The Jekyll And Hyde Effect Eat It 09

The Jekyll and Hyde Effect
Play, Games, and Learning in the classroom
Professional identities torn asunder?

Brock Dubbels
Brock Dubbels vgAlt.com Brock@vgAlt.com
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Brock Dubbels vgAlt.com
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Outline
• This presentation explores the Jekyll and Hyde Effect and themes
elicited from themes coded through discourse analysis on artifacts
and outcomes from a graduate course in literacy.
• The Jekyll and Hyde Effect calls into question approaches to
accountability and implementation of research and assessment in
classroom instruction.
• This is then connected to reviews on intelligence and recent
research on comprehension and new views that connect
embodiment and motor resonance as important parts of recall and
mental simulation (some times called imagination) validating active
learning as a necessary part of building subject area
comprehension.
• This is then connected to current thinking on play and
implementation with games and play in the classroom.

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The Jekyll and Hyde effect
• New models of comprehension and
memory validate the value of active
and playful learning for cognitive
enhancement and generative transfer.
Data on academic performance and
engagement measures from five years of
games, play, and virtual space learning in
k-20 classrooms will be presented in the
context of assessment measures using a
model for assessing cognitive growth. This
is contrasted with educator beliefs the
efficacy of play and the limitations of
models of teacher professionalism
creating a Jekyll and Hyde Effect.

• Through interviews, artifacts, and
surveys, k-20 educators have expressed a
willingness to embrace games, but have
been reluctant to do so publicly for fear of
professional reputation, as well as the
ability to implement such pedagogical
change.

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Introduction
• Professional identity in a school can have a profound effect on
engagement and performance by teachers—especially in a
time of reform. Of significance is the role of trust and the way
this single factor in a school community can shape teacher
interactions with other staff, students, administrators, and
community.
• What happens when a teacher’s core beliefs about learning
and student instruction are contrary to mandates and policy?
• What if there is research to support that active learning
involving movement, emotion , and play may be the basis for
building reading comprehension?

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• Teachers have expressed that they feel tension as
professional educators in that their beliefs about
student learning contrast with the current beliefs
related to the culture of accountability;
• That what may look good on a spreadsheet, may
not be helping kids in the bigger picture.
• Many teachers have unknowingly found
themselves in a situation where they have begun
creating two different classrooms,
• and two different sets of grade books . . . and
two different teaching identities – culminating in
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the Jekyll and Hyde Effect.

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Jekyll -- Hyde --
• standards, benchmarks, tra • I know what works for my
ditional curriculum to not kids, modification of
be singled out: by the mandates to fit students
book, proper, professional, engaging; developmentally
dignified, and ready to do appropriate, and fits the
whatever they are told. teachers MOJO.

The classroom The classroom
we show we grow

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Methods
• Over the course of five years documents and teacher artifacts were
collected with permission through courses, surveys, and policy documents
for teaching standards and quality instruction. Teacher responses to
questions related to standardized assessment and curriculum were
elicited through survey, interview, and course assignments in a graduate
course for teachers at the University of Minnesota. These artifacts and
responses to research literature on play and standardized curriculum were
analyzed from the perspectives of work and play, reform, and professional
teaching identities. Where work was often associated with rigor, teaching
to the standards and tests, and scripted curriculum; play was often seen as
differentiated, student-centered instruction with teacher influenced
discovery activities, open-ended criteria driven projects, and inquiry.
These two categories were coded analyzed for influence or reaction to
education policy mandates, standards, and quality indicators from
TAP, INTASC, and the Minneapolis Public Schools Standards for Effective
Instruction in the form of genre chains (Fairclough, 2007).

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Genre chain of quality & mandate

What I began to see was more that researched methods, mandates, policy, and assessments
were lost in translation – in that they were seen as replacing traditional curriculum rather than
to enhance and extend instruction and curriculum that teachers felt passion for and have
developed over time. This was probably due to a lack of imagination, lack of experience, and the
purpose and outcomes, lost in translation, and teachers feeling disconnected and disrespected.
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When What skills are being assessed How are these skills assessed-Sample Assessments Why and Who
F, W, S Screening – Identify student skills, Assessment Tools Why
needs and levels of performance Kdg. and 1st Grade District Assessments/Star To identify students who need additional
phonemic awareness and phonics Early Literacy/HM Emergent Literacy Survey assessments and supplemental/intervention
fluency (WPM) CBM/DIBELS/AIMSWEB instruction
comprehension Running Record -Retell and Comprehension To form differentiated instructional groups
reading levels Questions Who
oral language Fountas&Pinnell/HM/Rigby/DRA All Students
spelling, phonics & vocabulary Mondo Oral Language Assessment
Words Their Way
F, W, S Diagnostic – Analyze student strengths Assessment Tools Why
and weaknesses to identify specific Mondo Oral Language Assessment To provide teacher with more precise and in-
instructional needs Running Record – Error Analysis depth information of a student’s knowledge
oral language Running Record – Expression/CBM – Expression and skills to guide instruction
miscue analysis Oral and written responses to reading Who
expression Raven’s Test and Circle Test (gr.2)(G/T) Students identified for additional support based
comprehension Words Their Way on screening assessments
advanced literacy abilities (G/T)
spelling, phonics & vocabulary
On- Progress Monitoring –Monitor student Assessment Tools Why
going response to targeted instruction Star Early Literacy/HMEmergent Literacy Survey To inform teacher of the effectiveness of instruction
phonemic awareness & phonics CBM/DIBELS for individual students
Fluency Running Record – Retell and Comprehension To identify students who require further assessment
Comprehension Questions and intervention
Oral Language Mondo Oral Language Assessment Who
Spelling, phonics and vocabulary Words Their Way Initially, all students and then to monitor
students who have not met grade level
benchmarks and are receiving interventions in
specific areas
F, S Benchmarks-Measure student Assessment Tools Why
performance relative to state or national DIBELS-Segmentation,Nonsense Word Fluency To inform the teacher of student baseline scores
grade-level achievement expectations (gd.1- 2) based on national or state norms
phonemic awareness & phonics DIBELS –Oral Reading Fluency (gr.1-5) To make decisions at the school, classroom and
fluency CALT (gr. 2-5)/ MCA (gr. 3-5) individual student levels
comprehension/vocabulary Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test (PPVT) (Kdg.) Who
vocabulary All Students
On- Performance Assessments – Evaluate Assessment Tools Why
going student abilities, including content Teacher Observations/Anecdotal Records To inform teacher of student progress based on
knowledge and habits of thinking, that Student Work application of knowledge, skills and habits of
Brock Dubbels
conventional standardized tests are less Check Lists/Rating Scales/Rubrics vgAlt.com thinking
able to capture Teacher Created Assessments IT 09
EAT To inform ongoing instructional practices
Who All Students

