A Manifesto for a Different Kind of Education

by | Feb 14, 2022 | Uncategorized

by Lisa K. Forbes

Someone recently asked me: “What makes you a different kind of learner?” Upon reflection, I told them that I am a different kind of learner because I am a neurodiverse and disabled learner. As a student, I struggled throughout my schooling. I experienced a rigid education system that valued only certain forms of intelligence and this led me to believe I wasn’t smart, nor that I could achieve. But, what makes me a disabled learner also makes me an effective professor. My educational journey instilled a desire to provide a different kind of learning experience for all students, not just those who, like me, feel devalued by education. It turns out, my experience as a disabled learner is one of my greatest assets, and is something that now informs my approach as an educator.

Because my history as a learner was something that gave me stomach aches, I always begin with the intention of making my class enjoyable. I believe the learning environment is most effective when students are provided opportunities to become engaged, encouraged to be passionate, and believe they are a valuable member of the learning community. I have always been interested in getting people connected, engaged, and co-creating knowledge. I want all the humans in the classroom to be invested in the learning process – not just the “knowledgeable instructor” instilling wisdom into passive and empty vessels. To be sure, I have content expertise in my discipline that needs to be taught, but I believe every student in the classroom, through their own lived experience, is also a content expert. And, when given an opportunity to share, each student can become a teacher to the rest of us. 

Knowing how a rigid schooling system impacted me, I approach my own teaching with a desire to find a better way to teach and to make learning an empowering endeavor. This mindset led me to explore how the idea of play can be incorporated into the learning process. A playful pedagogy is often dismissed because the term “play” is typically associated with small children. Common misperceptions of play are that it’s trivial, childish, and having no place in academia. But research dispels these beliefs and it turns out that play is an effective strategy for many facets of adult life, including learning. Knowing this, I incorporate play into my teaching in several ways:

Play as a mindset and a way of being. Embodying playfulness is about finding congruence within myself, being genuine, and simply not taking myself so seriously. For me to be playful, I must also be authentic and vulnerable. Coming out from behind my pedagogical theories and teaching tools and showing up as a human, is perhaps one of the most vital aspects of my teaching – one that creates connection, trust, and belonging. I cannot ask my students to be vulnerable (i.e., try something new, be creative, risk making a mistake, be open, etc.) unless I am also willing to model those things.

My discipline is mental health counseling and in my field, it is understood that the therapeutic relationship is the most important and powerful factor to effective therapy. That is, the strength of the therapeutic alliance largely determines the quality of the counseling experience for the client. It is through the relationship that the therapeutic theories and interventions come alive. In the classroom I see the same importance in the student-faculty relationship because from the safety of those relationships, students are freer to openly communicate, take risks, make mistakes, and engage in the learning process. The stronger the teacher-student relationship, the more robust the investment into the learning process. The exact ingredients necessary to instill intrinsically motivated learners. When I embody a spirit of playfulness, I increase my ability to establish a strong relationship with my students.

Play as an activity. Play by its nature is hands-on and interactive leading to authentic engagement and opportunities to think critically. Play in adult education is generally unexpected, so it generates excitement, surprise, and novelty. Play activities create a dynamic classroom where students are pushed beyond their comfort zones and encouraged to think about concepts differently. Generally in higher education, students experience a series of Powerpoint lectures, typical small group discussions, and occasionally other interventions such as video demonstrations. However, small, playful adjustments to commonly used activities can invigorate a classroom. Instead of distributing a simple handout and a lecture of what it is and why it’s useful, I can create a blank outline of the handout and design a game with teams, a timer, and a prize to make the content come alive leading to critical thinking, more engaged students, and more memorable learning. Instead of a typical case study, commonly used in counseling training programs, play helps me create a more dynamic type of case study involving a client that is a giraffe. I begin by reading the children’s book Giraffes Can’t Dance (a story of Gerald the giraffe that is different and gets made fun of and experiences sadness and low self-esteem). After the story, I give the students Gerald the giraffe’s client profile that I have constructed from real facts about giraffes, turning the facts into presenting problems requiring counseling services. Not only is this more fun and novel but also by making the client an animal, it removes a certain level of pressure from the student to “get it right.” Because no one has ever counseled a giraffe, students are freer to think outside of the box and become creative as they apply their theoretical orientations and interventions to treating this “client.” 

Play as a philosophy. Play is not just for fun. It can also be about playing with the status quo of traditional learning to be more flexible and inclusive. It can be playing with ideas and current realities or approaches to break and remake learning into something new and innovative. I play with traditional viewpoints on grading and align more with elements of the “ungrading” philosophy. Letter grades hold no intrinsic meaning to students regarding their future careers and lessen students’ desire to learn through mistakes and feedback. Letter grades simply create unnecessary anxiety and a sense of robotically jumping through hoops which both are counterproductive to learning. Instead, I serving as a reader to their work to provide my insights, concerns, and wonderings as a part of an ongoing process of iteration with the goal of deepening their learning – not simply to earn a grade. My goal is for all students to earn an “A” in my courses. This represents my belief that through clear expectations, consistent and frequent feedback, as well as opportunities for students to revise and resubmit their work to apply my feedback, they learn more in the process. My approach to grading is constantly evolving but it’s one way to play with the rigid confines of evaluation which I view as being counter to deep learning. 

