I came into project based learning from the perspective of blending the standard curriculum goals you see detailed in documents like the California Common Core Standards with game based social emotional programme's such as Quantum Learning in order to make the pathway between education and employment smoother and more intuitive. Selecting into a gamification lesson study group therefore seemed like a natural progression of my interests in blending curriculum with whole body experiences. Little did I know that I had my understanding of the purpose and outcomes of gamification completely wrong and indeed these are common misconceptions within the realm of new educators. We were directed to center our lesson study around enacting equity in our classroom and it seemed gamification was going to be the vehicle through which we would need to do so. After re-orienting ourselves to a correct understanding of gamification ( i.e. making the structures and systems of your classroom into a game) versus gamified learning ( playing a game to internalise a particular lesson), our lesson study group chose “How can we use gamification to grow student interest/engagement, and as a result increase academic success and confidence? How can we use games to scaffold to a larger goal?” as our problem of practice for this trimester.

My lesson study team and I approached this first by looking at research around how gamification is implemented in a classroom environment. That we started at this basic of a level indicates our level of ignorance and how many misconceptions we had. From those readings and interviews I noticed the following themes: . I expand on key learnings and ideas about each below. Gamification is widely misunderstood, Gamification incentivises time on task and modifies behaviour, Gamification does not make up for poor explicit teaching of material

Further details on the research we did can be found in my annotated bibliography and literature synthesis linked below.

Annotated Bibliography

Literature Synthesis

Lesson Study Memorialisation Document

Our team was new to gamification as a concept. In the research we had read about how badges are effective at increasing students time on task and incentivising behaviour. As a result we conducted our PDSA's with implementing badge based reward systems across our various classrooms. We also hypothesised that it takes more than one PDSA cycle to see growth in student behaviour.  I decided to do this over a 3 week cycle of seminars that will be conducted over the course of the rest of the semester.  I drew out charts for each of my classes on large poster paper and record every time a student does one of four things: 1. Asks a question 2. Answer a question 3. Makes a connection between materials or to other previous knowledge. 4. Uses a piece of evidence.  See images below.

My three students have the following learning profiles:

Focus Student 1

He is a quiet student who defines himself as emotional and needy. His previous map scores indicate he is a 2nd /3rd grade level reader. I have seen him show engagement and dedication when provided with support and material he is passionate about. He very rarely contributes to whole group discussions.

Focus Student 2

This student has shown to be creative and expressed with drawings.  She also tested as a 2nd/3rd grade level reader.  She needs support around expressing self, thoughts and ideas orally and in writing. He very rarely contributes to whole group discussions.

Focus Student 3

This student is a cheerful and engaging student. He tested as a 1st grade level reader.  He has an IEP with that expresses an auditory processing challenge . He is enthusiastic and keen to improve and consistently asks me how to get better. She very rarely contributes to whole group discussions.

Two of the three focus students contributed in the seminar which is 200% growth considering their learning profiles is a good indication that the system of badges in the classroom is working. 

This chart shows that 1 of the focus students who participated last time, participated again. The third focus student who did not contribute last time  to the seminar shared. 

Our lesson study team read broadly around the concept and thought a number of concepts were interesting including the idea of an escape room. We initiallly planned our lesson study to be the culmination of a series of lessons where we implemented badges. Due to a change in the hosts scheduling this became impossible and so we switched to an escape room concept where students would demonstrate risk taking through behaviours that were incentivised by the immediate feedback and competition of the escape room format. 

Lesson Study Research Theme

We will utilize gamification strategies to help students feel confident to trust their thinking.  

Content Goal

Students understand how different types of actions (categorized by Physical Force; Acts of Service; Inspire; Education; Daily Life; and Law) impact the effectiveness of your service and defense of your beliefs/opinions (based on evidence from our class text and our history as collected through the unit). 

Grounding in Research

1. Gamification has been shown to incentivise students to spend time on task and to work through frustration as a result of receiving positive feedback every time they get sometime correct and move up a level.

2. Having students participate in an escape room will enable them to take more risks on their way to success in the way of 1. asking for help from a teacher 2. asking for help for a peer 3. sticking at the problem longer than they might do otherwise. 4. using the resources in the room 5. taking a targeted social or academic risk given to them by the teacher.                                               

Lesson Flow

We will get the students settled and then give them the following instructions:

• Form teams of 3. Each team should have 1 of each number. *If you approach Ms. Caisse with a team of people you don’t usually work with, you will be given the answer to the first challenge and able to skip ahead. 