Meet you to death?

What else can we do?
It can be overwhelming.
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Leader Roles:
•support administration of assessments;
•be familiar with assessment tools and their purposes;
•allocate and prioritize time for data based teacher
collaboration;
•build school schedules that enable teachers to respond to
assessment information; and
•create school cultures focused on the use of assessment
information and teachers as learners.

Classroom Focused Assessment Reported Assessments Three Main Purposes of Assessment
1. Informing instruction to improve
Examples: Examples:
learning
classroom work; screening assessments;
2. Supporting standards focused
student developed rubrics; benchmark assessments;
instruction
student self assessments; and required work samples graded on
3. Facilitating communication and
informal teacher observations. district rubrics; and
collaboration
Uses: teacher observations of specific
looking at student progress; behaviors indicated for reporting.
Types of Assessments
conferencing and goal setting; Uses:
Screening assessments
student response groups; making instructional decisions;
Diagnostic assessments
peer and self assessment; and documenting interventions and
Progress monitoring assessments
mini-lessons, breaking down student progress;
Benchmark assessments
instruction of reading and writing supporting teacher collaboration; and
Performance assessments
components and standards. checking student progress against
Brock Dubbels benchmarks. vgAlt.com
standards and
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On being told about
changes that needed to be
made for data collection.
Teacher Roles:
•administer assessments where
appropriate;
•collect and organize assessment
information;
•engage in collaborative data
analysis, review and sharing;
•collaborate with colleagues in
response to assessment
information;
•implement instruction responsive
to assessment identified student
needs;
•track student progress over time;
•provide feedback to students on
their work and progress;
•engage in reflective practice;
•engage students in identifying
criteria for quality work; and
•align assessments to standards
and instruction

"doing my job is getting in the way of doing my job“
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Why have Learning Walks?

• Reinforces attention to an instructional focus on teaching and learning.
• Gather data about instructional practice and students’ learning to
supplement other data about school and student performance.
• Stimulate collegial conversation about teaching and learning through asking
questions about what evidence is and isn’t observed.
• Learn from other participants through their
observations, questions, experiences, and perspectives.
• Deepen understanding and practices by continuous feedback and monitoring
of school growth.
• Deepen understandings and practices related to continuous improvement.
• Focuses the school’s work on school learning goals, instructional
practices, and students’ learning.
• Provides feedback to the school’s stakeholders and helps maintain
momentum and focus on teaching and learning.

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On Learning Walks and
Observation
I had all the things on the overhead
that an observer would want to see—
not that I don’t use the projector for
kids--but I usually do not include
teacher stuff like benchmarks and
standards; that just turns them off (the
kids). . . And when we are working in
class, we have projects and structured
group work that does not look like
what they (observers) are coming to
see.
So I told my kids that we were going
to have a visitor tomorrow who
wneeded to be a better teacher, and
that is why they did not have a
classroom of their own. So the kids sat
patiently and let me explain
everything on the overhead and did
the worksheet. The kids were all very
worried about her and really wanted
to help!

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Two sets of books

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On the use of reading
software for data
collection
from using reading software, where I
shared that this software had no real
research behind the outcomes. She
said:

“it doesn’t matter if it works, as long
as I have these scores to give to
parents and administrators I can do
what I know works. The district and
parents like to have numbers that level
the kids scores. I just don’t want to be
the nail sticking up.”

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Special Ed

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Regarding Special Ed
Schools fudge, parents fudge, teachers
fudge and the federal paperwork almost
encourages this to happen as there are
loopholes in place to make sure the
system keeps taking its chunk regardless
of testing. There are thousands of stories
of this online and there is enough
paperwork and documentation to show
what happens to intent when good policy
is unfunded and often unfounded.

Every new little change that comes and
the implementation of it is colored by the
precedent of how one is permitted to
implement policy.

The premier example of how that is done
is with special education. I am no sp.ed.
basher, don't get me wrong, it's just very
easy to see where policy and intent do
not come close to matching what actually
happens. Sp.Ed. teachers often have to
fight to get things like good inclusion in
schools where the school actually touts it.

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Read what we tell you

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About limitations in books
I believe that the literacy gap can be
closed, children just have to be
enthusiastic about reading and be able
to explore the genres they enjoy so
that reading is fun. My mother is a
writer and we've always had books in
the house but I am the only one (out
of 7) who likes to read and actually has
bookcases with books. I think it is
about access to books and children
being allowed to read what they want,
not the books the teacher has chosen
for them or the ones that the
curriculum says is mandatory.

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Rejected
Inappropriate Too hard

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Play is suspect
Maybe everyone is?

