers sharing two classes. We have one Humanities teacher and one Math/Science teacher for each of these two homerooms. We have four homerooms in grade 8, and thus, four teachers. However, we work very closely as a team, and so we like to make time during the first week of school for all the grade 8 students to meet all the grade 8 teachers. We have thus designed the brainstorming round to have students rotate through with each of the grade 8 teachers. This year, amidst COVID, we did this brainstorming outside so students could easily distance from each other and we could have the students move around.
We begin with our own homeroom, and then rotate classes through each teacher. Round 1 begins with this prompt:
Question 1: Think about your best school year. Describe how it:
Looked like
Sounded like
Felt like
We type the words and phrases the students suggest in a shared Google doc. We rotate the students to the next teacher, and then tackle the second question:
Question 2: Think of when your learning is at its best. Describe how your learning space:
Looks like
Sounds like
Feels like
The students rotate to the third teacher, and respond to the third question:
Question 3: Think of the relationships with the people who impact your learning in a positive way. Describe how they:
Look
Sound
Feel
The last question is the most open. The students rotate to the fourth teacher, answering this question:
Question 4: What are your hopes and dreams for this school year?
By the end of the brainstorming round, we have four classes' worth of ideas for each of these four questions.
Day 2: Summarizing with Adjectives and Adverbs
On Day 2, working with our own homeroom, we print a copy of all the brainstorming - enough for one copy for two students. We explain that the students will see a lot of things in common between the four classes. Their first job is to look through the brainstorming and pick out themes. Once they have the themes identified, their next task is to assign an adjective or adverb to the theme. For example, if students found "collaboration" as a common theme, they might choose the adjective "collaborative." If they found a theme of "focus," "focused" would be an appropriate adjective/adverb. One way we teach our students what an appropriate word would be is if we can say "We are ____." Some themes are harder than others to find adjectives and adverbs for, like "growth mindset."
The homeroom teacher then asks the groups to share their adjectives and adverbs, compiling them in another Google Doc full of the adjectives and adverb mindsets the students brainstormed.
Day 3: Live Draft to Converge
One fun thing we often do in grade 8 is a live draft. If we are doing research projects in science, for example, and we want only one group to cover a topic, we do a live draft, so students don't all select the same topic. We've used this concept for our norms, asking each homeroom to narrow their list of adjectives and adverbs to 20 mindset words, with no repeats allowed. By the end of this live draft, we have 80 great words.
Our teaching team then sits down, and from here, we select 20 words we'd be happy living with. We do this because we can take the time to contemplate the words, and the situations in which we would use them. Some words are often very similar, and we can discuss the nuance of each word, selecting the most generous one.
Then our team created a Google form with these 20 words in checkbox voting style.
Day 4: The Vote
Our students get this Google form and every student gets to vote for their top 10 words.
Our teaching team looks at the results, taking the top 10 words as our final set of grade 8 norms.
The result is an incredibly diverse, thoughtful, and purposeful list of norms. We make a poster with the norms and display them in prominent spots in our classrooms.
Here are the norms our students chose in 2020:
Here are the norms from 2019:
It's interesting to see which words are the same both years and which ones are different.
How We Use Them
Before beginning a task, we will ask our students, "What norms would be important for this task?" Students will suggest 2-3 norms we will keep in mind for the activity. One of my colleagues has remarked how much smoother a task runs when she remembers to ask for norms versus when she forgets.
These norms replace classroom rules, because, really, who needs that? If something goes awry, we can talk about it using these norms: "Were you being inclusive just now? How might you change things up to be more inclusive?"
They do wonders to establish a culture where everyone agrees about what's normal in a given situation and help each other behave in expected ways.
My teaching partner Tara and I knew we needed to redesign the way we taught Language Arts to our grade 8 students this year. What we had been doing was okay, and we did some pretty neat things with our kids, but it certainly wasn't streamlined, and engagement was pretty variable, depending on the task. So we went away in the summer with lots of things to think about, good books to read, and ideas to percolate.