I question why we do what we do in academia to examine how our norms might hold us back. Because even for people who are adept at coloring outside of the lines, there still exists a strong pull back to the mean. I know I fall victim to this. With this said, however strong the trap of the status quo may be, I believe for education to be most effective, teachers must try to escape it. Much like a fish doesn’t realize the water it swims in until it jumps into the air chasing a fly, teachers often don’t realize the pedagogical water they swim in until something provokes them to jump. The incorporation of play in learning has been a fly for me to chase. It has kept me vigilant to the ways I could become complacent and it fuels me to pursue finding a better way. 

The playvolution. This playful pedagogy has become a personal manifesto for a different kind of education which I call “the Playvolution.” The Playvolution is a powerful lens that helps me reimagine what higher education can be by shifting the boundaries of teaching and learning. The Playvolution encourages me to examine the status quos and ask, for example, if a lecture-based modality of learning is always the best pedagogical strategy, and to explore other ways of teaching. The Playvolution inspires me to play with my instruction and dare to be different and playful. The Playvolution re-positions me within the classroom away from the “sage on the stage” and polished professionalism in order to co-construct learning and meaning alongside my students. All this can help me reduce the intimidating and distancing hierarchy between my students and myself because anxiety is counterproductive to learning. 

While my expectations remain high, a playful pedagogy provides more spaciousness for students to explore, wonder, critique, and risk failure. I feel a heavy responsibility to teach my counselors-in-training to think flexibly and creatively in an ever-changing diverse society with complex problems and people. The quality of care my students provide their future clients depends on that. Therefore, I must design my classes in a way that allows students to grapple with ambiguity and uncertainty, to exist outside of their comfort zones, and that sharpens their flexible and creative thinking skills placing importance on personal growth through community and self-reflection. As a disabled learner, I want to provide my students the learning experience I was denied. I want each of my students to feel empowered to leap out of the water, to chase that fly that piques their curiosity. For it is only when we are free from the imaginary constraints placed on us, that we are able to realize our fullest potential. 

 

Wow. Wow. Wow.

by | Feb 1, 2022 | Inspiration, Resources

If you have not discovered the Playful University Platform, drop what you are doing and go there now.

Before there was a Professors at Play, the PUP folks were doing paralell work in Europe, building a plaform for a more playful higher education.

With the publication of Playful Higher Education: Voices, Activities and Co-creations from the PUP Community, a brillaint and playful 250 page collection of insight, techniques and commentary, you now have a bible of play to sermonize at your instution.

We couldn’t be more delighted to see this publication made available!

Goodbye Gamification: Hello Play

by | Jan 10, 2022 | Uncategorized

So you want to bring a little fun into your classroom and games seem like the perfect way to do it. How do you start?

 It might be tempting to Google “gamification” and see what comes up. But let me steer you in a different direction. Gamification has a mixed reputation in the world. For many, it’s a cheap way to paint a little games on your learning content. Ian Bogost has called this approach the Mary Poppins remedy—a spoonful of sugar that helps the medicine go down. Less generously, this is the chocolate covered brocollii approach. At the worst, it is simply BS.

 So while there is nothing wrong with adding points or levels or power-ups to lessons to your teaching any more than it is an issue bribing a class to study with cookies or an early class release, gamification tends to take all the fun out of playing games.

What’s the other way?

I think there are four basic approaches to using games in your classroom:

  1. Play games
  2. Talk about games
  3. Modify games
  4. Make games

Let me take each in turn.

PLAYING GAMES 

If you want to bring games into your classroom, the easiest way to do it is just pick a game and play it. A game doesn’t have to have anything to do with your teaching and learning domain to provide healthy connection and priming benefits to your students. Play Duck, Duck, Goose. Or a triva game.  Or set up a Nerf basket in your classroom and let students shoot freethrows for candy. It will make a difference. And without much effort, you have managed to bring games into your classroom.

But what about play that is directly relevant to what you teach? These days, there are learning games in almost every domain. A little web searching  can go a long way. So, for example, if you are teaching coding, maybe you could introduce your students to Code Combat. This game will teach you Javascript and Python in an entertaining package. It’s fun, it’s a game, and it’s relevant. 

 TALK ABOUT GAMES

Too often, teachers get stuck on the idea of playing games to teach a subject when they miss the obvious—talking about games can be as much fun as playing them. Teaching a class on ancient Egypt? Have the students play Assassin’s Creed Origins—a fully realized 3D world set in a mythical time of the Pharos. But rather than let the game do the heavy lifting of teaching about an ancient culture, let the students play the game then come back to them and have them critique their expereince. What did the game get right? What did it get wrong? What could be improved? What did they learn about ancient Egypt from a game?

I used to teach an urban planning class. And yes, we used SimCity. But it turns out that SimCIty is a terrible game to teach much about planning beyond the idea that there is such a thing as zoning and that cities are complex. In the real world, there are laws and citizens get to vote. You can’t just blow up roads and buildings when you like. SimCity is, at best, a simulation of totalitarian rule. And since I was not preparing the future Stalins of the world, it turned out the game was better as a tool to stimulate conversations about what it took to design and run a city much more than a software platform that taught anything practical to would-be planners.

Games are fun to play. That’s a start. Talking about the experience is a wonderful way to carry that fun forward, directly into the learning objectives for your c lass.

MODIFY GAMES

Closely related to talking about games is the idea if getting your hands dirty and making changes to games. You can do this as a design exercise, having students describe what changes they would make to a game. Or you can do this as an actual making activity—having students break a apart a game and put it back together with a purpose and point.

