Reacting to Reacting: Selfish Reasons to Become a Gamemaster

Dice, or, as I like to call them, "contingency enhancers." 

There are some great reasons to teach a Reacting to the Past class. Many are pedagogical-- it awakens students' interests, forces them to exercise unfamiliar skills, and introduces the idea of contingency-- that things could have turned out differently than they did. 

However, there are also a few purely selfish reasons you should consider it. I recently had the opportunity to reflect on these in an effort to encourage interest in an RTTP workshop in our department, so I'll share a few of my favorites: 

1. It is an instructor-friendly way to teach a stand-alone for the first time. You have some built-in scheduling provided; rather than crafting daily plans for an entire semester, your syllabus only has to figure out how to weave together the schedules for the games you've chosen with preparation, reflection, etcetera. This can still be challenging, no question-- but sometimes, a few limits on what you have to fit into a semester can help you prioritize what's remaining, or provide a framework into which you can slot other things in. 

2. It allows you to say while on the job market or applying for teaching-related awards, etc, that you have experimented with innovative pedagogies. Even if you conclude that you don't like the system, you'll come out the other side with plenty of ideas about what sorts of things worked and which didn't-- ideas which will help to inform a teaching philosophy.

3. It develops your teaching abilities in unexpected ways. One example: I became much more comfortable with periodic silences in the classroom. One of the hardest things to learn about teaching is to be comfortable with silence as you wait for student responses to a question or discussion topic. Instructors during an RTTP game often sit in the back of the room as class is run by a student playing the role of an authority. You'll have ample time to develop a relationship with waiting patiently for students to find their own answers. Later, in a more conventionally organized class, I received positive feedback from an observer on my willingness to let silence happen in the classroom. 

If you've used or played Reacting games in your courses, what did you learn from it? If not, what questions do you have about ways it can benefit you personally?

Related Links: 

An explanation of the Reacting to the Past concept, from the Reacting Consortium. 

A few U of I folks (including myself and some of my students) discussing Reacting in a brief video. 

Plug and Play: My Approach to the Lesson Plan

Here is a confession from me: I am repeatedly skeptical of things and then, eventually, adopt them wholeheartedly. Here is a partial list:

• Asparagus
• Exercise
• Southwest Airlines
• Budgeting
• Casual gaming
• Savings accounts
• E-books
• Looking at the weather before you leave the house
• Bran
• Going for walks
• Rubrics (more on this another day)

So it should come as no surprise that I have come to appreciate the wonders of the lesson plan. Because there’s a variety of approaches to lesson planning, I had trouble figuring out what the point was in my early days of teaching, especially while TAing, in which many of the decisions about readings and course structure have already been made for you. So although I dabbled in the creation of lesson plans while I was a teaching assistant, they were generally brief lists of questions and activities scribbled on a piece of scrap paper on the way into my section. We read the reading; now let’s talk about it! Simple.

The year I taught two Reacting to the Past courses was similar in some ways— the structure of the games is either planned for you in the book or run by the students, so there are comparatively few days for which a lesson plan is useful. It wasn’t until my Fiction and the Historical Imagination course that I became infatuated with the lesson plan, and although I fell off the wagon a few times as the semester stretched on, I used a particular strategy to great effect. 

Here’s an example of a week of lesson plans from the middle of this course:

Let's take a walk through their components.

Up top: the week and day, to stay on track. Then, the purpose: what is the goal of the day? I’ll admit to being less than enamored with too much agonizing over long lists of objectives, but I find it really useful to have a straightforward statement of what we should be aiming for by the end of the period.

Then, a time breakdown of each step, beginning always with five minutes at beginning and end for hellos, roll, housekeeping, etcetera. This is great for reminding you that in fact, a fifty minute class often ends up being much less because of the small tasks that have to be done before one can start the film, begin the quizzes, or instigate group discussion. Likewise, it encourages you to think about the real factors that may delay your plans. If you are going from a lecture to assigned groups, how long will it take the class to move from A to B? If you allow for that in your plan you’ll save yourself some grief.

As I lay out each segment of class, I like to include both the length of time allotted to each and the time of day it should be at the beginning and end of that segment. I don’t follow this exactly while in class, of course— there are a million reasons why you might choose to follow a rabbit trail of discussion or allow a bit of time to review a reading that will throw you off of this path. But including both allows you the flexibility to go off path and then to see exactly how far off you are and make quick decisions about how to handle it.

As I mentioned above, I always end with at least five minutes for reminders and other housekeeping. This is useful to both students and instructor because it allows for checking in about ongoing or upcoming assignments; it also encourages you to end class on time, which I consider a mark of respect and professionalism.

Perhaps the most important thing about the lesson plan is that I print the plans for the week — even if unfinished— at the beginning of the week and carry them around. Then as I am leading class, working on other things, or reviewing course readings, I can write in changes or additions to future days. I also sometimes annotate them while class is ongoing, noting how I diverged from the plan. I still have a stack of lesson plans from last semester; I plan at some point to update the files using my annotations to use again for future courses.

Do you lesson plan? What things do you include or leave out?

Related links:

Some other approaches to lesson planning at The Chronicle of Higher Education and Algonquin College.

If you're interested in learning outcomes and objectives, check out the National Institute for Learning Outcomes Assessment.