I teach for a living.
It's a strange occupation, to be sure, one I never thought I'd be
engaged in, but I've found that I've got a taste for it: the truly grueling
failures, the tentative, small successes as students eke forward, grow as
people and then, eventually leave your care, hopefully prepared for at least
part of what life's going to throw at them.
When I first started teaching, a little over a year ago, I wrote an SNS
on how game theory had influenced my student policies, and how I tried to use
game mechanics like feedback support as a mechanism for student engagement.
It failed miserably.
Lately, however, I've been trying something new. I've been giving students hyper-directive
feedback about objectives. That isn't to
say that I'm telling them how they should think, or what they should think - while
that's unfortunately an all too common practice in education, I find it pretty
reprehensible and counterproductive. No,
I'm simply telling students what I want them to get out of each lesson at the
end of each lesson. I watch them attempt
a task, present them with feedback, and then discuss, very directly, their
performance at said task.
The end result is a relatively high level of student
engagement: my students do their work, they employ the feedback I'm presenting
them with, and they consider what I'm saying as relevant, rather than vaguely
impressionistic bullshit (a potential problem that can emerge from less
directive teaching approaches).
Previously, I gave them a performative framework that they could track
their progress within, a percentage meter of the course that they could watch
gradually fill up. That failed
miserably. Now, I hit them again with
each point, like the end scene of a tutorial, or like a repetitive objective in
a game, and the result? So far, an
engaged, attentive classroom that manages the tasks I set them at deftly, and
is rapidly improving at learning.
By presenting a transparent goal system, rather than
presenting a transparent feedback system, I'm giving my students something
concrete to lean on while they study.
I'm making often abstract discussions very, very concrete by solidifying
them around one or several goals.
There are rogue data points, but I'm struck by just how
effective this method of direct intervention (without directive practice) has
been so far, particularly because it's a marvelous way to condition players in
video games to be totally unable to solve problems.
In video games, directive objectives, when exposed, tend to
make players either feel stupid or lead about by the nose. Consider a game like Mirror's Edge, hyper-directive in its objectives and its
calcification of lessons through objective oriented play and dictation. Mirror's
Edge, after listing off objectives out the wazoo and highlighting relevant
environmental frameworks for your playing-ease, ends in an unsatisfying series
of puzzle rooms built on those previous objective-lessons which, without the
framing that the objective lessons themselves had, are incoherent messes of
play. ID first person shooters are
similar, presenting samey gameplay concepts that drive home a single point,
reinforcing that point each time, until the game is changed, the stakes are raised,
or the context is shifted. Then,
post-context shift, players, who might normally expect a specific lesson, are
left to feel out how to blow up the Macron by circle-strafing or charge the
Hellcube to tear off bits of the Cyberdaemon.
Assassin's Creed: Revelation's
strategy mini-game, which vascilates between piss-easy objective-lesson
missions and controller-snappingly-hard pissing in the dark slamming your head
against a wall missions is an even better example: the lessons condition you to
expect a particular kind of play, based around a single issue, or a new kind of
issue, and instead players are simply given a challenge that violates the
lessons they were previously taught.
These games are, for lack of a better term, dumb. Their gameplay and lessons are often quite
shallow, and they manifest briefly. They
occur in broad, repetitive systems that draw themselves out through arena setups
and repeats. What's worse, their lessons
often make players feel either coddled or extremely dumb, a less than ideal
sensation.
Compare this to the way that games like Portal present lessons. Portal is, at its heart, a game that is
constantly teaching you things without telling you just what it wants you to
learn. The end result is that you, as a
player, always feel like you're cheating a system by making a discovery or
learning a new trick. When the game
finally jumps its rails, it's doing so to literalize the process it's been
having you engage in over the course of the game as a whole: the systems, it's
time to fucking tear them down.
That kind of learning curve would be ideal in a classroom,
but it's tough, really tough, in part because it would require normalizing a
non-normalized process. Portal's brevity is a strength, and it's
a strength that allows a struggling player to spend an hour on a puzzle without
feeling dumb. The game, which can be
finished in a little less than an hour, can be stretched out, its lessons
extended tediously, without feeling tedious.
You aren't in Portal for enough time to actually start to hate it, to
grow frustrated at its various systems.
In a classroom, this simply isn't tenable. Ideally, it would be: you'd be able to have
each and every student take as long as they need to achieve each objective, and
you'd be able to provide them with directive and non-directive support to that
end as needed. But the reality is that,
especially teaching college classes, I have about two hours a week where I've
got active, engaged students who are sitting down and absorbing whatever wacky
lesson I'm throwing at them, at best.
Usually less. And students who
absorb less quickly, who I entrust quicker learners to bring up to speed, might
still not get what's going on by the end of any given class.
So I highlight objectives.
I make it clear that you were supposed to use the rocket launcher to
shoot down the Combine helicopter, even though they could've used the gravity
gun to throw its mines back at it, or that Swift's use of satire in "A
Modest Proposal" was largely unsuccessful, even if it is fun to read, and
even though it has sustained itself in our literary subconscious to this
day. I can't say it's perfect. I can't even say for certain that it works
well (though so far, so good, fingers crossed).
Even then, I've got an exceptionally strong crop of students that might
skew my data already.
The psychological divide fascinates me. Perhaps its owed to the structure of play,
which is something the classroom rejects quite fiercely. It is challenging for students to
"play" with their thoughts as they, often non-voluntarily, take
credits for general requirements, usually after emerging from a public school
system which more closely resembles a framework for a particular kind of socialization
than an educational framework.
Regardless, the more effectively I can reinforce my lessons, the clearer
I can make my intended objectives for my "players," the better. Now, if only I could find a way to make my
paper assignments look like boss-fights.
That might be fun.