But, you might say, I don’t teach a computer class. My students don’t know how to program! And fair enough. But who said we were only talking about videogames? Crack open a copy of Monopoly. Perhaps you are teaching a class on social justice. Have the students fix Monopoly to have a socially just message. All the parts are there. All you need is note cards and an imagination. Or have student propose a Fortnight mod that teaches supply and demand. The sky is the limit with modifications.

I used to have student reskin Chess to be about something else. Are you teaching about the Civil War? OK, what historical figures map to which chess pieces? Are you are teaching a wine appreciation class? OK, reskin the graphics of chess to be red versus white. May the best vintage win!

The point of modifying games is to get students engaged in a critical practice where they are thinking about the system of the game and thinking about whatever content you want them to explore. Maybe there are no good games out there in your subject area. But what games are close? What happens when you ask your students to play with games to find that instructional purpose? You end up with play with purpose. 

MAKE GAMES

Or, why not just ask your students to make games? Again, you don’t need to be a programmer or a game designer to take a pile of note cards, some dice, a few tokens and lots of imagination and turn it all into a game. Sure, a lot of the games might be more Candyland than Grand Theft Auto. But the practice of making, designing and digging into domain content to create teaching games is a process that rewards with deeper insight. So, you teach the novels of Emily Brontë and can’t find a solid game to bring into your classroom? Great! Give the students a go at creating a game that lets you play in Brontë’s literary university. The World of Wuthering Heights? You might be surprised what your students can do. 

CONCLUSION

 This quick tour should give you a sense of the different ways to bring games, whole games, into your classroom. Gamification borrows bits and pieces of what makes games pleasurable and too often leaves the fun at the classroom door. By embracing games for what they are—designed systems to invite play and generate fun—and you have unlocked real power of play.

 

 

 

 

 

Light a Candle

by | Dec 24, 2021 | Uncategorized

 Wow. What a year.

Since Professors at Play is a diverse organization with people from all over the world, we know that what is winter for many of us is summer for others. Some of you are about to celebrate Christmas, others have already enjoyed Hanukkah, the Soltice or even just enoying a break from work. We are all different. But what brings us together is play. And even in face of the ongoing stress of Covid and health issues wiht our loved ones and remote teaching and uncertainties from every corner, we have all found time this year to play.

So whatever your faith or tradition, remember to light a candle and share that warmth. For us, that’s what play is, a small flame that can call people out of the darkness and can build a fire that brings us all together and ignites our common hunamity. Too much? Nope, not even a little. We need play now more than ever.

That is all to say: Happy Holidays and we can’t wait to working and playing with you all in the new year!

David & Lisa

What is a “Playvolution”?

by | Sep 8, 2021 | Commentary

Are you ready to change the world? Or at least higher education? Then welcome to the revolution. Or the Playvolution as we call it. 

What is the Playvolution? Like any good revolution it’s an rallying cry to hoist out the old and establish something new. So, what are we trying to toss? How about hegemonic, classist, hierarchical, didactic, sexist, racist and wildly inefficient practices that have, through managed flows of endowment cash, historical inertia and traditions of power, become adopted as very nature of higher ed.

That is to say: Is there anyone who thinks higher education couldn’t do better?

As a professor, I read the trade magazines and watch what the pundits say. I engage in the scholarly debate around the purpose of higher education and the social contract between education and society at large. I see policy solutions at the federal and state level. I see campus initiatives around student success and innovation in teaching and learning. The higher education solution industry is hard at work developing the next big thing and our various faculties and staffs work tirelessly to make things better.

As a professor at play, I think we are trying to fix massive environmental issues with incremental solutions. We are, collectively, building the sea wall higher and higher a brick at a time against rising oceans instead of looking at the systematic effects of global warming. So to speak.

When I’m honest, I am part of the problem because I love higher ed too much to tear it down and sometimes I think I love it too much to be willing to do the hard things it’s gonna take to fix it. Then I remember play.

Play is transformational. That’s in the literature. That’s in our gut. We know it’s true. Play builds resilience, community, compassion, empathy and curiosity. It ignites our minds and our hearts. It leaves satisfied and alive. And when I look at what play can do, I think this is a solution. We can play ourselves out of this mess.

To get there, it starts with personal play. To be a professor at play is to learn to play in your own life. Then with students. Then with assignments. Then with whole classes. Eventually, with everything. It might be a long way between a fun little ice breaker in a freshman class to assigning committee work and teaching slots by rolling dice and betting on winners. But it can be done. We can take what is serious, seriously and have fun with the rest.

I know. A lot of words from a would-be Playvolutionary. But all the best revolutions start with a battle cry, a manifesto, an idea that leads to action. So that’s where we have decided to start: Telling everyone about play in higher ed.

When you see the Professors at Play Playpsoium 2021: Welcome to the Playvolution, know it’s in earnest and it’s a part of an effort to turn all these words and ideas into action. The next easy step is to join us at the event. If not, just join us in solidarity in play. 

Chilling Out

by | Aug 4, 2021 | Uncategorized

One of the important lessons of play is to take a break. Sometimes fun is just kicking back and not doing anything. As the summer lingers and the fall term approaches, we have been taking time to do just that–relax!

We’ll be back with regular posts and lots of cool news soon. In the meantime, run through a sprinler. Ideally, run through someone else’s. It will be fun. We promise!

The Playvolution

by | Jul 6, 2021 | Uncategorized

by David Thomas

The other day this popped up in a student assignment:

“I also agree when you spoke in the lecture about how there is ‘Play Shaming’ in education. I have always been told to never say ‘play, or playing with an iteration’ and instead use  ‘experiment, iterate, and explore’ since ‘play’ is not serious, and that architecture should be serious to be more creditable.”

