Our non-traditional high school presents many unique challenges. Though isolationism is a common problem throughout the profession, it’s more evident in a building where teachers are often the only one teaching a particular subject. To create unity and a sense of school spirit, we needed to completely dismantle the box.
Education Leaders 3C: Inspire a culture of innovation and collaboration that allows the time and space to explore and experiment with digital tools.
Educators 2C: Model for colleagues the identification, exploration, evaluation, curation and adoption of new digital resources and tools for learning.
While the topic of our session is about our attempt to gamify school culture, the lessons we learned and audience takeaways are applicable to almost all technology initiatives and firmly grounded in the ISTE standards, particularly standard 3C for Education Leaders and standard 2C for Educators.
According to standard 3C for Education Leaders, leaders are “asked to inspire a culture of innovation and collaboration that allows the time and space to explore and experiment with digital tools.” Our experiment with gamifying school culture meets this standard by design: tasks were intentionally chosen to promote collaboration between and among stakeholders in the building, and digital tools were likewise carefully selected in order to give stakeholders an authentic experience as a user of that tool and an opportunity for the coaches to model natural ways to incorporate the tool into the different objectives within the game. In other words, the tools were used to facilitate the strategies that were chosen to support the goal, in adherence with the guidance posited by Wes Kieschnick in Bold School. Additionally, the entire concept of gamification was also modeled by the Bryant coaches, with the intention of pulling back the curtain and inviting teachers to embrace gamification elements within their own classrooms.
Similarly, standard 2C for Educators refers to educators having the “ability to model for colleagues the identification, exploration, evaluation, curation, and adoption of new digital tools for learning.” Based on our experiences in the building, we knew the strengths and areas for growth for each teacher, and we knew what types of technology initiatives were successful or unsuccessful in the past. We anticipated using the game to provide a platform for tech-savvy teachers to support their curious, but less tech-savvy colleagues in a nonthreatening environment. To generate new ideas, we polled stakeholders for task ideas and incorporated them into the game in various ways to ensure that there were multiple points of entry regardless of anyone’s comfort level with technology, and also ensure that there were enough new ideas and challenges to keep building the capacity of the early adopters.