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On the role of play
As a teacher I like to have everything
under control. I want to have things
planned out and orderly. Play is a very
difficult thing to have control of. So
when it comes to the classroom, is
play the right thing to do? I think it is
important to let kids play. . . play is
very important for kids in the learning
process. I feel play is essential for
learning, but educators need to be
cautious of how they use it in the
classroom.

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When translation is
included
I was struck with several examples of things my
school IS doing right (according to the checklist
on pages 30-44). (I will put Gee’s terms in
parenthesis or otherwise note them). For
example, my principal encourages me to
incorporate choice (#1 Co-design) into my
teaching because she recognizes and reminds
me, as Gee states, that this encourages
“ownership, buy in, engaged participation”
(p.31).

I believe the math curriculum our district uses is
in alignment with Gee’s cycles of Expertise (#7)
because skills and concepts are taught
cyclically, allowing students multiple exposures
and practices times to develop, deepen and
master the given academic content over the 5+
years of the program. In science we use the FOSS
kits, which allow learners to “play around” (#10
Sandbox) before they dive in and learn and are
assessed on the content.

When I was a young student my father used to do
science experiments with me, and I remember
learning all about the Praying Mantis in a hands-
on experience with a live praying mantis. This is
deep learning. It was a meaningful experience
where I was able to internalize the information I
was taught and now can pass on to other
students.

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Creating a second
classroom
Professor Dubbels could have written
this exercise down and asked us what
problems we thought would
arise. Certainly we would have come
up with a list and could have discussed
it. However, having us actively
participate in the simulation, “playing
the game”, created a longer lasting and
more meaningful experience. Notice I
used the term “game”. I believe that
as teachers we sometimes shy away
from that term due to fear of what
other teachers, administrators, or
parents will say.

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Mandates and translation
From my experience of
teaching, teaching reading is one of
the hardest things for me to do. I have
a wide range of learners and
readers, from newcomers with no
concept of phonics and letters to
struggling readers who benefit most
from small group work to high readers
who need to be challenged. I struggle
with my own focus on what I need to
be teaching. What skills will all
students benefit from? What skills
need to be reintroduced? I have gone
through the week long trainings where
we are told what we can do but I want
to know how we can do it.

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• We have talked about rigor so much and how it looks different to different
people depending on where they are in the learning continuum, their
position in the school (teacher/ principal, assistant principal, EA, or even
parents), teaching experience, and also their educational philosophy on
how to teach/how students learn.
Rigor and early grades
• In primary grades the play is part of the students work and
learning. When someone walks into the classroom and doesn't
understand it, they may preserve that the students are not working on
the state/district standards. Kindergarten (I taught Kindergarten for about
20 years and for summer school) now has 3 tests given by the
district. The district sends a tester out to each site to administer the tests
in Sept, Jan., and April. They test different items on the tests and it's hard
to do an
accurate correlation. In April they do a CBM/curriculum based
measurement which is how many words that they can read in one minute
accurately...(You know that part). If you know that your students are
going to be tested and compared with other teachers at your site and
other schools; teachers do feel a need to teach what will be on the
test. This is also something that the administrators would want teachers
to do so that it reflects good on the school. Allowing the play/exploration
time can take away from some of the test preparation time and conflict
with what we know is better for early childhood learning
(play/exploration) .
• This can be a dilemma for teachers. The first grade has a district tester
come out fall and spring to individually administer an
oral reading test. Second grade has had the CALT computer test in the
spring (our schedule for next year list the MAT test for second grade 3X in
the year.
• There are school walk through observations by district staff and other
teachers. They are looking to see rigor and differentiated
instruction. Their idea can be different from the teacher that they are
observing.
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So what does all this mean?
Are teachers creating two different identities to get by?
Isn’t this institutionally reinforced falsehood?
What if the teacher must modify the curriculum to
make it work –
are we still measuring the same mandates then?
What if the measures are wrong? vgAlt.com
Brock Dubbels
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There is a battle of perception
Child convenience design

Brock Dubbels vgAlt.com Adult convenience design
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Perceived Importance of Play
Play is for young kids Middle school means work
4.5
4
3.5
3
2.5
2
So as we grow older, we are 1.5
1 PIP
expected to be ready to work.
0.5
This may be how words like “rigor” 0
and statements like
"it's your job” , and
“you don’t have to like it”
come in to play.

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Our emphasis for students is different

Teachers may need support to implement authentic ways to integrate this new emphasis on
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assessment , and perhaps we are not connecting with the difficulty of this task.

Discipline
• Do we have this all wrong?
• Consider the word: Discipline
• What is it to be someone’s disciple?
• Is that out of love and respect, or fear?
• Are we losing good quality instruction through
poor translation of research for
implementation?
• Is there a reason there are not more disciples?
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Will standardizing teaching lead to standardized minds?

Is there a right way?
A wrong way?
What is good teaching? Dubbels
Brock vgAlt.com
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What does this mean for universities?
65% take reading and writing
90% take mathematics

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What would you like to learn next?
• Games and Play --Intelligence and problem
solving
• The role of play in learning
• History of remediation and assessment for
reading
• Why integrate games and play
• Examples of integration or, Hybridity

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We understand the importance of tests, but . . .
What will tests offer to students’ education? Really?
Should what we do in the classroom, provide the basis for success on tests?
Or is testing a new genre that needs to be accounted for across content areas?
Is there a general intelligence that can be nurtured for testing?
Is there more than one intelligence?

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Measuring Intelligence, a Brief History

• Francis Galton, a cousin of Darwin, was into measuring
humans in every way possible … including measuring
their ability to make sensory discriminations which he
assumed was linked to intellectual prowess.
• However, the measure of intelligence really took off
with the work of Binet who thought that intelligence
was not reflected in abilities to make sensory
discriminations but, instead, was reflected by
performance on a variety of paper-and-pencil tests
targeting such things as
imagery, attention, comprehension, imagination, judg
ments of visual space, memory, etc…).
– The Binet-Simon test (1905) was the first such test.
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So, is there one intelligence, or
several?
• Spearman (1927) was one of the first
Psychologists to theorize about human
intelligence.

