Go to the Chris-Roger Template Here
Perhaps 50% of you have noticed recently that it is common, when stepping up to a public urinal to see a fly perched, just about half-way between hip and knee level. The fly is right on the spot that that you were intending to ... you know ... claim. The fly is pretty docile. It's a nice fly, not a horsefly or anything that looks particularly dangerous. But ... well ... that's your spot.
Elevation negative 30-degrees. Range 0.25 meters. Fire. The target remains, and we realize that the fly was life-like image put there by the City of Tokyo to encourage me to focus a bit more on my aim and make life a little easier for the nice old ladies charged with cleaning the lavatories. And it works. Without punishing or rewarding me, without telling me to do anything, without even gently requesting, my behavior has been modified. So these water-resistent, computer-generated, one has to wonder, perhaps even market tested fly stickers, are a perfect example of a recently popular concept, often referred to as "Nudge" thinking. (A very recent and popular book that I am reading on this subject is one entitled Nudge by Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein.)
If is the very subtlest example of a larger movement in thinking that had taken over in business, particularly in marketing, and which could very easily be applied to teaching -- that of gamification. Gamification is a strategy for channeling human behaviors that extends beyond reward and punishment, and does not rely on trust, loyalty, or other human impulses more consciously at play in a command-and-control contexts.
In spite of what the term might suggest, gamification is not fundamentally about fun. Gamifying a classroom activity can, as a side effect, make the activity fun, the point is to create a sense of purpose and urgency around activities which would otherwise be open-ended. I don't pee on the fly because I think that it's fun, but the presence of the fly introduces a sense of purpose to an activity that is normally lacking in focus ... or should I say, aim.
For this blog post, I am going to present an Activity Module that I think is an excellent example of gamification. Do not be distracted by the fact that some of these activities might be "fun." What justifies them is not, strictly speaking, that they are "games" (some of them arguably are not). What justifies them is that they compel the behavior that the teacher wants by challenging the students with the kinds of intrinsically gratifying puzzles that one finds in games.
This ActMod is a fictionalized amalgam of two lessons that I observed by two teachers of ours — Christoper Harkins (who teaches out in Chiba) and Roger Browne (who teaches for us out near Yokohama). I have tried to compose the Action Bucket in such a way that you can copy it into your own Action Bucket, adapting it to your own particular content.
- Here are the features that I think make what I’ll call “The Chris-Roger Template” effective.
- The teacher marks the transitions from one action to the next by deliberately moving the students from one seating configuration to the next.
- The governing motif is spurts of activity. We are not “giving kids time to get comfortable” with anything.
- Tasks are discrete. There is no gray area between on-task and off task.
- Tasks are structured in such a way that it’s not possible to “finish.”
- There are tangible consequences for effort/lack of effort.
- Wherever possible, a time limit is deployed.
- It consists of four Actions; each of which I think could probably be broken down into more discrete Actions, which I am happy to do if people want me to -- especially if people are confused about how to implement some of these in the room.
- The Actions are of four types:
- A Ping-Pong-Ball-Bounce Drill where the teacher encourages responsiveness on the part of the students by using the device of a ping-pong ball.
- An I-Challenge-You Game where students, organized into teams, challenge each each other with prompts.
- A Shrinking-Time-Window Speaking Drill, where the teacher pushes the students' towards aggressive engagement with the language by having them speak within successively shrinking time parameters.
- And a Musical-Conversations game, a little like hot-potato or musical chairs, where the teacher suddenly stops the music and whosever turn it is has to stand up and do something.