When we met over coffee in August, we came to the conclusion that we wanted to do a reading/writing workshop-style approach. In this initial conversation, we wondered about how we would teach the other strands that are a part of our curriculum: listening, speaking, viewing, and representing. We thought maybe we could do something with these on Fridays. I was just pulling out of the parking lot when Tara called me on handsfree saying, "Wait a minute. WHY would we only do these strands on Fridays?? Why not all the time?"
This is how Room to Breathe was born.
R2B In a Nutshell
Students self-design projects that include an Inhale (Reading, Listening, Viewing) - in other words, text interpretation - and an Exhale (Writing, Speaking, Representing) - in other words, text creation. When they design their projects, they associate "I Can" statements - our entire curriculum reworded in kid-friendly language. Students conference with their teacher before they begin, and again at the end of each Inhale and Exhale. This allows us to help set students up for success when they start, to identify skills that need to be taught, and what resources will be needed. It also allows us to collaboratively assess the student work with the students (more on that later!).
Room to Breathe is the bulk of our English Language Arts instruction time. In 2019-2020, we had time for two full rounds of R2B (that's six projects), a class novel, and a final project. The way Room to Breathe is designed, students achieve all the outcomes from the curriculum over the course of the year (sometimes many times over!).
If you'd prefer to see us explain it to you, we recorded a presentation that we presented at the Calgary City Teachers Convention, in which we share the logistics, practical considerations, and philosophy of our Room to Breathe approach.
The Logistics
We created a flowchart for the Room to Breathe processes to help students get the hang of it, at first. Once they get used to the process, they don't need to refer to the flowchart - it becomes a part of their muscle memory.
Students use a planning sheet to organize their idea before we conference. The planning sheet includes the "I Can" statements, as well as a spot for the student, teacher, and parent to sign when approved.
A selection of some of our "I Can" Statements
The very first set of conferences to get the first Inhale approved is fast and furious, but then meetings are spaced out. We learned that finding a way to stagger that first set of conferences is the way to go, and often have an assignment the students are working on prior. This year, we did a practice inhale-exhale with a shared article and some poems to practice together how to annotate a text during an Inhale, and then had the students write an Exhale their own in the style of one of the mentor texts. Students then signed up for a conference when they completed this initial assignment, spreading out the first round of conferences.
Students set their own due date for the completion of their task and write their name on our classroom calendar on the due date. That becomes their next conference date. As we progressed through the year, we found ways to streamline this. In the classroom, we used a big calendar on the whiteboard for students to write their due date on, which informed us of our conference schedule for the day. Students knew there could be a maximum of four conferences scheduled each day. During emergency online learning during the COVID lockdown, we used a Google Calendar with bookable appointment slots to scheduled one-on-one conferences.
We offer minilessons based on student needs and questions that we compile as we conference prior to beginning a task. Here is a slidedeck we are continually adding to based on our minilessons. These minilessons come organically from what the students need. Not all students are required to attend a minilesson, only those who the minilesson applies to. Why learn about how to analyze a song if you're working on creating a stop motion video? Sometimes this means we repeat minilessons throughout the year, and that's okay. This is about meeting the students' needs and helping them grow.
The Principles
Now that we've gotten the "what" out of the way, we want to dig in a bit deeper into the "why."
A few principles guide our work and have been designed to be heart and centre in R2B.
For student learning to be truly personalised, they need to be the ones making decisions about what to read, view, create, and share.
We have heard people bemoaning the idea that today's youth don't read and write anymore. This is simply not true. In fact, students are reading and write more than ever before using social media and other platforms. In addition to all this reading and writing, they are engaging in sophisticated forms of content creation through platforms like YouTube, Instagram, and Tik Tok. The problem is that this kind of text interpretation and creation is sometimes not acknowledged or honoured in classrooms. Of course, we want our students to interpret and create in more critical and analytical ways. But by using the topics and ideas they already care about and allowing them to design their own tasks around these interests, student learning will be incredibly personalized and rich.
