Dungeons and Dragons

Day 12 (of 187) – September 19, 2018

I will admit… today’s daily blog of learning will be short. I’m pooped. My bed is calling my name. The day started and ended talking about practicum for the Year 2 Elementary Cohort at UNBC School of Education. Enough said. It’s about laying the ground work for the upcoming 4-week practicum and it was an opportunity to discuss with the Teacher Candidates, Coaching Teachers, and Practicum Mentors with what’s happening in the next few weeks, months, and vision for future. I love the framework of LEARNING at the heart of what we are doing and I feel that things got off to a good start. I’m pretty stoked.

Year 2 Elementary Practicum for EDUC490 was not the highlight of my day today… it was my EDUC360 class with the Year 1 Secondary Cohort. Student facilitated learning as a couple of my students summarized one of my favourite articles, “The Heart of a Teacher,” which comes from one of my favourite books, “The Courage to Teach” by Parker Palmer (1997). The two students opted to collaborate and first summarized the article with a PowerPoint. It was a nice summary that highlighted points that they had identified about the importance of identity and integrity in teaching… and that WE TEACH WHO WE ARE.

The two students unpacked this idea by “being vulnerable” and used their passion, DUNGEONS AND DRAGONS to demonstrate some of the big ideas from the article. They self-identified as GEEKS and developed a game for the class to participate in. This learning was scaffolded with us forming groups of 3-4 and filling out a form, which asked us the following: What is your superhero name? What are your passionate about? What do you think your strength is in teaching? (name 3) And, what are your weakness in teaching? (name 2) I liked that activity already as it got us to think about our passion and strengths. It’s not easy to do, yet many of us struggled with the superhero name (lol).

We shared what we had developed with our team and the class… then we rolled a die to see who would go first in the Dungeons and Dragons Challenge (i.e. warding off ZOMBIES on campus at UNBC). They had cute graphics identifying the Zombies at different areas of campus with different scenarios. As a team, we were each posed a challenge to win back these Zombies back to learning/education using our STRENGTHS. I’ll admit, role play is not my strength but the class proceeded with volunteer Zombies and each superhero team using their strength with transform these Zombies into active learners. I loved how the 2 student facilitators were able to take what we have created for ourselves (i.e. strengths) to transform Zombie behaviour and make connections to teaching and learning. Personally, I enjoyed the colour commentary. Lots of laughs. Lots of engagement. Lots of joy. This is exactly what the article was all about. Brilliant.

There might be a games night in the near future… heads up. I love the idea of using gamification as part of pedagogy because Dungeons and Dragons (or board games) is a passion and somehow they were able to depict and demonstrate the underpinnings of the article that was personalized, experiential, and memorable. Thank you Kris and Devon.