At yesterday’s Horizon Forum meeting at the College of Education and Human Development at the University of Minnesota, Dr. Steve O’Conner, Director of Instructional Services for Owatonna Public Schools, presented an overview of an initiative in a classroom in Washington Elementary School where a fifth grade classroom has gone mostly paperless. Desks are replaced with medicine balls and music stands, and textbooks, papers and pens are replaced with laptop computers. We then connected to the classroom by videoconference, and spoke with the students and their teacher, Matt McCartney.

What do the kids think? They love it!

Jeff Cagle from Owatonna People’s Press joined the conversation in Owatonna, and wrote:

Megan Andrist said she found the laptops helpful because she was able to access a number of kid-friendly Web sites for research.

Cam Muchow enjoyed using technology and adding other elements such as digital photography to his assignments.

By removing desks from the classroom, the students are able to instantly reconfigure their learning and work settings. In theory, the instant physical reorganization and software-enhanced environment allows for more individualized instruction. One kinesiologist at the University of Minnesota wondered if the medicine balls could help reduce the need to medicate children diagnosed with neurobehavioral development disorders (i.e., ADHD). Others saw instant potential in the cost savings that can be realized by eliminating traditional desks. Again, we asked: what do the kids think? They love the medicine balls. Cagle wrote:

Most students, including Brady Steinhorst, enjoyed sitting on the therapy balls.

“Usually when you’re sitting in a chair, you have nothing to do,” he said, “and then you talk to a friend.”

Despite the excitement and hope the classroom is generating, a troubling question looms: What will happen to these kids when they graduate from the 5^th grade and enter a middle school with desks, and where computers and other resources are restricted to tightly-controlled laboratories?

Special thanks goes to Superintendent Dr. Tom Tapper, principal Mary Baier, and Matt McCartney for their collaboration on this event.

Fifth Grade for the 21^st Century

Hosted by Dr. Tom Tapper, Superintendent, Owatonna Public Schools

Thursday, April 24

11:15am – 1:00pm

Conference Room 325, Education Sciences Building (University of Minnesota East Bank)

Dr. Tom Tapper (Superintendent, Owatonna Public Schools), Dr. Steve O’Connor (Director of Instructional Services), Mary Baier (Principal, Washington Elementary School) and Matt McCartney (Teacher, Washington Elementary School) will lead a discussion on their experiences in purposively adopting technologies in Owatonna Public Schools. During this session, Mr. McCartney’s fifth grade class will join us by videoconference for student presentations on how they’re using technology in innovative, Leapfrog-oriented ways that better connect them with their future participation in the workforce.

Lunch and validated parking will be provided. Please RSVP your attendance to Carole MacLean at cmaclean@umn.edu or call 612-625-5060.

an “open source” instructional program that helps teachers teach early reading. Because it’s open source, it represents the collective wisdom of a wide community of teachers and researchers. It’s designed to contain a scope and sequence of activities that can support and supplement a typical “core” or “basal” program.

Tom Hoffman notes that despite free-reading.net’s quiet launch,

this demonstrates that Wireless Generation is making a serious play. It also underscores a good reason why, as Doug Noon points out, the curriculum hews to the post-NCLB status quo on reading pedagogy.

I agree that the research base on the site is perhaps too centered on behaviorist and education psychology tradition. The curricula, however narrow, remains open –and could serve as another signal of a shift in curricula and textbooks toward open formats…

But not just any games. The kinds of games that require some flexibility in problem solving are the ones I am most interested in. By looking at these games we can consider some of the elements that might inform how we engage students in well-designed instruction.

Games have not changed much.

There are some different genres now, and computers take much of the computation out of the complex games that we would have played in small groups. You can now play Risk, Monopoly, D & D, and stat sheet baseball all on the computer.

But what makes games fun are the same some core elements that have always been there.

The reason I have them in this order is that the first games I have seen my toddlers engage in is imaginative play. Is imaginative play a game? The kids take the toys and do what they do. Making sounds and telling us stories about what is happening; they put pillows under the table and make a race car. This is really productive learning. It is modeling and practicing what they see in the world. So perhaps imaginative play is not a game from the perspective of a formal definition, but it is often at the root of games with narratives.

