{"id":2438,"date":"2017-11-05T19:59:37","date_gmt":"2017-11-05T16:59:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/?p=2438"},"modified":"2017-11-05T19:59:37","modified_gmt":"2017-11-05T16:59:37","slug":"replicating-game-fighting-spirit-in-classroom-to-motivate-students","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/2438\/replicating-game-fighting-spirit-in-classroom-to-motivate-students\/","title":{"rendered":"Replicating game fighting spirit in classroom to motivate students"},"content":{"rendered":"

That Coleman<\/a> in 1959 saw a direct link between teen culture and high school achievement is significant. Though the first public high school opened in Boston in 1821, for more than a hundred years, the majority of American teens were otherwise engaged. Most didn\u2019t hold a high school diploma until 1940. The byproduct of more universal schooling\u2014or perhaps its main product\u2014was the American teenager, \u201ca New Deal project\u201d much like the Hoover Dam, wrote cultural critic Thomas Hine. <\/p>\n

Actually, Hine noted, the word \u201cteenager\u201d first appeared in a 1941 Popular Science article. Compulsory education gave rise, inevitably, to mid-20th-century teen culture, and in quick succession, to nearly every cultural artifact we now associate with teens, most of them tied to breakthroughs in technology. Cheaper automobiles, color printing, and better amplification brought us car culture, comic books, and pop music\u2014who can imagine a crooning Frank Sinatra screaming his way through the 1942 Paramount sessions? A generation later, another technological trio\u2014birth control pills, synthesized LSD, and multitrack recording\u2014brought us sex, drugs, and rock-and-roll.<\/p>\n

Coleman hadn\u2019t much cared for high school himself. Born in Indiana in 1926, he attended high school in Greenhills, Ohio, then in Louisville, where each year two rival schools fought bitterly on the football field…<\/p>\n

Coleman ended up at Columbia University, where a chance dinner conversation with friends near the end of his tenure there got him thinking about how the culture of one\u2019s high school can have a life-changing impact\u2014actually, it was that conversation that got him studying schools in the first place. <\/p>\n

When he began interviewing high school students a few years later, he discovered that little had changed. In schools from the inner city to the most privileged suburbs, teens were intensely social, spending most of their free time playing sports and hanging out. \u201cAdults often forget how \u2018person-oriented\u2019 children are,\u201d he wrote in 1959 in the Harvard Educational Review. \u201cThey have not yet moved into the world of cold impersonality in which many adults live.\u201d<\/p>\n

The paradox of modern schooling after World War II, he found, was that just as our complex industrial society made formal education more important, adolescent culture was shifting teens\u2019 attention away from education, prompting adolescents to squeeze out \u201cmaximum rewards for minimal effort.\u201d One girl told him what it really took to be part of \u201cthe leading crowd\u201d at her high school: \u201cDon\u2019t be too smart. Flirt with boys. Be cooperative on dates.\u201d<\/p>\n

Coleman<\/a> found that in many schools, athletics ruled. More than 40 percent of boys, for instance, wanted to be remembered in school as a \u201cstar athlete,\u201d but fewer than 30 percent favored the epithet \u201cbrilliant student,\u201d despite the fact that, as Coleman observed, school was \u201can institution explicitly designed to train students, not athletes.\u201d<\/p>\n

Like factory workers or prison inmates, to which Coleman directly compared them, he found that most high school students in the 1950s had responded to school\u2019s demands by \u201cholding down effort to a level which can be maintained by all.\u201d The institutions may be different, he wrote, \u201cbut the demands are there, and the students develop a collective response to these demands.\u201d <\/p>\n

It was, Coleman suggested, a rational response to a system whose rewards sat on a bell curve. Students were protecting themselves from extra work by ostracizing high achievers, \u201cconstraining the fast minority,\u201d and holding down the achievements of those who were above average, \u201cso that the school\u2019s demands will be at a level easily maintained by the majority.\u201d<\/p>\n

A few academically oriented, highly competitive \u201cisolates\u201d might prosper under this system, he found, but even the gifted high achievers, set apart with \u201cspecial tasks,\u201d usually found themselves unhappily separated from their peers. And the effort to serve gifted children, he wrote, \u201cat its best probably misses far more potential scientists and scholars than it finds.\u201d<\/p>\n

