An Idea for Introducing Debate in EFL Classes

Debate in EFL has a heavy image. Partly it is the result of formal debating. Politicians and bureaucrats often love the idea, but then they would, wouldn’t they? Teachers are wary of it: most think it is too much trouble for too little benefit. There is always reams of text to get through, dozens of expressions to teach, and long…agonizing…blocks…of silence that need to be waded through. And students, well, they don’t really have any idea about what good thinking is, why it is important, how it can help them, and how an activity like debating can be a way to learn it. In summary, almost nobody is screaming for debate. And yet it seems clear that the skills involved in debate are critical for learning, critical for learning success, and (in my humble opinion) a possible solution for the tragedy now occurring in high level (進学校) English classes.

Teaching debate is teaching thinking. In debating, we verbalize ideas, explain them, and assess them. To debate, you must have ideas about something. You must explain your ideas in a persuasive manner. And you must find and offer support for your ideas. You do this by building up your ideas (making them more persuasive and providing more powerful support), while looking for possible weaknesses in other arguments or ideas. The key words, from Bloom’s taxonomy, are Understanding, Analyzing, and Evaluating. In doing debate, you train yourself in these critical skills. This can help you in thinking, writing, giving presentations, and making decisions. That’s a lot of benefit from one activity! In learning how to debate, these skills are made visible. The process is visible. It can be taught. It can be seen, discussed, and evaluated in a social setting.

So there are good reasons for doing debate. But can it be enjoyable? Many people would say yes. If we believe what game designer Raph Koster says, “Fun is just another word for learning,” there is no reason why it shouldn’t be.

Below is an activity I tried recently as an entry-level activity to introduce debating. The purpose of this activity is to have students generate arguments, evaluate their arguments, and think about ways that they could make them stronger with support. The activity is based on pictures so we can accommodate different levels of proficiency and don’t need to spend time explaining language to students. The goal is for them to get involved in the process as quickly and completely as possible. It is and introduction to debate. And so the next step is to use their performance to see what their needs are and make decisions on subsequent activities and teaching. One of the eventual goals of the course is to have a full formal debate, but first we must focus on the thinking process.

lightbulb

Day One

Step 1 Look at the pictures. Below are some pictures. In pairs try to answer two questions, using just information you can see in the pictures. Do not use any reference materials (dictionaries, websites, etc.). Just look at the pictures and answer the two questions. Try to generate as many possible reasons for your answers based only on what you see in the pictures.

  1. When do you think these pictures were made?

  2. Where do you think these pictures were made?

2000FlyThru

2000HorseCuriosity

2000Learning

2000VidConf

 

Step 2. Look at your answers to the questions. Look at your reasons. Look again at the pictures and try to generate more possible reasons. Then rank your reasons according to how strong you think they are. Choose the two reasons you think “prove” your opinion best. You can use the template at Exploratree to map out your ideas and explore them.

Step 3. Write out your answers to the two questions as two paragraphs. In each paragraph, carefully explain the two reasons you have for your answer.

Step 4. Share your ideas with a new partner and then with a small group. Listen carefully to the ideas of the other students.

Day Two

Step 5. In small groups, review the questions, the answers,  and the reasons you gave last time. Look at the reasons again carefully. They are opinions you have based on things you see in the pictures. Could you do any research to support your opinions? Think about what research you could do. What would provide “proof” for your opinions? Check around on the web or in reference books to find facts that support your opinions. Write these in the Supporting Evidence section of the graphic organizer.

Step 6. Share your views again in small groups. Listen carefully to any opinions that are different from your own. Write them down in the Conflicting Views section of the graphic organizer. [Teachers: you may need to shuffle groups here. It is important that each group contains some different opinions].

Step 7. Assess the different opinions the emerged from your group. Decide which ones you think are “correct.”

Step 8. Rank what you think are the most powerful arguments that emerged during this activity.

Step 8. [The teacher leads a discussion on the process the students have just undertaken. What they have just done is very similar to a debate: they have taken a stance, constructed arguments, and contrasted them with other arguments].

Step 9. [Optional: the teacher talks a little about the pictures. They were drawn by a man imagining the future. It is quite amazing that he got a lot right! In the pictures, he corrected predicted 1, a drive-thru, 2, a petting zoo, 3, e-learning, and 4, video conferencing. The power of human imagination is strong.]