• He thought that there was one basic
factor, termed the g factor (g for general)
that he thought was underlying all cognitive
behavior.

• In addition to this g factor, he also thought
that there were a variety of s factors (s for
specific) that also contributed to a subject’s
performance on some specific task.

• Thus, performance on any given task we
assumed to reflect the subject’s general
intelligence, plus specific intelligence
relevant to the task.

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Factor Analytic Approaches
• Some studies using the factor analytic approach ended up finding
many different factors related to intelligence.
• Thurstone (1938) found 7 factors:
1. verbal comprehension,
2. verbal fluency,
3. number,
4. spatial visualization,
5. memory,
6. reasoning,
7. and perceptual speed.
• However, when a factor analysis was performed on Thurstone’s
factors, Cattell found that two factors underlie the 7 factors. He
labeled these two factors fluid intelligence (Gf) and crystal
intelligence (Gc), concepts which are still discussed quite frequently
in current intelligence research.
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General Intelligence
• Cattell thought fluid intelligence (Gf) was a non-learned
characteristic that was revealed through performance on culture-
free tasks tapping such things as the ability to see relations in
patterns.

• Conversely, crystal intelligence (Gc) is learned knowledge such as
that revealed by vocabulary or mathematics tasks … anything that
taps the kinds of things you might learn in school.

• Cattell also thought that fluid intelligence was necessary for good
crystal intelligence … basically, if one had a high fluid intelligence
then, given the opportunity, they could achieve a high crystal
intelligence … however, if the fluid intelligence is low, then the
person will not benefit much from the learning opportunity.

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An Information Processing Theory of
Intelligence
• Sternberg (1985) has come up with a different
theoretical viewpoint concerning intelligence that is
based on the information processing framework used
by most cognitive psychologists.

• His view assumes three factors:
1. Componential Intelligence consists of the mental
mechanisms that people use to plan and carry out tasks.
2. Experiential Intelligence refers to our ability to apply past
learning in novel situations to solve problems more
easily.
3. Contextual Intelligence refers to an ability to perform
behaviours that are adaptive in an evolutionary sense.
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A Neuropsychological Theory of
Intelligence
• Gardiner’s (1983) • Gardiner claims there are
neuropsychological seven such categories of
approach posits that if intelligence:
certain abilities are 1. linguistic,
located in separate parts 2. musical,
of the brain such that one 3. spatial,
ability can be damaged 4. logical-mathematical,
while the others are 5. bodily-kinesthetic,
retained, these abilities 6. intrapersonal awareness,
must be the basic building 7. and interpersonal
blocks of intelligent awareness.
behavior.
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Plasticity, and Metamodality
• Research in cognitive
neuroscience has made a case
for meaning making as a
distributed network of diverse
cognitive connections with
redundant functions that can
respond to trauma with
plasticity—allowing one area
to compensate for loss or
mishap in another. Research
on plasticity shows that “the
experience in one sensory
modality influences the
experience of another.”
(Pascual-Leone &
Hamilton, 2001, pg. 1).

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Embodiment and Motor Resonance

The brain is for action Sensory Organs
• the brain is for creating action with the body and
responding to activity in the environment – that the
majority of the brains function and work consists of
controlling the body, and that there is an intimate
connection between action and language
comprehension . . . the meaning of a situation to an
individual (human or nonhuman animal) consists of
the set of actions the individual can undertake in
that situation. That when we read, we are imagining
the actions described through the symbolic
representations from the medium. In effect, a
mimetic or representational mental simulation is
created based upon description from the text. The
text then queues memory from world experience
and connects the multimodal memory that
supports the referents and descriptors through
predicate and nominal input and the qualities that
contextualize them as well as provide the ability to
project patterns of experience from gained prior
experience. We see a mental image of what is
described by words.

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Indexical Hypothesis
Schema of an egg Mapping Perception to schema
• The Indexical Hypothesis
suggests young readers may
not consistently “index,” or
map, words to the objects
the words represent
because of a lack of
experience with physical
objects and action.
Consequently, these readers
fail to derive much meaning
from the text.

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According to
Glenberg, Jaworski, Rischal, a
nd Levin (2007, p. 231)
the point of reading is to convey
meaning. But what is meaning?
According to the IH, meaning arises
from creating or simulating
the perceptual/action situation
described by sentences. These Manipulation recalled more, and more successfully answered the
simulations are determined by the inference questions, than children who read and reread the
properties of the objects referred critical sentences. The effect size (Cohen’s d) for recall was
1.39, and for answering the inference question it was 0.81.
to, that is, the affordances of the
objects, not the properties of the
In other words, the effects were substantial.
words. Physical and imagined After applying physical manipulation, the children were taught to
manipulations help children to index imagine manipulating the objects; that is, they were told to figure
words to objects so that affordances out how they would move the objects, but instead of actually
can be derived and meaning achieved. moving them, they were to imagine moving them. In the reread
condition, the children were taught to read the text once out loud
and once silently. Columns 2 and 3 in Table 9.1 show that the
benefits of manipulation extend to imagined manipulation.

That is, children do not have to always physically manipulate;
once they learn how to index, the indexing can be done in
imagination, much the way we suppose that competent adults
read. The effect sizes for imagined manipulation compared to
reread were 1.87 and 1.50 for the recall and question
answering, respectively.
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Glenberg, Gutierrez, Levin,
Japuntich, and Kaschak
(2004)
brains evolved to control
action, and, as suggested by M.
Montessori (1967), a successful theory
of cognition and its application will
require recognition of that fact. The
indexical hypothesis, an embodied
account of language
comprehension, posits that language is
understood by simulating the actions
that underlie sentence meaning and
that reading comprehension can be
improved by ensuring that this
simulation
occurs.