 First, a little background. The class I teach is an online class called the Architecture of Fun. I teach architecture students about how to design more playfully and how to create more playful buildings. So, in one of my lectures, I was talking about the idea of design can benifit from a playful approach. My point was that they could use the principles from the class in more serious work—whether designing homes or shopping mall or hospitals. I also warned them that a lot of “serious” architects were pretty playful. But they didn’t often use the word “play” or even”fun”. They might use words like my student mentioned: iteration, experiments, explorations, experiments…the list goes on.

So, what surprised me to read this feedback from my student was that she was specifically being taught what I warned them about. Or as I shared the wisdom of Bernie Dekoven with the class:

“We have been taught to distrust play. Worse, we have been taught that we are not and should not be playful….”

 Here was confirmation from my students that they are, in fact,  taught not to play. It’s not an accident. They are being taught codewords to use to camouflage play. They are advised, in no uncertain terms, to be serious, even when play is the answer.

 I’m tempted to go into a rant about why there is so much ugly and non-functional architecture. But that would distract from the real concern here.

 Higher education is ashamed of play and as a result shames students who play. And unless we do something about it, the same depressing cycles of entitlement, radical individualism, lack of curiosity and dogmatic faith will continue. If higher education wants to continue to help students develop into empathic, curious and courageous citizens, then we need play. Through play we learn to take chances and risk vulnerability, we learn manners when playing with others, we embrace failure and celebrate success. We take the good with bad and value a smile after effort.

All of that is to say, what my student told me was why Professors at Play exists. We are here to change the world with the tools we have at hand as educators. We are here to play and teach others to play with us.

Definitions: Play to Save the World

by | Jun 21, 2021 | Commentary

 

by Lisa Forbes

I’ve been pleased and inspired to find more and more people talking about play and interested in how to use it in higher education. But the more I hear people talk about play, the more I realize we might not be talking about the same thing. And, if we aren’t really talking about the same thing then that means our idea of the function of play may vary too. 

Overwhelmingly, when I hear people talk about play in learning the words “student engagement” soon follow. There’s nothing wrong with this – it’s true that one of play’s super powers is getting students engaged in the content and the learning process. This was a key finding in my latest research study but my issue arises when we reduce play to a tool that saves us from having bored and disengaged students. Play can do more than engage people. If academia wants to fulfill its missions and aspirational promises we make to our students, it behooves us to see play as bigger than an engagement tool.

I see play as a broader means to impact organizations, institutions, societies, and problematic status quos. I see play as a medium that puts people in a position to solve the world’s most concerning social problems. And, fostering this ability for change starts in our classrooms. 

If you’ve read any of my other work, you know that I train students to become mental health therapists. I feel a heavy responsibility to teach my students to think flexibly and creatively in an ever-changing diverse society with complex problems and people. My students get frustrated with me because I start almost every answer to most of their questions with: “it depends” because it does – no two people or circumstances are the same. No one counseling theory or approach fits everyone. Therefore, I must design my classes in a way that allows students to grapple with ambiguity and uncertainty, that forces them to exist outside of their comfort zones, that sharpens their flexible and creative thinking skills, and that places importance on personal growth through community and self-reflection. 

Although foundational to the field, I must resist focusing on only teaching the facts, theories and histories of counseling. I must resist the status quo of lecture-based education, note-taking students, and testing assessments that run counter to what the profession and clients are going to ask of them once they graduate. 

Imagine your loved one finds themself in a “rock bottom” moment in time and winds up in my former student’s therapy office. I bet you won’t care what my student’s GPA was. I bet you won’t care what they got on the midterm exam. I bet you wouldn’t even care how “engaged” they were during lectures and class time discussions. But, you would care how well they could see the complexities and uniqueness of your loved one. You’d care how well they could critically analyze the situation and think flexibly in order to provide the most individualized and effective mode of treatment. You’d care if my former student could think beyond textbooks and worksheets in order to have a part in saving your loved one’s life. Right?

But, then I think about how many students are being taught within rigid and lecture-based classes that are supposed to be teaching people to counsel complex humans in a complex world. So, yes, play can be about leisure and joy. And, it can be about student engagement but it is way more than that. Play is a vital tool that trains people to be more playful, flexible, creative and effective in their jobs with the ability to change people’s lives, their profession, and the world. 

In his book, Free Play, Nachmanovich (1990) stated:

“Looking at the state of our planet, we can easily see that only major breakthroughs will pull us through. Miracles. What is needed in the coming generation is a whole series of adaptive, creative, and evolutionary jumps…creativity arises from play, but play is not necessarily linked to our values. What we call creativity involves such factors as intelligence, ability to break out of outmoded mindsets, fearlessness, stamina, playfulness, and even outrageousness” (p. 183-184).

Similarly, In his book, The Play Ethic, Pat Kane (2004) summarized words from Brian Sutton-Smith, “our brains need to maintain a perpetual state of play to keep the human organism adaptable for any circumstance or challenge” (p. 343). 

So, remember that play in learning is bigger than making teaching a more joyful experience. It’s bigger than a tool to engage students. Play prepares students to be adaptive, creative, and innovative in their careers. We don’t need more mindless, straight-A students who can take exams well. We need students who have the ability to break out of outdated systems and mindsets. 

Enter play…

All Work and No Play

by | Jun 14, 2021 | Commentary

by David Thomas

Do our students want to play? Do they want to have fun in class?

Maybe.