 

 

 

 

 

By the way, the images were drawn by Jean Marc Cote between 1899 and 1910 in France. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/En_L%27An_2000

The images are available from many sources on the internet. One interesting source is the Paleofuture blog: http://www.paleofuture.com/blog/2007/9/10/french-prints-show-the-year-2000-1910.html

EFL Gamification 9: Jr. and Sr. High

trainwreckfrag

In August, I gave–or I should say attempted to give–a presentation titled Gamification and High School EFL. Things did not go well. I tried to condense a previous 3-hr. workshop into an informative and thought-provoking 30-minute presentation. That was problem No. 1. But it wasn’t the only problem.

The day before, a keynote speaker named Kishimoto Yoichiro had talked about gamifying his university class on game design. It was very similar to what Lee Sheldon (another game designer teaching another game design course at a university in the US) had done. You can see my mini-review of Mr. Sheldon’s book, The Multiplayer Classroom, at this page. I enjoyed the presentation. Mr. Kishimoto was a thoughtful presenter and explained his rationale nicely and walked us through his syllabus carefully, explaining the assignments and the interactions. Having read Mr. Sheldon’s book, I understood what he was trying to show and say. But I don’t think many people listening felt that what he said had any relevance to their own classes;  I don’t think many people left with a clear idea of what gamification is and how they could put it to work in their own classes. When I started my presentation the next day, I asked the participants if they had been at the gamification plenary the day before and if they now understood what gamification is. Most of them had: “Um…not really,” was the hesitant reply.

I had hoped to drag them into the light in my 30 minutes. But in the end, speaking too quickly and working on an unfamiliar computer and with one of my pair of two short videos refusing to play, I realized that I had failed. I think I managed to explain gamification fairly well. I think I managed to communicate what intrinsic motivation is and why it is important. I think I even got everyone to understand why narrative is so important. But what most certainly did not happen was enlightenment. Participants did not leave with any sense other than that gamification is a quirky, fringe movement, kind of like cosplay, that some people are doing, but definitely isn’t for everyone.

I was angry that I wasn’t able to show my second video. There was a contrast I wanted to show between two classroom scenes,  a before and after a-ha moment I wanted to induce. At the time, I felt like I had brought them to the cusp of understanding, but lacking an essential component, the whole idea had collapsed. Thinking about it later, though, I realized that the stark truth is that my second video probably wouldn’t have made much difference. The stark truth is that real gamification–what I’ve been calling gameful design–requires a much better understanding and acceptance of the role of formative feedback, and the role of engagement (fun) and involvement (meaningfulness). The stark truth is that a form of gamification already exists in schools. Yup, you heard that right. It’s the way things are: students get points of performing actions. What teachers need to learn is not actually what gamification is, but rather what is the difference between bad gamification  and good gamification. What Mr. Sheldon and Mr. Kishimoto are doing is not replicable in most high school classrooms, not bymost teachers or most normal human beings. That’s not only because it is uber-geeky and requires intimate familiarity with the culture of games (as it most certainly does!), but because those two teachers were willing to throw out the prevailing system of point-giving after teaching and testing, and replace it with a feedback system based on earned points for everything (user experience points). And they were not shy about having learners do unconventionally fun things in the classroom, sometimes things which mimicked game elements (quests, boss fights, zones), and sometimes quirky, fun things for no other reason than because they are fun (everyone wear yellow on project yellow day).

Knowing what I know about high school EFL in Japan–the primacy of the textbook, the tyranny of entrance exams, the necessity of loose coordination of syllabuses between teachers due to sharing of exams while accommodating different  approaches,  my advice for most high school teachers is instead of gamification, think about introducing more gameful design elements into your classes.

gamefuldesigndef

Some of the features of gameful design will work so long as you concentrate your efforts on two things: formative feedback and fun. You must have both of these. If you have only formative assessment, you risk being joyless (though certainly you will still be pedagogically effective). If you have only the narrative/fun, you risk being delightfully ineffective and eventually being seen as old hat and dull. I should add at this point that in my observation, most classes now provide neither narrative nor effective formative feedback. And if you are at all unsure why, you probably have never experienced an English class at a Japanese high school and you need to read up on formative feedback (start here). The hardest thing for most people to understand is how narrative can be used. Simply put, narrative  is a story structure that can be used to add a meaningful context for activities. Activities under a selected narrative assume part of their meaning from the story.  If a Hunger Games narrative, or a Harry Potter narrative, or a Buffy the Vampire Slayer narrative is applied to a series of activities, these activities become embedded in a system in which the heroes, villains, and general story organization and progression are already familiar.

trainbridge

So can any of this be useful to high school teachers? Absolutely. And below I am going to offer some things that can be tried in almost any class and that fit with the gameful design approach. Notice how each one has a narrative element (based on a story), has a play element (competition here, collecting or challenging), and a formative feedback element (students learn right away what to do and how to do it, since it impacts the ongoing play). These are only a few examples, but I think you’ll get the point. All aboard!