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Yoga for comprehension
Yes, this was the test.

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What can we do?

•Are we going to lose play-like learning based upon a lack of imagination in
understanding implementation of research-based instruction and assessment
for data-based decision-making?
•Perhaps embedding and synthesizing these measures in purposeful learning
aligned with student interest and choice is important for engagement.
•Maybe play is the engine for deeper learning and comprehension?
•So why are we so caught up on worlds like work, rigor, effort, and discipline?
Brock Dubbels
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vgAlt.com

I don’t want to be the teacher no
It’s okay for little kids and one respects. I am a professional
Montessori, but this is a and know my content area.
public school.

Where are we now?

Play, what about rigor and standards!

These kids have tests to take!

We have taken away play in school?
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When is an activity not
play?
Play is an activity where there are NO
significant consequences.
No is significant here.

When you here the words

Don’t play with that . . . No
honey, no. ..

My coffee .. …

Computer . . . .

No!

Ohhhh noooo!

Then you know it is not play

Brock Dubbels is not play when an activity has consequences
Mostly, it vgAlt.com – but
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that is

The Importance of play
From
“we can do that”

To:

“JPL, we have a problem.”

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The Right Way to Teach

So many demands, directions, and different students
Which way do go?
What road do we follow?
Should we wait until they go away?
Which way? Brock Dubbels vgAlt.com
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Building comprehension process
Age/ time

Learning
to Read Basic reading skills Comprehension Skills

Decoding

Reading Comprehension
Grade 4
Reading to Learn

Figure 1. Kintsch & Kintsch in Paris
Brock Dubbels vgAlt.com & Stahl (2006)
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It takes a week to make a jelly bean.

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Learning and schema building
are iterative
Interaction seems essential in learning, the more feedback the learner
receives on a behavior, attitude, or performance, the more likely they are to
become aware of it and either refine or change the behavior with the information
provided in the feedback (Ferster & Skinner, 1957; Baer & Wolf, 1970;
Vygotsky, 1976).

Taken side by side, games are designed in much the same way we
conceptualize learning through as we view Vygostky’s zone of proximal
development (Tharp & Gallimore, 1988, p. 35) next to game designer Daniel
Cook ( last visited 6/10/09, http://is.gd/1kQ0r).
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Learning Acceleration
• Stanovich (2000) called
this compensation, where
the comprehender may
try to utilize more highly
developed skills and
knowledge in order to
make sense of what may
be new or unfamiliar by
utilizing knowledge and
experience from other
content areas.

Once upon a time . . . Happily ever after
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Enter the labyrinth – a new experience, perhaps a story.

It is when we gain top-sight, a systemic awareness of the landscape, that we
can become strategic and move on from trial and error, and simple tactics for
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exercising agency. In a galaxy far, far away . . .

Towards top sight

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That is no
moon, that
is a space
station!

Stories and media have become much more complex, but also more
interactive and helpful by adapting to the needs of the learner. Games
are structured forms of play that create interaction and thus, learning.
Learning is about feedback and the next act to modify the last behavior.
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Just think about reading
• Pattern recognition
• Expression
• Decoding
• Mental representation
• Mental Simulation
• Motor resonance
• Affective catalyst
• Embodied
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Elements of comprehension
• Attention
• Prior Knowledge
• Content, Structure, Genre, Categories, Concepts
• Situation Model
– spatial locations, time
frames, people, objects, ideas, color, emotions, goals, shape
, spatial, temporal, causal, ownership, kinship, social, etc.
• Composition of Comprehension
• Perceptual, action, and affective areas contribute

Glenberg, Gutierrez, Levin, Japunitch
, Kaschak (2004)
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Recall and fluency

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How do we build a comprehension model?
Comprehension Model Literary Elements
• A spatial-temporal framework • Character/ Characterization
– spatial locations, time frames • diction
• Entities • Plot
– people, objects, ideas, • Setting
• Properties of entities • Point of View
– color, emotions, goals, shape, et • Theme
c.
• Tone
• Relational information
• Voice
– spatial, temporal, causal, owners
hip, kinship, social, etc. • Word choice

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Play is the factory of learning and Comprehension

The Event Indexing Model
Zwann, Langston, & Graesser, 1995; Zwann & Radavansky, 1998

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Situation model
• When a reader has well-
developed comprehension
skills, they can recruit prior
knowledge to bootstrap
lower level processes
(Stanovich, 2000) and this is
an important idea for
making a case for using
more accessible texts that
are relevant and interesting
to the learner. Once
again, the reader can use
higher-level process in order
to support lower level
process (Stanovich, 2000).
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Characteristics of readers
In separating readers into two of these categories, which will remediate faster?

High comp
L Low Comp
High fluency
E High Fluency
V
E
L

of

F
L
U
E
N
C Low comp High Comp
Y Low fluency Low Fluency

ability to comprehend in dialogic method /create a model

These categories were derived from texts experienced
through different sensory modalities read aloud, visual and
listening comprehension EAT IT 09

Narrative arcs
Traditional – linear text Contemporary –contingency

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So what’s the problem
• You guessed it, the low fluency high comprehension
group.
• Comprehension comes from experience and high order
cognition and problem solving.
• Games and play can provide this.
• Yes, games can deliver content just like a lecture.
• This new schema and learning diversity can be
leveraged from a well developed competency and to
warm up a cognitive cold spot.
• If there is a strength of experience, build from it.
• No, problem!