In the movie The Shining, Jack Nicholson plays a writer who hauls his family into the mountains of Colorado to caretake for a massive, seasonal hotel. His ideas is that while trapped in the wintry Rockies, he will finally complete his novel. If you’ve watched the movie or read Stephen King’s book, you know what happens next to Nicolson’s character, Jack Torrence. On his way toward complete madness and attempt to take out his family, writer Jack manages to produce hundreds of pages of his manuscript. When the camera pans to the progress he has made, page after page is filled with the same line:

“All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.”

Not only is this a chilling cinematic reveal, it pretty much lays bare what we deeply feel about play. You’d have to be a madman to think that play is primary.

Sigh.

I think about this when facing a room full of students. I know they want to play. I know they need to have fun. But I also know they grew up in a world that is “working for the weekend”. My students have been steeped in an ironic world where play is the obsession of a possessed caretaker in creepy hotel. Play is just something you might get a little of, after you’ve done your chores, punched out for the day, eaten your vegetables and finished your homework.

Sure, I am exaggerating a bit. Then again, the reality is—you can teach an entire class and not let anyone have fun and keep your job. Even more, you might even win an award for academic rigor for all your humorless instruction. The risk is in playing, not in being overly serious. And the same thing goes for the students. If you want them to take your course seriously, that’s easy. They will at least pretend on paper that they care. College students have learned to be serious. They know education is serious work.  But ask them to play their brain goes on alert: It’s a trap!

All this is to say, do our students want to play? Yes. Do they want to have fun in class? Yes. Do you have to make it safe for them to play? Yes. Do you have show them how fun can stimulate learning? Yes you do. As a professor at play, you have to do more than just offer fun. You just might have to teach them how to have fun at school in the first place.

All work and no play will make Jill a dull girl. So, why not reclaim the fun? You students will thank you.

My Learning Disability Made Me Do It

by | Jun 8, 2021 | Uncategorized

by Lisa Forbes

Someone recently asked me: “what makes you a different kind of learner?”

I am a different kind of learner because I am a disabled learner. The way that formalized education approaches teaching and learning never worked very well for me. I struggled to learn for a very long time (and still struggle actually) in the way in which learning was forced on me in formalized education. I experienced learning as lacking engagement, creativity, and flexibility. I experienced it as valuing only certain forms of intelligence and excluding others. But what makes me a disabled learner also makes me an effective professor. I can’t say for certain but I believe I would approach teaching much differently if learning had always come easy to me. If listening to a lecture allowed me to soak in all the information. If reading a textbook was an easy way to remember the content. If taking tests was simple and a successful activity for me. Those things, which I consider typical aspects of traditional and formalized education, do not come easy to me and so I would never rely on those things to teach my students. I think my struggle with learning has helped me approach teaching in a way that steps outside of traditional modes of education. What makes me a different kind of learner has led me to value and utilize play in my teaching. 

Because I had, what I will call a traumatic past with education, I mostly believe that what I know isn’t all that profound, so lecturing never made much sense to me. As a faculty member, I have always been more interested in getting people connected, engaged, and co-creating knowledge. I have content expertise in my discipline and clinical experience to draw upon but in no way do I feel that I am the only human in the classroom that has all the valuable things to say. I believe in my students. I value their lived experiences and I think the learning is more impactful when it’s collective and social but also when it is personal to them. 

As a young academic, I was quickly bored with how I was “supposed” to teach – what had been modeled to me. What was “typical.” So, I spent a lot of time searching for more engaging approaches. Because my history with education as a learner was something that gave me stomach aches and low self-esteem, now as a faculty member, I have this desire for my students to enjoy class, to be highly engaged where they are energized, active, passionate, and feel like a valuable member in the learning community. I want all the humans in the classroom to be invested in the learning process – not just the knowledgeable instructor teaching passive and empty vessels. To find this magical approach that made students love learning, I searched in many places. I did my own research on pedagogy. I utilized our center for teaching and learning on my campus and consulted with their expertise. I looked into active learning approaches, socratic dialogues and discussions, and played around with ideas from Bloom’s Taxonomy. I had the director of the Center for Teaching and Learning to observe my teaching on multiple occasions to provide feedback. I asked for students’ feedback. All contained valuable lessons for me but nothing really made me feel excited or as though I had hit the nail on the head for what I was looking for exactly.

Then I found play..

I stumbled upon it, really. At first, I didn’t quite know that it held the answers to all the pedagogical problems I was trying to solve. To be honest, when I first started infusing play into my teaching, it was largely for me. Play fits better with my personality and it made me excited and energized to plan and teach classes. But I didn’t initially realize how impactful it would be for students too. This time, I quickly learned. 

I just received my students’ feedback in the university-administered Faculty Course Questionnaire that is sent out to students to collect feedback on the course and professor at the end of the semester. One student said:

“I have never learned more in any class from 5 years old to 30 years old. I was completely engaged, vulnerable, and finally feel what it may feel like to be a counselor.”

This feedback has little to do with me as an instructor. It has everything to do with play. I am just the person who values play and has the courage to bring it into my classrooms. Play is responsible for making learning so valuable. I am a person that believes everything happens for a reason. Sometimes that reason doesn’t reveal itself right away. In this case, my traumatic history with being a disabled learner has negatively impacted me in many ways and has been a long, hard journey if I’m honest. But I am starting to see why I went through all of that. I can see how it gave me a different perspective about learning and I can see how it has led me to find a different approach to teaching that lives outside of the status quo. Maybe, if it wasn’t for my learning disability, I wouldn’t have found play.