We were very inspired by the incredible book Beyond Literary Analysis as we designed R2B and their website Moving Writers has been instrumental as well. In both resources, Allison Marchetti and Rebekah O’Dell offer real strategies and methods for using topics that captivate our students and design tasks around them.
Assessment is teaching.
Most of the most powerful work in R2B happens during conference times. We have a chance to sit, one-on-one, with our students and really talk about their learning. When we look at the work that they completed and talk about what they are proud of, and what their next steps are, they get immediate, actionable feedback about what to focus on next. Because this project is ongoing, the feedback they receive is immediately implementable.
Guess what this means? We don't take grading home. It means being intensely present during the one hour we work on R2B each day, but then our planning periods and after school time can be used to plan for student learning and respond to their needs.
Assessment happens here, not alone, on my couch.
We collaboratively assess and grade all work in R2B with our students, during conferences. In these assessment conversations, and following a conversation about what they learned and demonstrated in their work, we ask our students to suggest a grade for their work. In 99.9% of situations, students' perceptions of their own work are in line with our perceptions. We assess against the "I Can" statements the students selected, and if they can provide lots of evidence to show how they met the outcomes, there is no reason why they shouldn't receive a 4 (our school board uses a 1-4 indicator scale for assessment and reporting).
The conversation, however, has quickly shifted from one of evaluation and judgment to one of learning - how can we, together, help you improve the complexity of your thinking and learning? We had mentioned that we wanted to push our students into analytical and critical thinking, and to support our students, we created a continuum of thinking:
This document has proven very useful for assessment conversations because if they aren't finding themselves using analytical, evaluative, and creative thinking, they are not demonstrating mastery. It also helps the students when they're designing a task. If they propose they're going to watch the movie Mean Girls and then summarize the story, this isn't designed in such a way that they can access analytical thinking. In our conference, we'll help the students redesign this proposal so it takes a more critical stance. In that example, it might become "I'm going to watch the movie Mean Girls, and identify the character archetypes present. Then I'm going to create a short film using character archetypes to help build meaning." Or it might become, "I'm going to analyze the movie Mean Girls, and then write a review about the movie, answering the question 'Does this 2004 film hold up in 2020 in how it portrays teenagers?"."
Student choice and ownership leads to authentic text interpretation and creation.
The proof in this approach has been the incredible engagement of our students. Our students can't wait for the hour in their day when they can truly breathe and focus on something that they have designed to explicitly engage themselves in their own learning. We have had an incredible range of student projects, which you can check out on our blog.
A Special Note About COVID-19 and Online Teaching and Learning
Many of us have found ourselves in situations where we need to be designing work that students can complete at home and submit online. As we learned about schools being closed indefinitely in our province, we breathed a sigh of relief because R2B could continue, business as usual.
We continued R2B with our students during emergency online learning. Students used Google Drive to work on their projects, as they had done while at school. As mentioned, we moved all conferences to Google Meet, which students signed up for using Google Calendar. For those teachers who are finding themselves in interesting teaching scenarios, be that full online learning, a hybrid approach, or in the physical school with health precautions, Room to Breathe will work for you.
Resources:
Please borrow any of our resources if they are helpful to you. Make a copy. Hack them. Make them yours. And then tell us about it! Tweet at us: @luckybydesign (Erin) and @bestcircus (Tara).
"I Can" statements (aligned with the ELA 8 curriculum in Alberta, Canada). Alberta teachers of other grades, check out the Essential Learning Outcomes site made by the Alberta Regional Consortia. They have "I" statements for all grade levels.
A non-exhaustive menu of R2B project ideas to get them started in thinking of ideas for Inhales and Exhales across the strands..