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Well, maybe . . .
• Except for the issue of that lack of imagination in
implementation of standards, benchmarks, and
assessments in the classroom.
• Turning our teachers into
outlaws, brigands, renegades, and iconoclasts –
one school at a time!
• Or worse, positioning them as resistant and
incompetent.
• Helping kids tell the difference between learning
and an education—then blaming them for poor
effort.
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Lost in translation
• Nobody came here with anything but good
intentions.
• You can teach probability by selling penny
candy, ask the folks who studied Brazilian
orphans!
• How about descriptive stats and averages with
basketball? Baseball? Dungeons and Dragons?
• Video games?
• Play!
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Current dominant classroom practice

1. Single text use predominates
2. Learning facts is a dominant goal
3. Little preteaching of concepts and vocabulary
4. Teacher control and order is of paramount interest
5. Accountability, testing, and time constraints limits
teacher efforts to implement content reading strategies
– Alvermann & Moore (1991)

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There is no consensus on which practices are most
likely to produce understanding of content area
materials

– We have only a partial knowledge base substantiating what is
effective comprehension instruction and which classroom
factors best promote comprehension.
– We have not adequately synthesized research in a coherent
national research agenda with comprehensive enough
theoretical frameworks.
» (RAND Study Group, 2002; Sweet & Snow, 2003)

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Adolescents who struggle to read in subject area
classrooms are positioned as unmotivated, and lacking
in requisite skills and strategies needed to succeed in
their content classrooms. They could benefit from
instruction that is developmentally, culturally, and
linguistically responsive to their needs. Yet. . .

 Such instruction is seldom embedded in the regular
curriculum.
 Instruction is seldom tailored to their range of abilities with
a range of texts and tasks.
• (Moore & Hinchman, 2003; Moje & O’Brien, 2001)

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• Adolescents respond best to complex demands of reading across
the disciplines when they are interested, have appropriate
strategies, and can use multiple forms of print text and media to
engage with content—i.e., they are engaged-- yet. . .

– Most instruction in school is still traditionally organized
around single print texts, such as textbooks, with little student
choice
• (e.g. RAND Reading Study Group, 2002)

– Most students don’t expect to learn important concepts from
reading, and teachers, who also don’t expect students to
engage with texts, talk around the texts (20 years of
research, using a range of research methods: e.g.,
• Alvermann & Moore, 1991; Wade & Moje, 2000; O’Brien, Moje, &
Stewart, 2001)

– The era of cognitive strategies instruction which has
dominated secondary level classrooms has yielded to social
constructivist approaches, yet classroom instruction is
remarkably similar to the climate described in five themes
discussed by Alvermann and Moore in 1991
• (discussed in Bean, 2000)

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Current State of Adolescent Literacy:
Focus on Reading
• We have focused almost exclusively on skills and strategies instruction, yet . . .
– Adolescents’ perceptions of their competence may be a more important
predictor of whether they will engage with difficult texts across the
disciplines than their past reading performance
– (Alvermann, 2001; Anderman et al., 2001; Bean, 2000; Guthrie & Wigfield, 2000)

– Struggling adolescent readers have disengaged from reading and choosing
to read early in their academic careers and are unlikely to re-engage with
strategies instruction alone
– (Guthrie & Wigfield, 2000; Alvermann, 2001)

– Strategies instruction has rarely provided enough intensive instruction
with guided practice, and independent practice with monitoring, to
ensure that students can read strategically .
• (Dole, 2003; Duffy, 2003, Palincsar, 2003)

– In research on the use of strategies, different strategies on the same text
yielded different understandings– purpose plays a huge role in
comprehension.
• Narvaez, D., van den Broek, P., and Ruiz, A. (1999)

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Tools given to educators
Blooms Taxonomy Readability

Well intentioned, but not reliable—and not meant for instructional use and leveling
Readability is usually sentence length and word frequency.
Blooms T was not meant to be aBrock Dubbels but a framework for teacher consideration.
mandate, vgAlt.com
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The trouble with bloom

context

Synthesize yellow and blue

Recall the process of
photosynthesis

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Readability
1. Mark Twain piloted a riverboat and later wrote several novels.
2. Vince offered to help cook dinner, so Janet asked him to make the salad.
3. After we reached our motel that night, we called our children.
4. Quiet and peaceful, the library is open until 9:00 pm on Fridays, but closes at noon
on Thursdays.
5. The air, our faces, all cool, moist, and dark, and the ghostly sky.
6. The writer attacked the king and admitted the mistake at the meeting.
7. The writer that the king attacked admitted the mistake at the meeting.
8. The pundit that the regent attacked admitted the gaffe at the conclave.
9. To be, or not to be.
• Lets not forget shifts in time, format, character, voice, and all
of the variables that create narrative like cohesion.
• Simple, complex, and compound sentence variations

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So much more to a text
• For hundreds of years, writers and teachers have used and taught the cognitive and structural factors in text such as organization and
coherence. Researchers in readability also addressed the effects of these factors on comprehension:
– • Image words, abstraction, predication, direct and indirect discourse, types of narration, and types of sentences, phrases, and
clauses (Gray and Leary 1935).
– • Difficult concepts (Morriss and Holverson 1938, Chall 1958).
– • Idea density (Dolch 1939).
– • Human interest (Flesch 1949, Gunning 1952)
– • Organization (Gunning 1952, Klare and Buck 1954, Chall 1958).
– • Nominalization (Coleman and Blumenfeld 1963; Coleman, 1964)
– • Active and passive voice (Gough 1965, Coleman 1966, Clark and Haviland 1977, Hornby 1974).
– • Embeddedness (Coleman 1966).