My learning disability made me do it…

Preparing to Play

by | Jun 2, 2021 | Commentary

 

by David Thomas

The summer term starts next week. And I’m not ready.

Oh boy.

Even though I study fun, publish about fun and am teaching The Architecture of Fun this summer, I’m really worried that I won’t be, or the class won’t be, or the students won’t have any…FUN. Knowing play matters and making play matter are different things. Sometimes I feel like a play expert. Then again, every time I get ready to teach, I start to worry that I’m not as much fun as I think I am. As a result, I am always challenged to be more playful in my classes, to find more playful ways to teach and to encourage my students to have more fun in their lives and studies.

Sure, I have surrounded myself with playful professors and learned from their techniques. Still, I still find myself stalling when it comes to adding new fun stuff to my class. Lisa addressed many of the reasons why in her post The Wall. Suffice to say, The Wall is a real thing for me and I still cast a jealous eye toward those teachers who can pull off a costume or a regular classroom carnival. As for me, I am always worried that my new play techniques won’t be good enough.

To beat back that worry, I remember: I know how to do this. As someone who has worked in and around faculty development for the better part of my career, I have some good advice to give myself. Here’s a few things I am coaching myself on these days. Maybe they can help you too!

  • Don’t try a million things. Pick one or two new things and them out. If they don’t work, no big deal. You can rely on the tried-and-true stuff to ensure your class is going to be effective.
  • Tell the students what you are doing. Don’t buy the Karate Kid school of training, where your pupils suffer some random stuff until you enlighten them later how your arbitrary lessons were actually teaching a core truth. Just explain your approach at the start: Play is good for you. Play will make you more effective as a student. Play will make you more effective as an employee. Play will make a difference, so we are going to play in this class.
  • Don’t be afraid to be foolish. Your students already expect that you are an expert. You don’t have to prove that. Bring a little vulnerability to the classroom. Your students will forgive you if you try something cool and it doesn’t work.
  • Plan ahead. Play is fun and freeing. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t prepare. In fact, if you try something new, feel free to overprepare. You can always adjust on the fly!
  • Be patient. The classroom isn’t a comedy club. You don’t need immediate feedback. Give your students time to digest and integrate. This play stuff might be new to them. It will take them time to trust it.
  • The research is on your side. This isn’t just something to do for novelty’s sake. The outcomes have been shown. I just need to trust the process.
  • Have fun while you play and teach. If nothing else, it will make you feel better. And that can’t help but make this summer class one worth teaching.

 

 

The Wall

by | May 25, 2021 | Commentary, Resources

credit: https://unsplash.com/@hngstrmby Lisa Forbes

Let’s talk about the wall. Not the Pink Floyd album but the metaphorical wall that represents what stands between us and some type of change. I’m a mental health counselor so this topic could quickly get into talking about our shame and childhood traumas that hold us back and mandate our behavior to this day. Gulp. For the record, I do think those things should be a part of the exploration for each of us but I’ll spare you this time since you probably only came here to read about Pink Floyd.

So, I won’t go psychoanalytic on you but in order to do something new and break out of the status quo we have to figure out what stands in our way. That pesky wall of anti-change factors is to blame. Without identifying what makes up our “walls” and then working to overcome those factors, we likely won’t change. For example, you could really want to be a better friend but until you can figure out what gets in your way of actually being better, it will only be a half-assed aspiration and flimsy promises made to another person. Finding the barriers to the change is where the magic is…that’s just good ol’ advice for anything in life.

But since this is a blog on a website about play in higher education let’s start there. Lecture-based teaching seems to be this bad habit that’s been passed down from generation to generation of academics and we just keep doing it despite how boring and ineffective it is. I’m skeptical of any “tradition” or norm that’s been in existence for centuries and keeps being just “the way we’ve always done it.” Don’t even get me started on my disdain for traditions. 

Despite lecture-based teaching being the primary mode of education for so long, and even more recent literature indicating that lecture actually isn’t the most effective mode of teaching, many faculty are still slow to adopt a more active, engaged, or playful approach. It seems simple to me but I realize there are barriers that influence our way of existing in academia. I think there are some structural reasons for why it is the way it is in academia. It’s this way because it works for certain groups of people. In my heart I don’t think the traditional mode of teaching works for students but I think in a way it works for faculty. I don’t want to lump all faculty into one category or characteristic but I am talking broadly about academia being largely similar across institutions. 

So, let’s look at some of the bricks in the wall…

Safety and Comfort

It really is easier to continue to do what you know than to try new things and to potentially take a risk on something you are not certain about or may require you to give up some control. It may feel safer to continue to teach the way we do when students’ feedback on our teaching is considered in our promotion or merit review. Change is scary, especially when it’s trying something potentially out of your comfort zone. Not to mention, faculty work very hard on their lectures and lesson plans so who is happy about re-doing everything that you’ve worked so hard to construct. But we never learn or grow in our comfort zones so…

There’s Never Any Time!

Many faculty already feel limited in their time and resources so the thought of spending time doing something they don’t necessarily have to do for their job is off-putting to some. When I was a new faculty, I certainly felt the time crunch and as though I was just trying to stay afloat so there wasn’t much space for creative thinking at that time. The amount of roles, activities, committees, etc. that faculty are required to pour time into is a barrier for anything extra. But I’d rather spend extra time or protect my time to work on creative, fun and playful endeavors so to me it’s a choice…You make time for what matters to you.

