ETHOS • FALL 2018
Just as trends in fashion brighten the most alluring of sidewalk cafes, the trend of gamifying learning shines light on the pedagogical traits that have helped me to engage students for decades. Classroom instruction cannot be about delivering content, rather, it must focus on creating classroom experiences that immerse students in authentic and open-ended situations based on real world problems, ones that require strong foundational knowledge, research skills, and above all the motivation to dig deeper by asking more questions.
The 10th Grade Truman Trial; when history doesn’t get old and work becomes play! by David Nelson, ACS Athens Academy Social Studies Faculty; Coordinator of Professional Development and Growth
I
t’s like thinking about the difference between work and play —when the distinction becomes more and more subtle, we know we’re in the right profession. When students think about school and our classes in the same way, we know that we’ve been successful as educators. All of my career I’ve sought ways to engage students in their learning, not in a leisurely sense but in an immersive one in which the school is not about work but about experiences. One of the latest trends in education is “gamification”: the process of integrating game-like features into student instruction to increase motivation and engage learners. For me, experiential learning is far from trendy and has been one of my major goals throughout my nearly thirty years of teaching Social Studies.
In the American Studies grade 10 “Combo”, we’ve created many opportunities to obtain this lofty goal, helping students to blur the distinction between school-work and play. Through classroom simulations, students become the learning, seeing the connections first hand while drawing their own relationship with the material. Simulations of the US Government, Supreme Court, or Presidential elections give international students a taste of an otherwise foreign palate, while simulations of the Henry Ford Assembly Line, the 1920s stock market crash, or of Cold War conflicts encourage students to contextualize the significance of the time period they are studying. Beyond simulations, students elucidate their learning in numerous ways: classroom debates, readers theater, poetry slams, Jenga tournaments, and Socratic Seminars, to name a few. Among these continually expanding pedagogical features of my classrooms, one of the most enduring is the 10th Grade Truman Trial. For the past seventeen years, this example of gamifying the instruction of history has helped to motivate countless students to want to learn more. With the Truman Trial, history doesn’t get old because the nature of defining the “problem” continually changes. Let me explain... each year our students place President Harry S. Truman on trial for “crimes against humanity”; however, the situation is never the same. For example by altering the date of when the trial takes place, we change the evidence that students are able to utilize as they can only use historical knowledge that existed prior to that date -- imagine examining the morality of dropping the atomic bombs on Japan to end World War II though a historical lense of 1946 vs one of 1962. As a class we are able to play with so many variables as students are exposed to new witnesses or uncover ever-expanding historical sources. The month long preparation of the two-day trial places students in the driver’s seat, as they take on the role of legal counsel and collaboratively create a unique case that will be judged by a jury of their peers. In other words, the outcome is far from pre-determined and the students largely create that outcome based on the quality of the work that they do. It’s that not so quiet sense of competition and public “performance” that ups the ante as one Combo class of students is motivated to out maneuver the other, or they are motivated to expand what had been done in previous years. For several days early in the preparation process, students become glued to the testimonies of previous years, as they view the Truman Trial