Get in Touch
If any of these resources are useful to you, you've been inspired by our approach, or have any questions for us, please reach out to us! You can find us on Twitter at @luckybydesign (Erin) and @bestcircus (Tara), or you can e-mail the Creativity Collective at thecreativitycollective@gmail.com.
This is going to be the trickiest project to post about because it's based on a simulation that's copyrighted, called Warlords of Japan. We used this simulation as a starting point for ours, but made some considerable additions and changes. After all, this simulation was published in 1991, and pedagogy has changed quite a bit since then (there were a lot of regurgitation-type activities in it). The game also touched on just under half of the curriculum we needed to teach, too - it focuses only on the time period in Edo period Japan when the Emperor closed its borders to the Western World. Our curriculum also asks us to address the period of rapid adaptation in Japan following the Perry expedition to Japan when US sailors basically forced Japan to open its borders to the West. That being said, the core game structure had definite merit, and I'd say this project was probably our students' favourite out of all three games we played with them this year.
The game worked like this: Students were placed in a goningumi (which is a traditional Japanese concept where groups of five households were held collectively responsible, and were rewarded and punished as a whole), or clan. Each goningumi was assigned a territory of Japan where their home castle would reside. The goal of the game was to take control of the most territory to become the shogun of Japan. The game play took place using a map of Japan. Each goningumi was awarded koku (a traditional Japanese unit of measurement that equated to 350 pounds of rice, enough to feed one adult for a year) based on how many territories they occupied. We needed a LOT of coloured map pins to play this game. Have a look at the game board below. I feel like I cannot post the rules of the game since we used the copyrighted rules without many adaptations.
The actual purchase and movement of troops was only part of the game. The more important piece came through the roles that students played each game day. Students rotated and took on one of several roles each day, which included:
daimyo: the leader - the one who makes decisions about purchasing and moving troops
banker: the person who does the accounting based on the previous day's work and decisions to figure out how much koku the daimyo can spend
artist/calligrapher: this person did a task related to art or calligraphy based on that day's focus
cartographer: this person would create a map related to the day's focus
historian: this person would complete a task related to a historical event or occurrence based on the day's focus and record it in a notebook called the History Book.
culture minister: this person would create rituals or traditions for the goningumi based on real Japanese cultural traditions. The culture minister also used a criteria sheet to assess the group's collaboration each day.
One final role was mine: Emperor.
Each day, each goningumi would be given a roles sheet, with specific instructions for each role. Here is an example:
Day #2
DAIMYO’S NAME:
🌸
BANKER’S NAME:
🌸
ARTIST/CALLIGRAPHER’S NAME:
YOUR TASK
Your assignment is to design and create a samurai war mask on paper which reflects the values and colours of your region.
🌸
CARTOGRAPHER’S NAME:
YOUR TASK
Your assignment is to create a blueprint (aerial view: looking down from the sky) of your Home-Castle. Make sure you include all necessary buildings (such as sleeping quarters for your head positions and armies, a trading centre, supply sheds, wells or water access, storage for weapons, gardens and food storage, areas to grow rice, areas for sewing, silk production areas, kitchens, latrines (bathrooms) that are away from your food and water supplies, and any other vital building structures). Also place defensive walls around your city, watch towers, gates and other methods of defence. Create a legend which explains the symbols used on your blueprints.
🌸
HISTORIAN’S NAME:
YOUR TASK
Using your knowledge of the social structure during Edo Japan you gain from Reading #2, you will write two personal letters from two people in your region within the feudal hierarchy: one at the bottom and one at the top.
Your first letter should be written from the perspective of a low-class member of society who is unhappy with their position in the feudal hierarchy. In your letter, discuss their frustrations and provide some recommendations for improvement that would make their lives better. Your second letter should be a response from a person higher in the hierarchy. Both letters should be about a half a page.
This assignment should be written from the first person perspective where you are pretending to be in each person’s shoes.