General Organizing Narrative Approaches

The Harry Potter Approach: Organize your class into three groups to match the houses in the Harry Potter series: Gryffindor, Ravenclaw, and Hufflepuff (leaving  Slytherin out). The three houses are told that they will compete for the house cup throughout the year. Points will be awarded for in-class effort, assignment, quiz and test performance, etc. Points may also be taken for behavior infractions. Different parts of the syllabus can be re-named according to various classes held at Hogwarts: potions (grammar), herbology (vocabulary), charms (speaking), and defense against the dark arts (writing). Just about anything you can think of doing in or with your class can be re-imagined as something from the Potter series. And the pull of Potter on HS students is strong. This past summer saw a Harry Potter exhibition in Tokyo (with 8000 yen souvenir wands!) and next year sees the opening of a Harry Potter theme park in Osaka.

For Homework or Discipline

The Homework Tessarae: If your high school is like my daughter’s, you have trouble getting students to do homework. Well, in addition to connecting homework to classroom lessons (make sure HW content is “necessary” in the subsequent lesson), try the Hunger Games Tessarae. Tessarae is a system in the book/movie where characters can get more food for their families if they add their name to the Hunger Games lottery (reaping). In the book, adding your name to the lottery increases your chances of being chosen for the games (and probably dying), but we can we can put a nicer spin on this by saying that if you COMPLETE your homework on time and to a certain standard, your name gets added into a pot for a class lottery with a good nice prize. This idea is similar to the speed camera lottery idea tried successfully in Europe. If you do an exceptional job, you can get your name added even more times! This gives the teacher an easy way to acknowledge and reward effort. For classes using a Harry Potter narrative, this could be a Goblet of Fire.

The Secret Student: This idea, via Dylan Wiliam, requires that you select and monitor one student each day–secretly. At the end of the day, if the student’s behavior has be sufficiently positive, the student is identified to the class and a point is added toward a future reward prize (a class trip, a class party, a special sweet, etc.). If the secret student’s behavior has not been good (the student has been uncooperative, disruptive, or failed to speak only in English during the pair work activities, etc.), then the class is informed that they didn’t earn a point for the day. The name of the unsuccessful secret student is NOT revealed. For classes using a Harry Potter narrative, this could be used just as it is, with the addition of house points also being given or taken away.

For Projects

From Project to Game (extended from an idea by Nicola Whitton in Using Games to Enhance Learning and Teaching): Ask students to design and make an A-Z school or community introduction booklet. Each pair of students is assigned a different letter of the alphabet and a different topic (a=art class, b=basketball club, etc.). Their task is to take a picture and write a short description introducing that thing. The goal of the project is to make a student-produced photo introduction to the school or community. For the game part, the teacher is assigned the letter X. The teacher makes a cryptic photo card explaining that the X marks the location of some kind of treasure or treasure map or clue to the location of some treasure that students have to puzzle out. Over the next few days/weeks, the students are engaged in solving clues or riddles to find the treasure. See the post on ARGs if you would like to know more about this type of activity.

That’s it for now. I hope to update this list in the future, but I think there is enough here to help you understand what gamification–or rather gameful design–can do for you and how it can do so.

This post is part of a series on gamification:

  1. Intrinsic and Extrinsic Rewards
  2. Triggers, Ability, and Motivation
  3. Mechanics
  4. The Downside and How to Avoid It
  5. The Whole Hog?
  6. ARGs
  7. Required Reading
  8. HabitRPG and Other Web-based Systems

 

First Image: Fagment from Train Wreck, 1922. Source: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/31/Train_Wreck_1922.jpg

Second Image: Fragment from Train on a Big Bridge. Source: https://ja.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E3%83%95%E3%82%A1%E3%82%A4%E3%83%AB:KSR_Train_on_a_big_bridge_05-02-12_71.jpeg

 