Habit and Modeling

I think we can become creatures of habit in a sense where rigid lecture is modeled to us so it’s what we know and so when we’re finally faculty, we end up doing it that way too. Then our students see us teach in that way and then if they enter a teaching position, then it gets mindlessly passed down from generation to generation of academics. But if we recall boring lectures from our training days, we can admit we never learned very well that way so we need to be mindful about our approach to try something new.

Systems of Academia

As faculty, we are told to be innovative and creative and yet we are not rewarded for those things. Promotion and merit reviews tend to value quantity over quality. How many committees are you on? How many publications did you get? How many classes did you teach? How many students did you advise? These evaluation measures do not reward or support innovation, change, or reflective practice. How can we value a more playful, flexible, innovative approach if we don’t allow space for tinkering or failure? Sometimes the structure of higher ed and the policies we must navigate around limit our ability for excellence in teaching. To this I say: How can I break the rules without breaking the game?

Social Scripts of Play in Adulthood

There is a bias in adulthood and in academia that says seriousness equates to rigor and so anything that’s playful is often considered trivial or “soft” thus not holding students to high standards. This issue deserves much more space than I have given it here but the bottom line is, how we have been socialized to believe that play is something done by kids and not serious adults, is problematic. It’s problematic for our health and well-being and it’s problematic for providing adequate space and legitimacy for faculty to break out of the serious mold. We must resist societal messages that mandate people to one way of thinking and behaving. It’s a trap. It’s mind control. 

Deadpan Perception

The systems of academia as well as the social scripts of play in adulthood make it that a playful approach isn’t always taken seriously. This can lead to faculty feeling as though they need to fit the mold of seriousness. So, in the quest to be taken seriously, respected, and seen as a rigorous academic, we avoid playfulness like the plague. It’s fear-based mostly. But, like Will Smith says in After Earth: “danger is very real, but fear is a choice.” I truly don’t believe being playful is something that will get us fired. It might make some “deadpans” (as Alison James and Chrissi Nerantzi say) view you differently but in the end, whose approval do you really need? If you didn’t get your parent’s approval when you were little, you will be more likely to need the approval of other people as an adult. Okay, I promised I wouldn’t go all counselor on you but I just couldn’t help myself there. But there comes a point where we have to stop worrying about external perception and just follow our instinct and passions. If you limit your playfulness because you fear how you will be perceived, I dare you to try out counseling to work through that unmet need. 

So, there you have it. That pesky wall isn’t so scary. I like to view the wall prohibiting playfulness as a game to win. The reward? Playfulness! Joy! Fun! Career longevity, because without play, I’m toast. 

Lecture Breakers

by | May 18, 2021 | Resources

If you have not heard of Barbi Honeycutt’s Lecture Breakers Podcast, you are missing out. Dedicated to providing resoures to profs ready to break away from the iron grip of the lecture, her posts and podcasts manage to balance high quyality content with an entertaining style. Check it out and be sure to sign up for her updates.

This week, David and Lisa had the chance to talk abvout play and professoring. You can listen to the podcast  here.

 

De-Educating Play

by | May 17, 2021 | Commentary

by David Thomas 

I’ve changed my mind about what it really means to be a professor at play.  It starts with how natural it is to play, travels through higher education’s participation in the de-education of play and ends up with me seeing a new mission in my teaching.

Let me start at the beginning.

When we are kids, we don’t need any coaching to play. Instead, life as a kid is a constant search for play.  The usual limits on kids’ play includes sleep and just as often adults. The grown-ups always stand at the ready to tell kids to stop goofing around and pay attention, to stop wiggling and eat their dinner, to cut the chatter and pay attention. Kids play. Adult modulate play.

And while there is a clear benefit to teaching kids to do things beyond play, somewhere along the way it gets out of control and we grow up thinking of play as childlike.  Play is one thing. Life is another. And that’s a tragedy, as the late, great Bernie Dekoven wrote in his book, A Playful Path:

“We have been taught to distrust play. Worse, we have been taught that we are not and should not be playful.  We have been taught that play is childish, immature, destructive. Taught by people who have themselves lost the path, who were themselves taught by people who believed that fun was, can you believe this: sinful. Taught by people who have inherited a broken culture where common sense has been replaced by common senselessness. Taught that if we work hard enough and long enough and live a life that is dull enough, we will be rewarded – when fun is the reward.” 

I was thinking about this turn away from play while listening to a panel that included Peter Gray  and Stewart Brown. They talked a lot about the benefits of play and touched on how education was letting us down.

What I heard was a clarion call for all professors at play. For me. 

I was thinking. “Where do we learn to set-aside playfulness?” While it certainly happens over a long period of time through a large number of cultural forces, I can’t help but see that higher education has mastered the removal of play and the insertion of a dour seriousness. Going to college is a rite of passage for many, and the passage is from the world of children to the world of adults. That’s a noble purpose. But it comes at a cost. We’ve been party to the great de-education of humans away from play. Admit it. We’ve seen It happen right in front of our eyes.

It wasn’t on purpose, and we have not all participated in that de-education to the same degree.  But you know what I am talking about. The rhetoric of higher education is critical thinking, rational debate, graded performance and good jobs. Sure, we allow a little room for fun—a sorority here, a fraternity there. But in the classroom, we get down to business, the serious business of teaching everything except how to play.

I am almost ashamed to admit that this realization just occurred to me. Then again, it’s a subtilty easy to miss. We have a status quo that hides play and we get used to not thinking about it. Play is a left turn in a world that always is asking us to turn right.