The result of this misbegotten competition, even in the best suburban schools, was intense social pressure to minimize, not maximize, studying. Low achievement, in other words, wasn\u2019t a bug in the high school system. It was an essential feature.<\/p>\n

On the other hand, students didn\u2019t think twice about honoring athletes. Coleman theorized that because most athletic events pit school against school, the achievements of star athletes bring prestige to the entire school, which benefits everyone. A student spending her lunch hour studying \u201cis regarded as someone a little odd, or different, or queer,\u201d he wrote. But the basketball player who shoots baskets at lunch \u201cis watched with interest and admiration, not with derision.\u201d<\/p>\n

In high school athletics, Coleman wrote, \u201cthere is no epithet comparable to curve-raiser, there is no ostracism for too-intense effort or for outstanding achievement. Quite to the contrary, the outstanding athlete is the \u2018star,\u2019 extra effort is applauded by one\u2019s fellows, and the informal group rewards are for positive achievement, rather than for restraint of effort.\u201d The athlete\u2019s achievements, he wrote, \u201cgive a lift to the community as a whole, and the community encourages his efforts.\u201d<\/p>\n

So Coleman challenged educators to rethink how they viewed competition.<\/p>\n

Writing two years later in his 1961 book The Adolescent Society, he noted that educators had long been suspicious of academic competition, but that they unwittingly used it every day when handing out letter grades. The problem, he said, was that the competition in most classrooms was interpersonal. Shift the emphasis\u2014make it interscholastic, that is, school versus school\u2014and the suspicion gives way to celebration.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen a boy or girl is competing, not merely for himself, but as a representative of others who surround him, then they support his efforts, acclaim his successes, console his failures,\u201d Coleman wrote. \u201cHis psychological environment is supportive rather than antagonistic, is at one with his efforts rather than opposed to them. It matters little that there are others, members of other social communities, who oppose him and would discourage his efforts, for those who are important to him give support to his efforts.\u201d<\/p>\n

Coleman<\/a> proposed that schools should replace the competition for grades with interscholastic academic games, \u201csystematically organized competitions, tournaments and meets in all activities,\u201d from math and English to home economics and industrial arts. These competitions, he predicted, would get both students and the general public more focused on academics and ensure all students a better education. <\/p>\n

It wouldn\u2019t be easy, he predicted: schools would need \u201cconsiderable inventiveness\u201d to come up with the right vehicles for competition. But they already had a few good models, including math and debate competitions, as well as drama and music contests. He noted that the RAND Corporation and MIT had already established \u201cpolitical gaming\u201d contests with great success.<\/p>\n

In the early 1960s, Coleman developed six games and tested them in Baltimore schools. Teachers, he would later write, \u201ccame to share our enthusiasm for this reconstruction of the learning environment.\u201d But he admitted that his vision was \u201cnot realized,\u201d even though a handful of fellow researchers at Hopkins and elsewhere piloted academic games with great success.<\/p>\n

Actually, Coleman was deep into his work on games when he got the call to pursue the wide-ranging examination of school conditions and achievement that would eventually become \u201cEquality of Educational Opportunity,\u201d or EEO, more popularly known as the Coleman Report. He later recalled that he saw working on the massive EEO survey as \u201ca detour in my research direction,\u201d though he understood its importance.<\/p>\n

The report\u2019s results, released in 1966, popularized the idea that a student\u2019s home life and family background mattered more than what happened at school. <\/p>\n

Most significantly, Coleman asserted that disadvantaged black students would do better academically if they attended schools in which the majority of their classmates were white. <\/p>\n

The Coleman Report would change American schooling forever, providing the theoretical basis for court-ordered busing plans, which gave rise to widespread, unintended \u201cwhite flight\u201d to suburbs in the 1960s and 1970s. In a follow-up study nearly a decade after the release of EEO, Coleman concluded that busing had become an empty exercise.<\/p>\n

Even as school systems redrew their boundaries, fired black teachers and principals, and tore up foundational enrollment structures to comply with desegregation orders, they largely ignored Coleman\u2019s earlier research on motivation and academic achievement, which found that competition \u201chas a magic ability to create a strong group goal.\u201d <\/p>\n