🌸
CULTURE MINISTER’S NAME:
YOUR TASK
Read Reading #2 about Feudal Japan with the Historian. Develop a set of rules you will follow in your goningumi regarding the different roles that exist in your group. For example, your Daimyo might have special privileges as the highest ranking member of your goningumi. Consider things like dress, language, seating, privileges, etc.
Because we developed most of the role assignments ourselves, I feel fine sharing these role sheets with you. Each day progressed through some historical events related to the time periods we were learning about, following the required events from our program of studies. As the days progressed, the focus changed. We went through feudalism, isolationism, a focus on the Dutch traders at Nagasaki who were permitted to stay during isolationism, Perry's expedition, opening the borders, and rapid adaptation. To help students understand the historical context of these and to help them with their role assignments, we also created a daily reading for the groups. We created most of these ourselves, too, and so feel fine sharing them as well.
We assessed the work of the group at the end of each day. This is something we need to consider iterating next year, because although it was really good to see what each student was learning and able to do each day, the assessment took a long time (with six groups in each class, and two classes, I was spending 1 - 1.5 hours after school each day assessing this project). However, in doing this, we also awarded moves. The total moves each goningumi earned were how many available moves (how many pins could be moved) during gameplay. So, essentially, if individuals in the group completed their role, the more moves the goningumi had the next day to play, and the better the goningumi would do in the game.
One clear advantage this game has is its possibilities for differentiation. Each role could earn up to 4 moves, and this allowed us an opportunity to modify or differentiate for each student's needs. It would be possible, therefore, for a student who is following a heavily modified program, to earn 4 moves based on the individual expectations for that student. In essence, then, each student had a pathway to excellence that was personal to their own learning plan. And what this meant was that in groups that were heterogenous and teacher-assigned, success was possible and probable for each group. No student could feel that their group was letting them down if they followed the pathway to success that we laid out for them.
I would fill out a moves tracking sheet at the end of the day, which the next day's banker would use to figure out how many moves they had to use.
Moves Tracking Sheets
The CULTURE MINISTER assesses the group at the end of each period.
SOCIAL EXPECTATIONS:
Members stay with the group and do not wander.
Members remain seated with their group.
The group’s volume is not excessive and does not detract from the classroom setting.
Positive language is used and the group refrains from negative or inappropriate speech
Group is on-task and working on the given assignments.
Finished members are supporting and helping group members or working on chapter questions and are not serving as a distraction to their goningumi or the class.
MOVES EARNED
______/2
______/2
______/2
______/2
______/2
The EMPEROR completes the following assessment based on how well each person fulfills their role and completes their work:
ROLES &
RESPONSIBILITIES
MOVES EARNED
DAIMYO
______/4
BANKER
______/4
ARTIST/
CALLIGRAPHER
______/4
HISTORIAN
______/4
CARTOGRAPHER
______/4
CULTURE MINISTER
______/4
A brief note about the social expectations part. I am a teacher who believes strongly in the intrinsic motivation of students to create a classroom where everyone can learn. I spend significant amounts of time establishing, developing, and reinforcing classroom community. In reality, though, sometimes this doesn't always end up working. Especially in May and June. Which is when we were doing this project. Because a lot of my time during the work period was spent running the gameplay, the social expectations piece was designed to remind groups of the social expectations of being a part of a group, as well as give them a mechanism to self-police themselves to make sure they were living up to them. I took every group's self-assessment here at face value.
We played the game for nine days before declaring the shogun. The goningumi that had occupied the most territories became the shogun of Japan. Because during Edo Japan, the Shogun was the one who called all the shots (the Emperor became more of a figurehead), we spent the next day, as a class, in adopting the traditions and customs the winning group had developed through the first nine days. Following one day to live according to the culture of the winning goningumi, I declared war on the shogun (mirroring what happened historically, which was that the Emperor and his allied forces attacked the Shogun and his forces to restore power to the Emperor, which became the Meiji Restoration), and re-established the control of the Emperor.
We watched this video to ensure we all understood the historical context:
As a final assessment piece, we asked each student to choose one of four questions and create a brief written response. Our four questions were:
How did time and geographic location shape Japanese worldview?
How did Japan’s worldview foster the choice to remain an isolated society?
How did Japan’s models of governance and decision making reflect their worldview?
How did Japan’s worldview shape individual citizenship and identity?
We were pleased, when reading their responses, to see that most students had a solid grasp on understanding the role worldview played in the isolation and adaptation periods of Japanese history.
Resources Shared in this Post:
The original Warlords of Japan simulation (included in this copyrighted resource are the rules of the game and the accounting sheets the bankers used to track koku and moves)
After we did a teacher-created game for our Renaissance case study, we decided to put the game design into the hands of our students for the Aztec and Spanish study. The Aztec and Spanish case study looks at what happens when two worldviews with very different technology, disease, and worldviews collide. In essence, the Aztecs, though they had a dominant empire in the Americas, were slaughtered and effectively eliminated when the Spanish arrived in Central Mexico.
We started this project by playing games! We were able to buy a bunch of different strategy games for our lunchrooms. We aimed for games with different mechanics but always a level of strategy. Some favourites were Machi Koru, Santorini, Ticket to Ride, Pandemic, Coup, Letters from Whitecastle, and the classic Catan.
Before we played, we did a quick intro to game theory, so the students would be able to identify things like the core engine, game mechanics, and different kinds of games. My student teacher Adrienne created a notecatcher so they could keep track of the terminology. As they played the games, they worked with a group to identify some of the mechanics and core engines of the games they played. They knew, at this point, that they would be creating their own board game and the purpose of the game play was to learn more about possibilities for their own games.
We used a modified design thinking process to structure our time for this project. The Discovery/Empathy phase was when they played other games to figure out how games work and what makes them fun (and on the flipside, NOT fun!). Students made many observations during this phase about how the best games are easy to learn and play (they decidedly did NOT enjoy the critically acclaimed game Root, because it was too time consuming to learn to play). They made observations about which rules were easiest to follow. They noticed that games were not fun when people were eliminated because then people are sitting around watching until the game is done, which is boring for them.
After having played several games (we aimed for each group to play 4 - 6 different games) - we played for a whole week, which felt like a long time, but we really wanted them to have a chance to play many different kinds of games. From here, we had the students work through some brainstorming about their own game, and they filled out a Build A Better Board Game organizer. We were really inspired by the Institute of Play's Gamepack resource, and borrowed pieces of them for our process. This part of the process aligned with the Ideation phase of design thinking frameworks. A note here: the result of the conflict between the Aztec and Spanish was known. We did not want their games to present alternate histories (so, if the Aztec won the wars with the Spanish and the history of the Americas would forever be different), but the Spanish did not have to "win." We talked a lot about how there could be different goals for the Spanish and Aztec players: In some games, the students had the Spanish working towards God, gold, and glory, and the Aztec could be aiming to survive for a certain number of rounds. Others decided to focus on one group only: all the players were Spanish, or all the players were Aztec. As I'm reflecting on this now, there's something uncomfortably colonial about this... and I'm not sure what to do about it.
Anyway, they began prototyping their game following ideation. They used lo-fi materials to prototype in the beginning: paper and pencil. They created paper stand-ins for a board, meeples (did you know the little figures you play with on board games are called meeples?? Until this project, I did not!), cards, and rules. We spent just a couple of days creating these lo-fi models, because after this, we had them do a playtest. Groups switched games with another group, and they tested the games to see if they would work, and to see if they would be fun. They used the Playtest Reflection Template on page 31 of the Institute of Play's Game Design Pack to give the group feedback.
Following this, they iterated based on feedback. They changed rules, worked on the clarity of their rulebook, and altered game mechanics. Then they began working on a hi-fi version of their game. They used all kinds of materials like cardboard, paint, clay to make meeples, and our 3D printer. And then they played each others' games! They used the playtest feedback form once again to give the groups feedback as they played.
As we did with our Renaissance project, we used an assessment sheet to keep track of progress towards outcomes as they were working through this process. We once again wanted students to have opportunities to improve throughout this project, and so re-assessment was possible at any point during the work time they had for their game. I think in future iterations of this project, I would simplify the assessment sheet as it had too much to focus on and made mastery more difficult.
Though it seems simplistic, the amount of content knowledge the students needed to know in order to make these games was quite astounding. They needed to make it historically accurate, and the outcomes had to reflect what really happened. Being able to create within those creative confines enabled great creativity - as you can see, each game is very different. Project-based learning can tend to go one of two ways: frontload the knowledge, and then have students create something to prove they know it, OR craft a performance task that gives the students a reason to find out the knowledge. The second type of project are the kinds I tend to gravitate towards. It works! This project proves that it does!
Boca al Lupo
Italian, "from the mouth of the wolf"
An expression, often used in theatre, to wish someone good luck.
When it came time for us to begin our first major case study about worldviews, a look at how ideas spread during the Italian Renaissance, and how a Western worldview emerged, we were totally stuck. We looked at things other people had created, and projects we'd done in the past. One huge problem with this interesting, yet very history-focused curriculum, is that many teachers tend to focus on content (what happened) rather than phenomena and significance (why it matters).
We knew we wanted to focus on the latter. We had a couple of frustrating planning meetings with our Humanities team, which consisted of my incredible team partner Tara, and my student teacher Adrienne. Finally, a conversation that took the form of plussing happened - where we took an attitude of "yes, and" and added on to another person's idea. We were talking about games and principles of game-like learning, and the seed of Boca al Lupo was born. Boca al Lupo is essentially a smashup of Pokemon cards and War.
Here's the premise of Boca al Lupo:
Students are organized into teams of 5-6 people, called Guilds. The students give the guild a name, a motto, and a coat of arms (after a little minilesson on European heraldry).
There are seven Levels in the game creation. Each Guild works on one level at a time, in whichever order they want. The levels are: Arts/Culture, Math/Science/Health, Philosophy, Political Systems, Religion, Technology, and Trade/Commerce/Competition. We created a package for each level, in which we found grade-level information about topics and people of significance in that area during the Italian Renaissance. For example, in Arts/Culture, we featured Christine de Pizan, Humanism, Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo Buanarotti, The House of Medici Patronage, and William Shakepeare.
The students worked through each level with their Guild. Each member of the Guild was responsible for creating one card for their deck of Boca al Lupo cards. They each chose one of the people or topics from the level to research and create a card for. They used a graphic organizer called Player One Ready to organize their research. We had a complex version and one that was a bit simplified for our students who needed it. We also had a sheet called Leveling Up! which I'll talk about in a minute. We borrowed many of the concepts on the Ready Player One sheets from the Historical Thinking Project. Here's the sheets:
After each student was finished their Ready Player One sheet, the group would get together to complete the Levelling Up sheet together. They would share what they learned about their own person or topic with the group, and then assess the level of historical significance together, creating a kind of ranking of the topics or people in terms of how historically significant they were. The group would have 200 Health Points (HP) and Damage Points (DP) to divvy up when they got to their hard creation, and this ranking would help them do this. It also ensured that people in the group were familiar with all the topics in the level. We wouldn't want someone, for example, not knowing what humanism was all about because they'd researched William Shakespeare.
After this point, the group would call their Questmaster (which is what the teachers were called during the game. I wore a cape. It was amazing) over for an interview. We used an assessment sheet to keep track of how each student was doing during the level.
I want to break here to talk about assessment for a moment. One of the principles of game-like learning is "Feedback is immediate and ongoing." Feedback is one of the reasons why playing games is fun. You get instant and continuous feedback about how you're doing. We wanted to make sure this was part of the way this project worked, so we developed the interview. This made sure that groups were getting feedback before they went to create their cards. It gave us time to check for understanding from each student. We talked to the group about what they'd learned about, and made sure they knew the historical significance. It gave us a feedback loop in case the students had missed something pretty important. If they thought humanism wasn't particularly historically significant, we could give them some feedback about what else they needed to read or research to get a more complete understanding of the topic. We did one interview per group per level.
