Building an engaged community in the classroom can be challenging for teachers, especially in our post-pandemic world. That’s where education professor Brian Girard hopes to make change — with help from games.
Using gaming principles in the classroom isn’t new, but Girard’s approach to it is. It’s not about playing games, in the traditional sense, in the classroom, but instead looking at how teachers can incorporate game-like elements (think simulations, stock market investment competitions, and Model United Nations) into their instructional strategies to enhance students’ motivation to learn.
Girard, professor of secondary education and chair of educational administration and secondary education, is the winner of this year’s Gitenstein-Hart Sabbatical Prize. His sabbatical game plan is to investigate the concept of game-like learning within secondary history classrooms as a way for teachers to facilitate deeper engagement with content in the curriculum.
That is, rather than students playing a game for extra credit or a prize, the reward comes from doing the learning activity itself.
“There are lessons to be learned from game design principles,” Girard explains. “Game designers, like teachers, try to craft experiences that sustain human attention — a notoriously fickle thing.”
Intrinsic motivation and engagement, he argues, come from a student’s agency and ability to affect the outcome of an activity like a simulation or role-play. In a simulation like Model UN, for example, students research and role-play individual roles that interact with each other and lead to an open-ended outcome like drafting and passing a resolution. A student’s choices and performance during the simulation can directly affect its outcome, which shows how similar scenarios can play out in real life.
Through interviews and classroom observations, Girard will investigate how teachers — specifically social studies teachers — use these game-like elements to foster student interaction that develops content knowledge and skills. Girard’s research will contribute to the development of educational strategies that prioritize student motivation and the social dynamics of learning while also informing his future work with student teachers at TCNJ and teachers across New Jersey.
“You’re trying to recreate a real-world phenomenon, but one that you don’t know the ending to,” he says. “There are many outcomes I want for students to get out of social studies classrooms, but one is for them to be engaged citizens who feel like they can have an impact on the world.
The Gitenstein-Hart Sabbatical Prize is made possible through the generosity of former TCNJ president R. Barbara Gitenstein and her husband Don Hart.
— Emily W. Dodd ’03