Looking back 25 years later, Coleman<\/a> himself would note that the Coleman Report\u2019s focus on administrative issues had largely ignored what he had long considered key: the necessity of talking to students about the social systems of schools and how they actually felt, day to day, going to school. As a result, he concluded, the report \u201cmay have missed the most important differences between the school environments in which black and white children found themselves.\u201d Had his seminal work focused on both the administrative problems and the social systems of school, Coleman later wrote, \u201cour knowledge of how to overcome problems of racial segregation would be far more advanced than it is.\u201d The result, he said, might have been more sturdily integrated schools without the racial backlash.<\/p>\n

The irony of Coleman\u2019s earlier findings is that, more than a half century later, students are, to no one\u2019s surprise, still \u201cperson-oriented,\u201d focusing more closely on their peers than on nearly anything adults ask them to consider. And schools still routinely use sports, games, social clubs, and band competitions, among other devices, to get students excited about coming to school. <\/p>\n

In fact, these activities are often the only ones that keep kids there long enough to graduate. Over the past few decades, many schools have embraced national and even international academic competitions such as the National Geographic Bee, the Scripps National Spelling Bee, MATHCOUNTS, National History Day, and Odyssey of the Mind, among others. But even though several of these competitions boast thousands or even millions of participants\u2014the spelling bee claims that upward of 10 million children participate each year\u2014schools have rarely used academic competition to improve instruction for more than just a few top students, in essence replicating the same old academic bell curve. Coleman would not be pleased.
\nShawn Young, founder of Classcraft, uses the game in his grade 11 physics class. Classcraft is a peer-driven classroom learning and management system that resembles a low-tech, sword-and-sorcery video game.<\/p>\n

The need for such a new culture is huge: Indiana University\u2019s High School Survey of Student Engagement has found, for instance, that 65 percent of students report being bored \u201cat least every day in class.\u201d Sixteen percent\u2014nearly one in six students\u2014are bored in every class.<\/p>\n

Shawn Young, a 32-year-old Canadian physics teacher, has created a peer-driven classroom learning and management system, dubbed Classcraft, that resembles a low-tech, sword-and-sorcery video game. In it, students work in teams to meet the basic demands of school\u2014showing up on time, working diligently, completing homework, behaving well in class, and encouraging each other to do the same\u2014to earn \u201cexperience\u201d and \u201chealth\u201d points. These points help a small group, or \u201cguild,\u201d of classmates prosper in the game. The system, Young said, essentially replaces letter grades.<\/p>\n

Echoing Coleman, Young told me most adults don\u2019t understand how strongly teenagers feel the need to belong to a group, fighting together for a common cause. In that sense, he said, letter or percentage grades \u201care horrible as general motivators,\u201d especially for struggling students. Going from a D to a B in a class is such a long-term endeavor that most feel it\u2019s a lost cause. \u201cIf you\u2019ve had Ds for five years, you\u2019re convinced you\u2019re a D student and you\u2019ll always have Ds, because even if you do more work it\u2019s not going to have an immediate repercussion.\u201d He hopes Classcraft will help break the cycle. As students move up through the levels of the game, they actually pay less attention to grades and more attention to keeping their guild teammates \u201calive\u201d and \u201chealthy.\u201d<\/p>\n

There are many other initiatives that play upon Coleman\u2019s basic thesis. In 2013, visiting Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology in Alexandria, Virginia, affectionately known as \u201cTJ,\u201d I watched as two members of the math team sat at computer terminals and worked through a set of high-level math problems. They were competing against a group of four other students who were sitting, at that moment, in a similar room in a similar high school 600 miles away, in the Indianapolis suburb of Carmel, Indiana. The opponents were simultaneously attacking the same set of problems. Each time someone solved one correctly, the digital score counter moved on all six screens.<\/p>\n

If math ever becomes a spectator sport\u2014and stranger things have happened\u2014we can look back on these problem sets and the massive tournament they eventually spawned and thank Tim Kelley. He is the man who dreamed up Arete (originally named Interstellar), the curious piece of software that he hopes will change how students feel not just about math but about academics of nearly every sort. Kelley has spent most of the past six years cold-calling school administrators, flying around the United States, and figuring out how to build NCAA-style bracket competitions in academic subjects. In Kelley\u2019s dream, Arete will pit class against class, school against school, and, someday, nation against nation.<\/p>\n

