Teachers' instructional decisions are based on a mix of theories from their teacher education, trial and error, colleagues’ suggestions, online resources, and gut instinct. Gut instincts are often helpful, but is there anything more concrete to rely on?
Cognitive psychologists, sometimes called brain scientists, study how the human brain works — how we think, remember, and learn. They apply psychological science to understand how we perceive events and make decisions.
When we observe human history over the centuries, we see that people have learned through the building blocks of three major processes: observation, apprenticeship, and applicable problem-solving as they became an expert. The arc of learning that moves from surface to deep to transfer, long before the first schoolhouse opened, followed natural curiosity and acquired knowledge as one needed it. The learning was then supported with coaching and experience. That natural learning process aligns with education’s best thinking from Bloom’s team on Taxonomy or Webb’s Depth of Knowledge (DOK) on how students are expected to show in order to prove a learning experience occurred.
Knowing that people learn best by a combination of observing, doing, and problem-solving, how can teachers most effectively foster a deep understanding of concepts in their students? The answer may rest with a teacher’s ability to create authentic learning experiences. An authentic learning experience? We can start by building on a fundamental component of constructivist learning approaches: the idea that a learner is challenged to construct their own knowledge via an ‘authentic’ learning experience. There are varying views on what constitutes authenticity, but Ann Carlson succinctly describes the pedagogy of authentic learning as one which values learner-centredness, active learning, and authentic tasks in which the learning experience takes place around real-world situations. The tasks encourage collaboration and reflection, and can span several subject areas.
The research is clear: student-centered learning that centralizes authentic learning experiences increases academic achievement. For example, a 2014 report found that students in four Northern California high schools saw notable improvements in achievement levels when they adopted a student-centered learning model. Results from the four schools exceeded both the local and statewide outcomes for similar types of school districts.
Additional benefits of using a student-centered approach to teaching include:
Improvements in students’ communication and collaboration skills
Advances in students’ ability to think and work independently
Increased student interest in school activities and education in general
Stronger relationships between students and teachers through shared experiences
Authentic learning experiences inherently allow students to learn by doing and moving with the grain of the natural process of learning. When developing student-centered classrooms, the goal is to offer instruction that matches what students want to learn, in the ways they choose to learn, and then authentically engage them in the content. But, the ability to understand what an individual students' capability and interests are and then integrating the instructional strategies that will provide the opportunities for students to engage meaningfully is a complex and challenging task.
What kind of instructional tools allow educators to bring student-centered, authentic learning experiences into their classroom?
Educators are being asked to engage kids in new and exciting ways like never before. Many teachers who know they want to provide authentic learning experiences that will keep students interested are turning toward the areas where students spend so much time: gaming. Especially in the last school year, teachers and leaders saw many tech tools become gamified. Gamification in learning is essentially adding a layer of game-based motivators around the learning core. Although it can increase motivation, it does not change how a student actually learns the subject matter. There is, however, a concrete distinction between gamification and game-based learning (GBL).
Whereas gamification often focuses on external rewards, game-based learning, and Breakout EDU, relies upon developing intrinsic motivation which just has a longer tail when it comes to creating lifelong learners. In order to leverage the potential of games and simulations, however, we can look at what they do best, and at what they can possibly do better than any other type of learning model. In the past, we have tended to focus primarily on games’ ability to motivate and engage. While certainly an important component of the learning experience, to say that games simply motivate does them a tremendous disservice. We are now coming to understand that games and simulated environments, like escape room-style experiences, may afford superior opportunities for learning.
The Breakout EDU team knew that a critical building block of an engaged classroom was through a tool that helped teachers offer students the opportunity to transfer their learning onto new problems; where students uncover new understandings and apply what they know in meaningful and relevant activities. Our focus has always been around creating engaging learner-centered experiences that bring a learner’s academic achievement side together with their social-emotional side.
Games are well known for their ability to inspire persistence. The best ones, like a Breakout EDU game, feature meaningful choices that have lasting consequences, reward experimentation, provide a like-minded community of players, encourage risk-taking in a low-stakes environment, and turn failures into learning opportunities. Breakout EDU’s content-aligned kit-based or digital escape-room-style games invite students to engage with content in a way that allows them to work together, think conceptually, and transfer their prior knowledge onto a new problem.
Here is the reality: every day, teachers write lessons for students in our schools. Instruction isn’t happening by accident. Teachers spend hours developing student’s courses of study. But the difference is that good teachers build good lessons and great teachers go one step further. Great teachers eagerly hand over any pride of ownership in the lesson to the students at just the right moment. Great teachers move from being the sage on the stage to the guide on the side, as they allow the student’s knowledge, capability, and curiosity to take root. Great teachers allow each student to assume total ownership of the experiences in the classroom. That handover of control can be a big barrier to harnessing the power of student-centered learning.
Breakout EDU makes it easy for teachers to put students in the driver’s seat of their learning. Whether students build their own Breakout EDU game to demonstrate their learning on a particular standard or they work together to solve puzzles with classmates, they drive their experience. With a library of 1,800 standards-aligned and team-building games in various topics and subjects, Breakout EDU provides a simple way for educators to find games to meet the wide range of learning paths of their students. The Breakout EDU learning experiences include challenging puzzles, secret codes, and the most exciting way for students to show off what they know.
At its core, student-centered learning shows what students can do when they feel fully engaged in their education. Using Breakout EDU to mobilize this approach may very well be the key to unlocking student engagement and building back better this fall.
Learn more about how to help your staff unlock the love of learning by going here.
RESEARCH
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