• The cognitive theorists and linguists, beginning in the 1970s, promoted the idea that reading was largely an act of thinking. Among the
ideas they promoted were:
– 1. Meaning is not in the words on the page. The reader constructs meaning by making inferences and interpretations.
– 2. Information is stored in long-term memory in organized "knowledge structures." The essence of learning is linking new
information to prior knowledge about the topic, the text structure or genre, and strategies for learning.
• 3. A reader constructs meaning using metacognition, the ability to think about and control the learning process (i.e., to plan, monitor
comprehension, and revise the use of strategies and comprehension); and attribution, beliefs about the relationship among
performance

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Cohesion – lost in translationin
another way!

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Remember “rejected”
• Well, when kids are given little choice in what
they read, and the choice happens to be a
book lacking cohesion because it is leveled
and sterilized, it tends to represent reading for
readings sake.
• It also tends to infantilize older students who
are developing as readers.

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Cause you could just be reading stuff
and you don’t necessarily learn
nothing from it. Like the books we
read in class…

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The books we read in class, we just be
reading them. We don’t really learn nothing
about um. Half of the time people don’t even
read them because she be like read chapters
one through ten, all in a day and people don’t
even be reading them. We have to tell the
questions, girl what happened in chapter
fourteen, what. Half the time we don’t even
read them before we do quizzes, we guess.

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a book isn’t interesting then you
don’t remember what it says and
you just don’t care

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They will read
• Funny though, kids will develop complex subject
registers of schema and vocabulary on topics they
know and are interested in – like pop
culture, video games, and life-like struggles that
excite and relate.
• Look at kids who read game guides and fan
fiction.
• We need to open our perceptions regarding
choice , games, and play.
• This will free our students to learn, and our
teachers to teach – with passion.
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But maybe not what we expect!

The unexpected can be a EAT IT 09 ifvgAlt.com open to it
Brock Dubbels
blessing we are

Is it important to bring one’s passions to
teaching and content?

Teachers have professional lives as well as personal lives
It may be important to an educator to allow themselves to be authentic in the
classroom, and share parts of their personal lives to make connections to kids
and show they care and may have had similar experiences and explain how
they handled the situation. Or should the professional remain detached?
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Ethos of Activity

Play Work

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We seem to have
forgotten that children
have voices
The Nature of childhood and
development is different for each
child—And then there is nurture.

Teachers cannot forget this, because
they see these children every day and
have relationships with them.

Often teachers are put into situations
where children are behind, and many
children are at different levels of
development, and have different
endurance for focused work and
attention.

Sometimes a teacher is the one
positive role model in a child’s life, and
school is where the child is fed
regularly, feels safe from
aggression, and can let down their
guard from uncertainty.

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A Life Without Play

Whitman had been raised in a
tyrannical, abusive household. From birth
through age 18, Whitman’s natural playfulness
had been systematically and dramatically
suppressed by an overbearing father.
A lifelong lack of play deprived him of
opportunities to view life with optimism, test
alternatives, or learn the social skills that, as part
of spontaneous play, prepare individuals to cope
with life stress. The committee concluded that
lack of play was a key factor in Whitman's
homicidal actions – if he had experienced regular
moments of spontaneous play during his
life, they believed he would have developed the
skill, flexibility, and strength to cope with the
stressful situations without violence.
Dr. Brown’s subsequent research of other violent
individuals concludes that play can act as a
powerful deterrent, even an antidote to prevent
violence. Play is a powerful catalyst for positive
socialization.

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What is the opposite of play?
Depression

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What can we do?
• Implement play and game like assessments
– Games assess, measure, and evaluate by their very
nature!
• Alignment of the assignment
• Interaction
• Grouping
• Autonomy supporting spaces
• Thresholds /liminality
• Play as the subjunctive mood
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So what do you call the answer to our curricular conundrum?

Hybridity

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Play is a portal to Self-Determination and Work

Working hard at play?
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What this means for schools
Maybe we need to motivate and engage through recruiting play for developing work-like competencies. You can go to:
http//:5th-teacher.blogspot.com
www.vgalt.com/blog
www.vgalt.com/moodle
www.videogamesaslearningtools.com

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Invoking play
Probability
Branching

Rules

Roles &
Identity

Imagery &
visualization

By design

Dubbels (2008) Reading, games, and transmedial comprehension. Handbook of Games in Education.
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Thresholds
Formerly, communities created rites of passage – where community
status and identity were earned and bestowed.

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Sustained Engagement
• When looking to measure growth or change, or even to understand
whether a learner has truly engaged, an educator should also look for
evidence of commitment and positive attitudes related to the activity and
subject matter.
• Engagement is not just doing the work, it is a connection and an affinity to
an activity supported from the affective domains (Chapman, 2003).
• Skinner & Belmont (1993, p.572) report that engaged learners show
sustained behavioral involvement in learning activities accompanied by a
positive emotional tone and select tasks at the border of their
competencies, initiate action when given the opportunity, and exert
intense effort and concentration.
• Pintrich and & De Groot (1990, in Chapman) see engagement as having
observable cognitive components that can be seen or elicited through
exploring the learner’s use of strategy, metacognition, and self-regulatory
behavior to monitor and guide the learning processes.

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Work Play

POSTURE VOLUME EMPHASIS COMPLEX POSTURE VOLUME EMPHASIS COMPLEX
SYM/ ANIM / RELAXED TONE VARIED / LESS / VERBOSE / SYM/ ANIM / RELAXED / TONE VARIED / LESS / VERBOSE /
ASSYM NONANIM / STIFF VARIED/MONO CONSISTENT MORE TERSE ASSYM NONANIM STIFF VARIED/MONO CONSISTENT MORE TERSE

1 1

2 2

3 3

4 4

5 5

6 6

7 7

8 8

9 9

10 10

11 11

12 12

Dubbels (Accepted) Learning engagement, student 2.0, and the role of play in convergence culture in the digital age. JISE
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Modified fluency with play and agency
1 I have chosen a challenging book. I read with hesitation with emphasis on single words—I am trying to learn them
in isolation from one another. The "flow" in my reading is a little clunky like a telegraph with word-by-word
reading.

