Category: General

I am a full-time geek. Anyone who knows me knows that comic books, video games, anime, board games, and sci-fi make up the bulk of my personality. What many of them don’t know, though, is that I play a lot of tabletop roleplaying games.

At this point, you might be wondering what, exactly, constitutes a tabletop roleplaying game. For me, it means that once a week, my friends and I get together and pretend to be members of a band of adventurers travelling around a fantasy world. We don’t dress up and run around in-character (that’s something else called LARP); we sit together and, with the guidance of one person acting as a storyteller or “Dungeon Master”, we tell a story. Very little is pre-determined in this game. When we try to accomplish things, we roll dice and see what happens.

I’ve been playing these games since I was a kid. I’ve played them in a lot of different formats – in-person, by e-mail, on Telnet serves, in IRC chat rooms, over video chat with webcams and microphones, I’ve even played in streaming games where total strangers can watch me and my friends live on camera. It’s a big thing in my life.

It’s also something I’m trying to bring into my classroom. This isn’t coming from a place of selfishness or obsession, where I just want to do my hobby all day. While I really love playing RPGs, they are a lot of work to put together and run for even just a small crew, and the logistics of implementing any kind of RPG in a classroom are… daunting. But the benefits outweigh the complications, and so here I am, slowly finding ways to bring the wonders of RPGs to my students.

Let’s talk about the benefits of D&D a little. (D&D isn’t the only tabletop RPG out there, but it’s the one most people have heard of, so I’ll roll with that system for this.) The most obvious benefit for any child is that it is a storytelling game where players have to listen, improvise, and react on the fly. The game rewards creativity and consistency of character. Players have to make choices about how their character would act in a given situation based on their past, their goals, their party’s plans. RPGs work wonders for improving the creative writing skills of their players.

It also encourages critical thinking and creative problem solving. Players are presented with all manner of obstacles every session, with a hundred possible solutions for every one. They have to listen closely to what they are told, search for clues in the narrative, and solve puzzles to survive encounters and work toward their goals. They also have to work together – as the players collaborate to tell a story, their characters collaborate to reach a common goal of some kind. The lone wolf doesn’t do well in this game.

Where this game really shines in the classroom, though, is in fostering confidence in its players. Many people will feel silly when they first start playing, some will always feel silly, but most will find themselves comfortable in their character’s personality after a few sessions. D&D provides opportunities to learn about socializing, leading, and working together in a risk-free scenario. Players can practice social skills knowing that it’s their character acting this way, not them, and that the worst outcome is that their character may die and they need to make a new one. I’ve seen the quietest, most reserved kids find their voice thanks to a D&D game where their character slowly becomes the leader of the crew. I’ve seen impulsive kids start to slow down and think their actions through in real life because when their character is rash and acts without thinking, they set off traps, or find themselves surrounded by monsters, or ruin their party’s carefully crafted plan.

The situations in these games are made up, but the skills they learn through playing transfer to real life. They can confidently take risks in the game because the only consequence is really that the story may not go the way they want. Over time, they start to take more risks in real life. They start to look at real life situations from multiple perspectives. They start to understand the interconnectedness of people, places, and things.

All of this to say… I want to do this more. Implementing games like D&D in the classroom is challenging. So far, I’ve had the most success with large-group one-session games like Werewolf, where students are given secret roles and must work together to help their team win while staying in character. I’ve also had success running small groups at recess time. Now, I want to try to find a way to bring a more in-depth, long-form game like D&D to my whole class.

Thinking about how I can adapt D&D for a class of 30 (yikes) is how I’ll be spending my summer – in between an AQ, a three-day FSL conference, multiple one-day workshops, a week in Toronto for the ETFO AGM, a week in Toronto for Fan Expo, my weekly D&D games, and oh, right, also being a spouse/mother/sister/daughter/friend/adult.

If someone out there has successfully implemented RPGs in their classroom on a consistent basis, I’m all ears. And if someone out there has no idea what I’m talking about but is intrigued, like any good tabletop player, I can talk your ear off about all the things you can check out to find out more about this crazy hobby!

As I come to the end of my first year as an Innovations Consultant and New Teacher Induction Program Coordinator I am doing some reflection about the past year.   Feedback has come in and the Collaborative Inquiry that NTIP teachers and mentors took part in this year was deemed as one of the most meaningful professional learning opportunities for educators.