Games with narratives are important for passing on cultural and professional knowledge.

But some games do not always have narratives. Cribbage does not have a narrative, neither does kick ball.

The big idea is that some games have these elements and some do not. But games can be a model for developing culturally valued skills, or for entering worlds of story and preparing for the development of competencies. What would happen if you explained to your kids that chess was a model for practicing battlefield tactics? Games are often representative of some abstracted system. In chess, you don’t have all of the details that make war tedious, like supply lines, morale, weather. But what you do have is a formalized system that necessitates strategy, resource management, and creative tool use. In addition, one must use the imagination to visualize all of the potential moves your opponent might do to counter. This kind of predictive play is the same kind method Einstein used in his thought experiment for Special Relativity.

When we think of this first step, we need to remember that play and games are powerful tools that take the facts, often conveyed in a lecture of from a text, and ask us to interact with them as processes and contexts. This potentially offers opportunities to develop deeper and more flexible knowledge of the system being described, rather than just memorizing it. Science can be taught this way, and so can literature and any other content area that has methods of inquiry. What you are doing is when you create games is the creation of models of the world and then modifying them to explore, fantasize, escape, and maybe try on a new identity.

Einstein used this same tool for imagining special relativity! The point of this taxonomy is not to place value in the sequence, but I have noticed that each one seems to build into the next for adding complexity. Imaginative games seem to come early.

As kids imagine their play, they often begin to take on the roles and identities of who they are imitating. They eventually learn that there are rules that come with roles, i.e., white hat cowboys don’t rustle horses, or the rules are made up for new variations as they play—as in, “No, you can’t do that. You are the baby, I’m the mommy “, or “let’s turn the submarine into a spaceship.”

These possible worlds are powerful.

And as children progress with age, we start to see them playing more formalized games developed in our cultures, like board games, signifying, soccer, kick the can, rapping, and telephone. Games are beginning to gain structure here with rules, and from here they can become somewhat complicated when we add elements that create uncertainty like branching, new rules, and probability. These more advanced games may provide the kid of habits of mind that can deliver the kind of complex problem solving many of today’s careers demand. Life is not always as you would expect. This is what I am hoping we begin to embrace in our lesson designs.

This is where games like D & D and other adventure and role playing games come in. They are built on the idea that given a certain situation, rules and roles will create certain contexts, and there might be a variety of solutions. Oddly enough, games develop this complexity very early on for kids. Just recall Chutes and Ladders®. In it there was a board squares and you moved in the squares in a linear or straightforward process. You probably know that the spinner brings luck in, but what makes the game more than just a horse race is the fact that are rules built into the board too. If you land on a chute, you might be sent back; if you land on a ladder, you might accelerate forward several levels on the path.

The importance of this is that there are many ways through a game. The elements of branching and probability demand this variable experience. When you add other elements like the way Monopoly has squares on the game board where you have to take a card like Chance or Community Cents, or you have to pay rent on some one’s land or hotel, or you decide to buy it, you have to adapt and act.

What this is leading to is games and designing classroom instruction can be very similar in their approach. A key to making it playful is allowing for non-linearity—that is uncertainty. Knowing that people may experience and play in different ways, and that people like this.

Do you have a lesson where the kids can make it different but just as good? The assessments can reflect the way games guide play through criteria and structure. The key is creating some latitude in how you evaluate the final product.

Things teacher should think about:

Games and lesson plans can be designed with the same elements.

Uncertainty can be stressful, but the right amount can be exciting.

Complex games have complex problems. You may have to have do overs.

Complex games often utilize all of the elements of listed in the taxonomy in different combinations and permutations, thus demanding the player to understand the problem and react on the spot. If they don’t get it, they can try again. If they are good problems, kids will persist and seek solutions.

There can be many solutions to a problem. It is good to allow for many approaches, even if this takes more time. These alternative explanations allow for greater variety of solutions, creativity, and flexible thinking.