2 I just read with two to three word phrasing.
My reading seems very hesitant, like I might be unsure, with considerable pausing. I am blending and decoding the
words. I am naming the words rather than letting them flow.

3 I am pausing for ending punctuation, but am not making inflection changes from sentence to sentence. I read in
phrases but I am lacking in tone necessary in fluent understandable reading.

4 Most of the time, I have, "flow" and phrasing. It is like telling a story to my friends, with vocal intonation and prosody
that indicates awareness of punctuation for pausing and breath, and appropriate inflection (i.e., happy voice).
I should be doing Shakespeare! My performance is characterized by reading that generally "flows."My voice
5 changes to reflect meaning changes in the passage. My inflections are consistently appropriate, and my
reading is fluent and smooth, generally easy to listen to and understood.

Adapted from Table 1. from Marston, Mansfield, cited in (pg. 81
Heineman, in Fountas and Pinnell, 1996) by Dubbels (2003).

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Comprehension measures for reflect aloud using the event indexing model --
Studen Boo Fl D Pro Sit Plo Set Char Them PO Tone W Voice/ Genr Autho
t k ec p t e V C Diction e r
o
d
e

Scoring 4 3 2 1 0
Defined Meaning in Mentioned Cued/ Cued/ Absent
context Explained Recognize Recognize
Detailed Term term
Description Explained

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Developmental Sequence of Inference
Types in Narrative Comprehension
Developmental Order Examples of Developmental Trends in Inference
Inference Making Making in Narrative Comprehension

Concrete physical relations that occur close
together Relations between Concrete Events
Concrete physical relations between distant
events Relations between Abstract Events
Causal relations involving the character’s
goals, emotions, and desires
Hierarchical and thematic relations between Relations between External Events
clusters of events
Translation of the story theme into a moral or Relations involving Internal Events
lesson
Relations between Individual Events

Relations between Clusters of Events

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Games and Reading Assessment
• 2007-2008 – non-play
– 4 students Read 100
• 2008-2009 – play
– 4 students test out of Read 1300, 200, 100
– 12 students test out of Read 200, 100
– 16 students test out of Read 100

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Gains in standardized tests

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What it looked like and what we did
You just can’t wait, cuz there is a game waiting for you!

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Extrinsic Motivation
Identity informs Continuum

motivation and
engagement External regulation Introjected regulation Identified regulation

•External regulation: doing something
for the sake of achieving a reward or
avoiding a punishment.

•Introjected regulation: partial
internalization of extrinsic motives.

•Identified regulation: doing an activity
because the individual identifies with
the values and accepts it as his own.

Dubbels (2009) Dance Dance Education and Rites of Passage ---Lessons learned about the importance of play in sustaining
engagement from a high school “girl gamer” based upon socio- and cultural-cognitive analysis for designing instructional
environments to elicit and sustain engagement through identity construction. IJGCMS.
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Four Principles for
Engagement by Design

Play as a Subjunctive Mood Desirable Activities

Desirable Groups
Spaces

Dubbels (2009) Dance Dance Education and Rites of Passage. IJGCMS.
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“More than eight in ten (83%) young people have a
video game console at home, and 56% have two or
more."
--Gen M: Media in the Lives of 8-18 Year-olds (Executive Summary, p. 36)

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9 ways that games and play can be used in an
instructional context:

• As cultural artifacts for study and evaluation
• Games as new fiction and non-fiction narratives
• As models and simulations for developing scientific habits of mind
• As tools for multimedia production such as Machinima
• The role and construction of virtual worlds for student learning and the
modern diorama
• Video games as tools for delivering content -- serious games
• Video games as a model for structuring classroom learning
• Games and play as research methodology for portals to gaining insight and
understanding for organizational change
• Connecting to secondary competency development and supporting
mediums and technologies for learning acceleration

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Better Living Production

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Artifacts
Gigaheart
• Problem:
– Many doctors are not
effective in detecting
heart sounds
• Built to deliver and quiz
• Heart sounds play
• Learner is guided to
identify heart sounds
and what they might
indicate
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3rSTEM Modeling
How about Math and
Science?
Scientific Habits of mind
Applied curriculum
Modeling
Simulation
STEM

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Clapping Design
Academy

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Artifacts
Games Unit
Inquiry
Reading comprehension
Composition
Sustained engagement
Behavioral management
Planning
Cooperative learning
Classroom as game
Outcomes

Dubbels, B.R. (in press) Video games, reading, and
transmedial comprehension. In R. E. Ferdig (Ed.), Handbook
of research on effective electronic gaming in
education. Information Science Reference. vgAlt.com
Brock Dubbels
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Design
Rhythm & Flow
• High interest
• Role Playing
• Performance
• Technology
• RFOL
• Writing
• Video
• Music
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Evolve Me

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Data
Artifacts
collection
Educate me
• Participants design
a board game to
identify outcomes
and the
context, route, and
obstacles to getting
there.

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Data
Design
collection

Dance Dance Education
Because kids won’t let an education get in the way of their learning

Dubbels (2009) Dance Dance Education and Rites of Passage ---Lessons learned about the importance of play in sustaining
engagement from a high school “girl gamer” based upon socio- and cultural-cognitive analysis for designing instructional
environments to elicit and sustain engagement through identity construction. IJGCMS.
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Discussion
• Based upon these concepts in game design
and the literacies and habits of mind
supported by them, how can we use these
design elements to construct curriculum for
our classroom?

• Do we need computers to do this?

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Natal

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