Teachers reported that having been given time to work with colleagues with a focus of learning that was responsive to student need with ways in which to measure success seemed daunting and theoretical at first but then became clearer as the process progressed.  At the end of our meetings and planning we were able to come together in order to share our learning.  We have collected our work on a Google site so that other educators may be inspired by  Inquiry and Innovation at KPR.  The reflection on the process was that teachers wanted to experience the process again next year.

When I went through the process of Assessment for Learning and first embarked upon inquiry it was difficult to make myself vulnerable as a professional after 20 years of teaching!  Working with these brave new teachers was awe inspiring.  I saw them become hooked on the inquiry process as I did many years ago.  It is hard to describe what happens when you finally give yourself permission to not be the “sage on the stage” and let student interest and need drive instruction.  You have to experience it…but once you do…it is rather difficult to go backward.

If you are interested in running a collaborative inquiry at your school (it doesn’t have to be school wide) I highly recommend the work of Jenni Donohoo.  She is an Ontario Elementary teacher and has a number of books about Collaborative Inquiry and some fantastic instructional videos online.

It certainly is an exciting time of year! Report cards are finished, we are wrapping up curriculum and beginning to think about next year already. Most of all, everyone is excited for summer. Teachers are ready for a break from the busyness of school, but are our students?

We talk so much about building belonging in the classroom. We go out of our way to make our class feel like a family and make each child feel safe, valued, and at home when they’re with us at school. So why is it that just because the year is ending, we now outwardly and loudly celebrate the fact that this is ending?

I always thought that celebrating the end of the year was just adding to the fun and excitement of summer. I’ve always had a fun countdown for my class. Lately, I’ve been wondering if this is just adding stress on some of my students. It really hit me last week when I announced that we only had ten school days left and there were at least five children in my class that crumbled to tears.

There are many reasons a child might feel stress or anxiety about school ending. We know that for many children in this world, school is their safe place. It might be the only place they receive warm smiles, positive affirmations, their access to friends, or even healthy snacks. I wonder how it might feel, for children like this, to hear and see their caring adults celebrating and counting down to the day they no longer have to be there.

It’s not just those kids that might be feeling the anxiety around this time of year. Many children thrive on a predictable, consistent routine. The end of a school year is a major, sudden and highly impactful transition from one routine to another, or in some cases to very little routine at all. We have to be mindful of our kids that need consistency, rely on stability and struggle with change.

And then, of course, we have our children who just absolutely love school. This was the case for my young friends that were very upset last week. They simply adore being part of our class and look forward to coming to school every day. They want to be here and they want to learn. To make things worse, I likely will not be teaching at this school next year, so the end of the year for my students is also bringing with it a goodbye to their teacher. I’ve spent the year building and nurturing our teacher-student relationships and now I have to leave them. I would imagine that the departure of any caring adult would be a cause for stress and anxiety in any child.

We start to see a lot more behaviour this time of year and it almost always gets put down to “end of the year excitement”, but what if that’s not excitement? We know that behaviour is communication. What are our students communicating to us? Could this added behaviour be a result of added stress over the fast-approaching big change?

I think we need to rethink and reconsider how we are marking the end of the school year. Of course, a successful year of growth and learning calls for celebration. Can we frame our celebrations as just that? A celebration of the year, but not a celebration of the year ending? I don’t think we should pretend nothing is happening, because part of our job is to teach our children how to process these big changes. After all, life is full of change. But I do wonder if we can frame it in a more school-positive way, and through that, send off our most vulnerable students with all of the love and affirmation they need to make it through a summer without their safe place.

Students from 8A made over 400 smoothies on Thursday, June 6th on our student led create your own business. With the donations from the HWDSB Foundation for Student Success and the help from my other job Tucker’s Marketplace, our business plan went off without many hitches.

We had a great day with 22 students spread out through many stations: blending, cup decorating, ice crushing, phoning classes, taking photos of students with smoothies, getting ingredients for students and much more.

Putting the leadership into my students hands was an amazing process and I cannot wait to do something like this in the future. Everyone was able to comment afterwards on their favourite parts of the project and parts they thought were more challenging. Students enjoyed: taking leadership, ordering ingredients, making the smoothies, shopping for ingredients, coming up with the idea, decorating the room and much more.

It was a great adventure and many more pictures can be seen on my instagram page mclaughlins.classroom. Special thanks to my dad, Bob McLaughlin for being our chef on site to ensure proper food handling all day long!