A Chicago native and perpetual graduate student\u2014he holds degrees in law and business, among others\u2014Kelley got the inspiration for Arete while volunteering to help the rowing team train at his old high school. He watched as rowers took a routine but grueling endurance test, and felt that the atmosphere was \u201celectric.\u201d Though their scores didn\u2019t mean anything in the long run, the rowers were obsessed with the task at hand, pushing to achieve their personal best. <\/p>\n

Kelley began to wonder how one might replicate that fighting spirit in the classroom. He soon imagined a computer application that would use students\u2019 day-to-day results to match them up with comparably skilled contestants in head-to-head academic competition\u2014in everything from classroom pickup games to bleacher-filling, live-broadcast amphitheater tournaments.<\/p>\n

In September 2012, Kelley called Steve Dunbar, director of the American Mathematics Competitions, or AMC, an elite program sponsored by the nonprofit Mathematical Association of America, with the idea of a competition based on AMC problems. The competition, founded in 1950, enrolls about 400,000 students, but it still uses pencil and paper and can take weeks to score. Dunbar had actually been searching for a way to bring AMC into the 21st century, and as soon as Kelley described his vision, Dunbar knew that this was what he\u2019d been looking for. In two months, Kelley had a prototype. In five months, he and Dunbar had selected 16 high schools to field-test the software. By February 2013, the first trials began.<\/p>\n

To those who blanch at Coleman\u2019s vision of making academics a spectator sport, Kelley says the focus of Arete, as with the rowers\u2019 fitness test, is on helping students achieve \u201cpersonal best\u201d milestones, a strategy that most schools rarely use. \u201cOnce kids see they\u2019re getting better, it just perpetuates improvement,\u201d he said. When I met Kelley, he was working on a tool that would allow spectators to view Arete matches live online. He said he hoped that would \u201cbring enough glory to the math department, or enough glory to the math students, that everybody else says, \u2018I\u2019d like to try this, too.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

In September 2013, after the pilot testing, 468 schools showed up for the beginning of the first Arete fall competition, and Kelley soon had 10,000 kids on the platform weekly. By November, he had arranged the highest-scoring 384 teams into six 64-team brackets. Two weeks before Christmas, the Final Four teams in each of the six divisions fought for their division\u2019s title. In the highest division, TJ actually made it to the Final Four, but was outscored by the Academy for the Advancement of Science and Technology in Hackensack, New Jersey. Hackensack lost in the finals to San Jose\u2019s Harker School. The following September, nearly 600 schools and 15,000 students showed up to play, paying a modest fee of between $120 and $195 per school, for access to the platform for the entire season.<\/p>\n

In October 2015, Kelley received a grant of nearly $150,000 from the National Science Foundation to further develop his project. Soon, students will be able to arrange matches on their own. What\u2019s more, hundreds of thousands of 6th- to 12th-grade students will be able to compete simultaneously in a challenge that decides a national and eventually a worldwide champion. After implementing that feature, Kelley wants to expand the same tournament model to other school subjects and grades.<\/p>\n

AMC\u2019s Dunbar hopes that Arete will ultimately bring high-level math to a larger audience\u2014the traditional AMC is focused on just the top 10 percent of students in the top 10 percent of schools. \u201cOne of the things that I do, one of the things that gets me up and here into the office every day, is that I want to get more good math in front of more kids, more often, in as many ways as I possibly can,\u201d he said. International competitions pitting our best students against the best in the world could be thrilling. \u201cIf you look at the top level of competition, the United States is as strong as any other country in the world,\u201d he said. \u201cIt would be good and it would be competitive. It would be exciting.\u201d<\/p>\n

__________<\/p>\n

Excerpts from an article by Greg Toppo, author of The Game Believes in You: How Digital Play Can Make Our Kids Smarter<\/a>. This article is part of Education Next<\/a> series commemorating the 50th anniversary of James S. Coleman\u2019s groundbreaking report, Equality of Educational Opportunity.<\/a> The full series will appear in the Spring 2016 issue of Education Next.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

That Coleman in 1959 saw a direct link between teen culture and high school achievement is significant. Though the first public high school opened in Boston in 1821, for more than a hundred years, the majority of American teens were otherwise engaged. Most didn\u2019t hold a high school diploma until 1940. The byproduct of more […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_disable_autopaging":false},"categories":[5],"tags":[5717,5716,5718,227],"class_list":["post-2438","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-education","tag-classroom","tag-coleman","tag-students","tag-teaching"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2438","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2438"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2438\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2438"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2438"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2438"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}