EFL Gamification 8: HabitRPG and Other Web-based Services

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Gameful design is something that is perhaps better learned from experience than from PPT slides or blog posts. When we start an explanation with motivation (as I did here) or habits (as I did here), it is hard to understand what gameful design should “look like” when it is deployed. One thing in particular, the use of narrative, needs to be seen to be understood. In another earlier post (here), I described what was for me a kind of epiphenal moment in my quest to understand how gameful learning  can help with motivation and learning. It came when I was reading Jane McGonigal’s book. After I read that, I felt like I finally had a workable example of the power of narrative in creating a game from something else entirely. I called the post Mechanics because for me the process of laying a narrative onto a something that would become a game equaled the process of “gamification.” Points and badges are often thought of as the mechanics of gamification, but if we think about making something more gamelike–that is playful, meaningful, delightful–then points and badges are really part of the  details that need to be worked out later. It is the narrative structure, in combination with a workable feedback system (here’s where your points and badges come in) that makes the experience meaningfully gamelike.

In order to see this idea of applying a narrative onto something different, I offer for your consideration today a few examples. You can try them out with your friends or family or by yourself to see how they feel. Of course, it is not the same as laying a narrative on top of an EFL class, but you’ll get an idea of what it is like to work toward your goals within the details of a story. All of these sites require registration and regular participation, so make sure you have the time and the stomach for a month of “play.” And notice first of all how each of these sites works on the same basic idea–nudging you to complete YOUR goals.

HabitRPG is a site to help you to establish positive habits for life, for work, and for study. It’s really a flexible task and time management tool that has a gamelike design. You use the system by deciding your daily routines and one-time to-dos. You also set your rewards and monitor your habits. It sounds a little confusing, but it is actually a fairly easy interface. The system is incredibly flexible and could be used as easily with training learning strategies as with developing good diet routines. Here is a blog article by Nik Peachey detailing how to use it. It includes his assessment of the tool.

Similar to HabitRPG but with more of a focus on healthy eating and living is Health Month. It uses a simple, friendly user interface at which you play turns (set goals and assess yourself). They also nudge you regularly with e-mail messages. It’s a nice system that works on a monthly basis; but it’s not really focused on study goals, and not really flexible beyond its health and lifestyle focus. Within those areas, however, it is quite a nice experience. I tried it to help me diet and reduce my internet time.

For more of a fitness emphasis, try Fitocracy. Its purpose is fitness motivation and it uses a combination of awareness-raising, goal-setting, habit-forming, and social media to get you to understand fitness better, plan your own fitness routines, and network or challenge other Fitocraccy players. It works for all levels of fitness they say, but unless you are fairly familiar with some exercises and terminology, you may find it a little difficult to understand what you should do. Plus the system is quite large with many functions. I found it a little  hard just to get orientated. But if you are serious about fitness, you will probably find this site meets your needs.

Nextup is Chore Wars. Chore Wars is designed for families or couples or any people  living together who find it hard to get the everyday chores of cooking and cleaning done regularly. The solution? Gamification. Each person chooses his/her chores and competes with others in completing more of them more efficiently. The narrative, as the name suggests is a World of Warcraft / Dungeons and Dragons world of adventures (chores) and quests (chores again). As you complete chores, your elf or wizard or dwarf earns XPs (experience points). If you are really using the system well,  you can introduce your own creatively-named rewards into the play.

But let’s not forget the world of education. World of Classcraft is a site offering the service of listing and tracking your class within a World of Warcraft / Dungeons and Dragons theme. According to their website, they are “an educational augmented-reality multiplayer role-playing game.” You really have to be familiar with the play and progression in World of Warcraft to understand what you have to do here. For that reason alone, it may be a little daunting. Recently, they tried (unsuccessfully) gain funding for a free web-based version of the game. If you just want to check it out, there is a nice video at the site showing how a teacher (actually the game developer) uses it in his physics classes.

And finally, in one of the more unusual (and looser) applications of gamification for learning, there is the Teacher Development game. It is a loose collection of online videos and tutorials showing how to teach EFL better. You can find it here.

And that’s it. If you really want to understand gamified learning, trying out any one of these sites can help you learn a little. As you play, however, keep thinking about what works and doesn’t work for you. Is the system accessible? What is the narrative? Does it make any difference? And finally, most importantly: Does the system make it easy reach your goals? How exactly does it do this?

This post is just one of a series of posts on gamification. The others are here:

  1. Intrinsic and Extrinsic Rewards
  2. Triggers, Ability, and Motivation
  3. Mechanics
  4. The Downside and How to Avoid It
  5. The Whole Hog?
  6. ARGs
  7. Required Reading

 

Image fragment from Les Portes by Paul Evans http://unsplash.s3.amazonaws.com/batch%208/les-portes.jpg