• You have 1 hour to escape the Middle Ages. You are permitted to use one person's binder and notes for the activities.  The 1st (3) teams to complete get a (better prize) than other teams. 

• Each player has a job to play. Some tasks can only be completed by the player who has been given the task. They can choose to pay for help. It will cost your team 3 coins to have a different player complete a task you were assigned. It costs your team 2 coins to ask the teacher for a clue. This is a risk-taking assessment.

• Clues are given as A, B, C, and D. The solution to A is the first number of the combo lock; B the second number; C the third; and D the fourth.

• Students will approach the teacher with their team to be given their first clue.

• When all teams have approached. The timer for 1 hour is set. 

The progression of activities in the escape room can be found in the lesson plan link below.

Link to Lesson Plan

Focal Student Assets and Needs:

Assets

• Hard worker

• Strong in math

• Self identifies as adventurous and funny.

Needs

• Vocabulary support as English Language Learner

• Support for confidence; self described as cautious

Observations:

Students were enthusiastically engaged with the task at hand. Many teams were working productively together to solve the puzzles around the room. As time went on it became more and more clear which students had powerful readers in the groups and which students had good notes and good information recall. 

Observation of Focal Student:

My focal student was mostly engaged with the task at hand. She spent large periods of time looking at the paper and trying to figure out the answers with limited success. This did not stop her from continuing to try. She worked with two other girls who seemed to have higher academic status than her. My focus student was the first student to pull out her binder and although instructed they were only to use one binder multiple binder switches were made during the time they spent trying to solve the clues looking for better notes. My focus student did contribute thoughts and answers to her group and was often overridden by her groupmates. When this happened once or twice she would go back to staring at the piece of paper looking for answers and when rebuffed again would sit quietly and twirl a pencil. It occurred to me that outside of this escape room format, with the immediate reward of moving on to the next clue in sight she may not have tried for that long. The group made little headway with the first clue for 45 minutes despite the fact that the option to use two coins they had been given to ask for help were available to them. After 45 minutes, I noticed my focus student was the one to ask for help. I wondered if this is a behavior that was elicited by the game or through habit. 

The focus student showed no change in her responses. A number of hypothesises reasons for this are :

1. The focus student took no risk in choosing to work with students outside of her friendship group. 

2. The focus student was not competent at using their binders to  find, read and digest materials though the focus student did spend a large amount of time on task looking.

3. As a result her friends routinely took the tasks away from her.

4. The focus student and her group did not make it past the first task and so never participated in her specific risk taking activity.

5. The room was a busy and noisy environment with multiple things happening at the same time and a competetivie atmosphere. This may have resulted in sensory overload. 

From my perspective this lesson did exactly what gamifying lessons is supposed to do. It encouraged students to spend time on the task. All students spent a long time figuring out a problem they might have only spent two or three minutes on in the course of a normal lesson before giving up. However in assessing it against a goal of encouraging students to take risks it was very difficult to evaluate whether the risk taking behaviours labelled on the sheet were being engaged with faithfully in the whole group. In observing my focus student, the instructions were certainly not adhered to faithfully as multiple people's back packs were pulled out of the cupboard and mulitple people were reading the only risk taking set of directions the group progressed to. Even the explicitly defined risk of working with people students didn't normally work with was avoided as far as possible. The reasons that risks weren't taken is because that was not the modality in which students had to demonstrate learning. They were free to write on a piece of paper and so no risk was required in order to participate fully and there was no way of fully holding students accountable for that. 

Indeed we intially planned this lesson as a seminar, in which sharing your thought out loud to your peers involves a high level of risk. In that format, speaking is the only way of participating and it is very clear to everyone who is doing so and so much easier to spot risk taking behaviour.

Given the mismatch between the modality of the lesson and the equity goal I do not believe the escape room format did incentivise risk taking behaviour. 

The idea of badges for behaviours however has proved to be valuable and successful. As this lesson study draws to a close I have implemented further badge charts in my room for behaviours that include: 1. Being on time 2. Logging out of of a laptop 3. Plugging a laptop in 4. Cleaning up the room at the end of class 5. Booking a 20 min conference with me. I am only in the first week of implementation but look forward to evaluating student progress.