Overview:
Excessive use of classroom games boosts fun but weakens students’ patience, discipline, and meaningful learning.
I grew up in the suburbs outside of Washington D.C., and I can remember hoping and wishing that my teachers had something fun planned for class each day. That being said, I knew that that “something fun” was highly dependent on how my classmates and I performed in class. If we were focused and finished everything, our teacher might give us some quiet reading time, study time, or something like that at the end of class; they might have a game that we could fall back on if everything was done early; getting closer to holidays, teachers might even let us pull out a deck of cards, but that was much rarer.
All of that is to show that games were not my norm when I was growing up. They were used as a reward for good classroom behavior, getting all of our work done, etc. It was a serious incentive for my friends and me.
These days – and yes, I am aware that that phrase makes me sound incredibly old – it seems like teachers have to rely on games way more often. I am sure that the students find that more enjoyable, but…is it really helping them in the classroom?
As educators, we all know the dangers of having phones in the classroom. We see the negative effects of too much screen time every single day, and it is not limited to just middle or high school students. Does the same danger exist with gameifying education?
I can understand the appeal. I taught French for six years, and games were really great tools to try and help students memorize the vocab that went along with each unit I covered in class. I know that games were also used quite a bit by the English teachers at the last school I taught, because, again, it was a good way to help drill vocabulary, whether that was for the ACT or for a novel they were reading in class.
I found games to be particularly helpful at getting students engaged in an activity. My last school was in a rural community, so the value of learning a language was lost on so many of my students. The level of apathy was unreal, and it was everything I could do to get some of them to participate in even just one activity in class. E-mails home, ISS, detentions, nothing made a dent.
So I turned to games as a fun way to try and keep them engaged. I relied pretty heavily on Blooket, Gimkit and Quizlet, and I really enjoyed using Wordwall, but then it became cost prohibitive. Although I cut down the amount of vocabulary that we actually tested on in my classes to the bare minimum, I still had tons of sets that I made available for students to use as flashcards or for studying while they were at home, too.
For a while, it was great. My class participation increased, I had students actually engaged in the class, and I was so proud to see more students awake, especially during first period. I felt better about teaching, just being surrounded by more positive attitudes every day.
It stopped being great, however, when I realized that the students really were not performing that much better on quizzes. Their recall was still so low, they were relying on translation tools like WordReference or Reverso, and many tried to sneak in the use of Google Translate, as well. I had switched over to project-based learning shortly after I arrived at my last school, because I felt that it allowed me a better understanding of how much my students were actually learning. This was great, because they had to show me that they could really use the material from class in meaningful ways.
I discovered that, contrary to my hopes, the games were not helping the students memorize the vocabulary to use it in real-life situations. Students were not even relying on their notes to help them with these projects. It was all coming down to AI and the internet.
I started paying attention to the games that we were playing in class. While they were certainly fun, and they gave my classroom a more enjoyable atmosphere – for the students and for me – I began to think that the games were impacting my students more negatively than positively. I realized that the games were hurting in four key areas.
First, the games did not help the students to train their patience skills in the classroom. In the age of instant gratification all the time, all day long, games in the classroom were actually contributing to their lack of patience. So many of the games were competitions or timed, and that made the students crave speed, but not actual knowledge. It was taking away from the sense of satisfaction that I remembered feeling when we were allowed to play a game after completing our classwork.
Second, games did not build discipline. For the majority of teachers, we know that learning takes a certain amount of discipline: students have to stick with something until it is done, they have to keep working and put in effort even when things are difficult, they have to complete multiple pieces of a task in order for it to be fully complete. These games do not contribute to any sense of discipline.
Third, the games allow the students to focus on the points, rather than the actual learning. They guessed more often than not, just in an effort to get the activity done with a decent amount of points. At the end of the day, my students were more interested in gaining points to purchase new Blooks or new clothing for their characters on these sites than actually learning the vocabulary for my class.
Fourth, and last, games did not build engagement with the subject matter, just with the idea of the “fun class.” When all was said and done, my students enjoyed my class because we played games, not because they actually found the material interesting or valuable. I was a somewhat cool teacher because the classroom was fun, but I did not see any substantial learning taking place on a wider scale after incorporating games.
Although the desire to have students engaged in class is a seductive mindset, I think that teachers need to resist it, as much as possible. I would argue that this needs to start with elementary school teachers. Yes, I understand they are overworked and underpaid, just like the high school teachers. Yes, I understand that we need to get communities involved in the kids’ education so they are learning better habits. The unfortunate reality, especially in low-income, rural communities, is that all teachers will always be underpaid compared to the value we bring to the community; a ton of parents and guardians will never be actively involved in the kids’ education because those parents or guardians do not, themselves, see the value of education. There is only so much that we can do on these fronts, though I definitely encourage looking for ways to alleviate these concerns.
In the meantime, teachers need to try and stand together to really serve our students as best as possible. By relying on games so heavily, we are further crippling them by allowing them to continue the status quo of fun activities most of the time, rather than insisting they practice the patience and discipline that are so necessary for becoming an adult. I was absolutely guilty of this mindset, because it did just feel so darn nice to have students excited to come into my classroom. However, looking back, now that I am no longer in the classroom, I am not convinced that I did not do more to hurt them than help them.
