In Chapter 4 of John Dewey’s Experience and Education there was one quote that struck me because my life experience didn’t align with what he was saying. Dewey wrote, “As long as the game goes on with reasonable smoothness, the players do not feel that they are submitting to external imposition but that they are playing the game. In the second place an individual may at times feel that a decision isn’t fair and he may even get angry. But he is not objecting to a rule but to what he claims is a violation of it, to some one-sided and unfair action” (52-53).
This quote immediately brought to mind two of experiences: Around the World and flag football. The latter experience occurred when I was working as a computer science education researcher at 9Dots. I was sitting in the corner taking notes on what was and wasn’t working in the classroom, and the first activity of the day was Around the World. To play, one student stands behind a student who is sitting in their chair. A math problem pops up on the board, and the two students have to say the answer as quickly as they can. If the person standing wins, they move on to stand behind the next student sitting in their chair. If the person sitting wins, the standing person sits in their chair and the sitting student now gets to stand behind a chair. The goal is for a student to beat every student and to end up back at where they had started.
In this 5th grade classroom there was an outlier. One of the male students was particularly good at solving math problems in his head quickly. In a typical classroom, students have to spend at least some time sitting before they end up back at their initial seat, but this student won round after round, never taking a seat. The students in the classroom started to get frustrated, and some started booing him. The game was fair and the rules were clear, but there was this unspoken understanding that students should have a semi-equal probability of winning.
The second experience that came to mind was playing flag football in PE. There were many students who dreaded playing flag football, and a portion of them were students who would have played flag football at recess for fun. The fact that it was during PE made it different. There are a myriad of reasons why the fact that it was PE made it less fun: you don’t get to play with the people you’d choose to play with, you’re getting graded, there’s an adult watching over the game, etc. I think that one of those reasons may also have been the fact that there wasn’t a choice to play. That lack of autonomy decreased the intrinsic motivation students had for playing.
I completely agree that experiences in the classroom should be more like games. Even with the problems I mentioned, game-like learning would definitely boost intrinsic motivation in comparison to traditional learning. I do think, though, that games at recess can’t directly translate to games in the classroom as Dewey seems to be suggesting. At recess, students wouldn’t play with their classmates who always win, whereas in the classroom students are encouraged to try their hardest regardless of how their winning affects the other students’ attitudes toward the game. And at recess students’ participation in games are voluntary, whereas in the classroom they are not. Is there a way to address this gap in recess versus classroom games?
Education 