This meant seven opportunities to check in on the learning for each student. This meant seven chances for a kid to show their progress on each stem (we use our report card stems in a very similar way to how you'd see standards or objectives used in standard-based grading and objective-based assessment). The content would be different for each attempt, but the skills are the same. We were looking for growth for each student over time, and kept a master record of each student for each level as we did the interview. I used Checkmark, Checkmark Minus, and Checkmark Plus symbols to note which students had strong understanding and more tenuous understanding for each skill. If a student did not meet the objective at a basic level, he/she was given feedback and asked to continue working on their research and then we'd have a follow up interview to check for understanding again. As a result, no students were working below grade level on this project.
When the interview was complete, and all students had at least a basic understanding of the objectives, students were given two things: a boost card (worth 2x, 3x, or 4x the Health Points) based on how well the whole group understood their topics, and blank card templates.
This is where the 200 HP and DP come in again. The group had 200 to distribute amongst the group's cards. They could decide as a group how to do that, but they had to be able to justify their allocation. They gave each person or topic two strengths and a weakness. For example, a strength of the Black Death might be "Kills 2/3s of all human cards" or "Kills nobility and peasants equally. Roll a dice. If you roll less than 3, your card is automatically killed." A weakness could be "Demolishes the feudal system. All lower class cards increase their HP by 30." They combine their knowledge of the historical event or person, and bring in elements of gameplay to have the card influence the play. In the box at the top, they'd also draw a picture.
At any point in the level, if they finished their job earlier than the rest of their guild members, they had an opportunity to do a side quest. Side quests were an extra task for them to do, adding an element of enrichment for those who needed it. Quests would be things like, "Learn the meaning and context of 5 Shakespearean insults and then write one of your own, to be used during game play" or "Research one-point linear perspective then use it to create a drawing of a hallway or room in the school." Quests would give the group a bonus card that would benefit them during gameplay. The quest cards were made by Tara using a website called MTG Cardsmith!
Once all the cards were created, then the group could move on to the next level, and start the process all over again.
Once all groups had progressed through all seven levels, then they had a deck of cards that they would play the game with. Gameplay looked like this: We created a double elimination tournament bracket so each group would play at least twice. They would put five cards down on the table as their "bench," which is how Pokemon works. Then they'd turn the cards over in that order. Whatever was written as the strengths and weaknesses was applied. If neither card was eliminated, it went down to HP and DP to determine the winner. The winning team kept both cards, and could use them in future gameplay. Sometimes, there were disputes about a card having an unreasonable amount of power for its historical significance. At that point, they called a Questmaster over to hear the arguments and make a decision. This turned out to be a great chance for students to use persuasive skills and logic to present an argument.
The final game came down to these two cards: Humanism vs. the Printing Press. We had to call it a tie.
As always, we have some changes we'd make next time. Most importantly, we need to figure out a better way to differentiate for students who have unique learning needs. Though we did create modified versions of the graphic organizers, students who needed modified work struggled with this task more than they should. All students should have pathways to excellence, and if a student didn't do a great job on their card, the card wouldn't be very useful to the group. We need to create a pathway to excellence for all students in this game. We don't yet have an idea for how to do this, but it's a definite redesign next time.
We'd also do a trial game early into the process, maybe after two levels, so the students can see how the gameplay works, which will give them feedback about how to improve their cards. We were kind of figuring this out as we were going through it so we didn't do this, but this would be an easy thing to incorporate next time.
Overall, we were happy to know that each student understood factors that shaped the Renaissance and the emergence of a Western worldview and were successfully able to employ historical thinking to determine historical significance.
Erin Quinn
