How to encourage Collaboration
How to Encourage Collaborative Lesson Planning
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>>Shula: Mission Lab is a design studio within Quest to Learn.
It's comprised of game designers and curriculum designers
and we work with teachers at Quest to Learn
to help them develop their curriculum and to design games
that are played in the classroom.
>>Shula: Part of what we do is to identify pieces of content
that students tend to have trouble learning or picking up
and when those areas come up, we work as a team
to brainstorm ways that we can design a game
that will help kids to better understand and really learn
and remember these content areas.
>>Arana: Mission Lab is something as a structure
within a school that does not exist
in any other school that I know of.
The support that it gives teachers, I think especially
at a public school, makes it extremely unique.
It's just a place where teachers can really be creative
and are really encouraged to be creative with our curriculum
and also a space of collaboration.
>>Eliza: It is an amazing experience
because you not only have three heads working together
but you have three heads that bring
such wonderful different knowledge and skills
to the table that you end up with products
that wouldn't have ever appeared
if it was just three teachers working together
or three curriculum designers or three game designers.
>>Ameer: The teacher obviously comes with the content expertise
in terms of what is mandated to be taught and then through,
you know, group meetings and discussions
with the curriculum developers and game designers,
start to flesh out possible ideas and directions
to go to teach the content.
>>Daniel: The space that we offer is just
like physically a necessary place for teachers to go
to that's not like a faculty room.
It's a place where they can go and think, not just go
and chill, and we are there to help them think.
>>Claudio: In terms of knowing what the teacher wants to teach,
I have some ideas in my mind already,
but then the teacher comes up with something else
which is very close to that.
So I say, "Well, actually, I was thinking the same,"
so when I see that connection happening, we are almost
on the same wavelength, then I say, "Oh, we should at least try
to prototype this idea and see what happens."
>>Shula: When the collaboration works, it's more successful
in the classroom because the teacher feels ownership over it.
>>Eliza: We see kids excited, they're jumping
out of their seats, they're yelling.
They're talking about triangles and Pythagorean theorem
and you can just see the energy in the classroom.
I call it controlled chaos, it is a lot of noise
but very specific noise geared towards learning goals.
So it's this amazing time in a classroom
where you know learning's going on at the same time
that the students are having fun.
>>Student: We're not just playing the games for no reason.
We have a goal in mind, so our goal for the day may be
to learn certain Spanish words.
So we played Clue once, but it was a Spanish Clue
and the object was to learn how to say different Spanish foods.
So by playing the game we were able to pick up the language
and speak it by the end of the class.
>>Ameer: At first you're like, "Oh man,
the second these kids hear game, their minds change
and they start to get a little excited, they talk,
they don't listen as much."
And that's true, and from a kid's perspective,
every time they have experienced games,
it's been in a more lax environment
where they're supposed to have fun and not worrying
about rules or anything else.
So as a teacher, it's your job to present the game
in such a way that, yeah, we're having fun, we're learning,
but at the same time, although you're enjoying this game,
you're still in a classroom and the ultimate goal is not only
to have fun but to learn what we're trying to teach you.
>>Shula: One of the things that gives games so much power
in teaching kids is that games really encourage you
to just keep trying.
This seems like a perfect fit with when you're teaching kids,
to teach them in a safe environment and encourage them
to just try without fearing failure.
>>Eliza: Oftentimes the teachers bring up ideas
that we never thought of, and so it changes the direction
of where we're going in a particular brainstorm
or with a play test of a game.
The teacher's feedback may then shift the redesign of that game.
>>Claudio: One block, you need to touch that with one
of your units so it's touching,
then you can attack and you can use that.
>>Daniel: Mission Lab and our meeting times are prompts
for teacher learning and teacher reflecting on their next steps
when they're long term planning.
It's very easy to get caught in the day to day as a teacher
and planning for the next day, or maybe the next week,
or maybe two weeks down the road,
but we try to force the long term vision.
And while it can be a pain sometimes too,
teachers do appreciate it in the long run.
>>Arana: There's sort of a trajectory
to understanding the nature of the collaboration
and so teachers who have been here
since the beginning are very protective of their relationship
with the curriculum team.
Curriculum meeting times are kind of like times
that are never touched unless they really have to be
and teachers protect that more than anybody else does.
>>Claudio: Games can be considered almost
like a second language, a universal language
for the world, because those are experiences that a lot
of people go through and they connect to,
maybe in similar ways.
And so there is already some kind of connection there,
so if something is working here, I don't see why something
like this wouldn't work in other places.