But when I think about my own journey as a playful professor, I see how I missed this turn. When I first walked into the classroom many years ago, I was afraid of being called out as a fraud. So, I wore a tie and was more serious that a doctor giving a patient a terminal illness diagnosis. As I found some comfort in my own teaching skin, I loosened up and would crack jokes. I learned along the way this was a called social presence and it was a good thing for your teaching.  I coasted along on instructionally clear outcomes and assessments and my humorous style for years. When Lisa and I formed Professor at Play, I started to think more intentionally about how to use play to engage students in learning and re-engage myself into teaching. I thought I’d reached the pinnacle of play at the university.

Then, just the other day, I realized I was only halfway there. Here’s what I have decided:

My true mission as a teacher is to help facilitate a certain kind of transformation in the lives of my students we call education. I want to show them new things, help them think about new things and guide them to develop habits of thinking in new ways. Sure, my discipline is architecture and what I teach is a bit bounded by that. But really, my goal is broader than the specific design objectives of my courses in the past. Now, as someone who believes in the power of play inside and outside of the classroom, I need to bring that into what I teach, and not just how I teach.

 As I work on the course I am set to teach this summer, I know I have all the academic bona fides to cover the topics in the course I have designed. But now I must challenge myself to start teaching my students how to unlearn being no fun. I’ve always had a purpose in my teaching. But now I have a mission. To help my students learn how to play again. That might be the most important gift I can give my students—the re-education of play.

I’m excited to realize this, but also a little scared. It sounds like hard work. It sounds risky. I am not even sure my students wont balk at the thought that they can play AND learn. But I have seen enough evidence and have enough support that I know it will be OK. If nothing else, this ought to be fun!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Watchmaker of Lilles

by | Apr 29, 2021 | Resources

The Watchmaker of Lilles

The foundation of unlocking play in teaching starts with having a playful soul. It’s not enough to deploy techniques, to gamifiy your course or dress up in costumes if you don’t start with a playful pose.

It’s common sense. But we often miss this fact in the race to restructure our classes as playgrounds.

To help get you thinking about your playful pose as a professor, I put together a short parable and a technique to help. Give it a try. And let me know what you think!

 

Download: The Watchmaker of Lilles

 

Image credit: https://unsplash.com/@numericcitizen

#WePlayChat

by | Feb 25, 2021 | Uncategorized

Precursors to a Playful Pedagogy

by | Feb 9, 2021 | Resources

by Lisa Forbes

Fred Hanna was a faculty member who trained me in my masters and doctoral work. This man was playful in his own way. He had a self-deprecating humor and never took himself too seriously. One time, I accidentally dropped some popcorn on the floor in the middle of class and mid-lecture, he bent down, picked the popcorn off of the floor and ate it as if it was a socially acceptable thing to do in front of 20 students.. Then he made a joke about me not feeding the animals during class.

From then on, I always made sure to pack popcorn in my bag to see if he would do it again and again. 

Fred is also an extraordinary therapist who has loads of experience working with challenging clients. He’s worked with some of the hardest, most “resistant” clients and seemed to be able to respectfully break down their walls to create change in teens that most everyone else had written off. 

Throughout my studies, Fred taught me his Precursors of Change model that he used to assess clients to understand their readiness for change. The precursors are seven prerequisites needed for change to occur. The more precursors the client demonstrates, the more likely they will be to change. Part of the therapist’s job is to assess clients to determine which precursors might need some attention. Once the deficient precursors are addressed, the client’s change process becomes more open and fluid. 

The precursors model was established for working therapeutically with clients in a mental health setting but I think it applies to teaching too. I think there are people in any setting or discipline that are “resistant” or less likely to change and this precursors model provides some insight into expediting the change process.

Hanna’s therapeutic precursors to change are:

  1. A sense of necessity for change: recognized urgency for the importance for change to take place and that current conditions are not satisfactory.
  2. A willingness or readiness to experience anxiety: a willingness to experience and surrender to anxiety, difficulty, and discomfort that comes with change.
  3. Awareness of the problem: An awareness of the areas that are in need of change. Knowing that a problem exists and having a good sense of what that problem or issue is. 
  4. Confronting the problem: a steady and deliberate willingness to confront the problem in order to change despite the tendency to avoid or escape it. 
  5. Effort or will toward change: an effort or deliberate exertion of energy or resources used to solve the problem. It also involves a commitment and decision to change.
  6. Hope for change: having hope or an expectation that you can change. Hope sees the possibility of change, and motivates a person, knowing that change can be accomplished. 
  7. Social support for change: Having social support and access to relationships that are dedicated to the well-being of the person. Such relationships make the change process more tolerable and can inspire each of the previous precursors. 

I wonder if these same precursors can shed some insight on how faculty can demonstrate change and movement toward being more playful and utilizing play in their teaching. Using Hanna’s framework, I have adapted the therapeutic precursors for faculty attempting to change their teaching approach to include more of a playful pedagogy. Go ahead, take the self-assessment and see what precursors you might need to increase to advance in your journey to play in higher education!

For more information on the Precursors to a Playful Pedagogy – Self Assessment tool Lisa has developed, contact her directly via our About Page.

Photo by Mockup Graphics on Unsplash

Gameful Learning

by | Feb 1, 2021 | Resources

Whether you call it “gamification”, game-based learning or something else, there’s an attraction to using playful pedogogies. University of Michigan calls it “gameful learning” and in this video Dr. Mika LaVaque-Mant, Arthur F. Thurnau Professor & Director of the LSA Honors Program, Dr. Benjamin Plummer, Learning Experience Designer at the Stephen M. Ross School of Business talk about their process and outcomes.

Check out thier presentation: