into game design choices, and chapter 5 into network design choices.
Part II puts the components together and shows you how to act on the information. This portion of the book asks that readers follow the sequence it gives. Chapter 6 reveals quest inspiration, goal clarification, curriculum mapping, and final products (known as deliverables). Chapter 7 helps you introduce students to questing. Chapter 8 details support provision during journeys, starting with timelines and checklists, which help address the standards required of you. Chapter 9 helps teachers and students decide what deliverables students will generate. Each chapter concludes with a coda to wrap up the most salient points therein. Afterward, appendix A addresses frequently asked questions, and appendix B offers probing questions that help guide quest decisions.
To showcase how the big picture and fine details support one another in quests, we’ve chosen one illustrative quest example (on the topic of disease) to show how the details within each chapter add dimension and engagement. Our self-imposed criteria for selecting the topic follow.
* The topic is applicable for students in various age ranges.
* Students can pursue the topic through myriad courses and subjects.
* The problem, challenge, or idea is meaningful and worth the pursuit.
This book helps you use the questing framework in your classroom and incorporate learning standards. It also provides planning and assessment tools. (Visit go.SolutionTree.com/instruction to download free reproducibles, including an example of the completed disease quest.)
We sincerely hope that you get the following from this book.
* Inspiration to use questing as a framework in your own classroom
* Opportunities to seek increased co-creation, win states, affinity spaces, and authentic deliverables
* Additional tools for your instructional toolbox (including question design options, game design options, and network design options)
* Tenets of engagement participation options for all students
Pause for a moment to respond to the following questions: What do you want on behalf of your learners? How do you model that, live that, and grow in that space together with your students? This response is a quest’s start and guiding reason. We designed this reading experience to examine current realities and grow from them through questioning, imagining, and—most important—taking action. Learning often requires a timeless and courageous act of becoming. This book is the beginning of a conversation. Let’s get started.
PART I
Establishing
CHAPTER 1
Making the Case for Questing
Dated approaches to school subjects where “problems are solved not by observing and responding to the natural landscape but by mastering time-tested routines, conveniently placed along the path” are ebbing away in favor of more contemporary tactics (National Research Council, 1990, p. 4). A 2016 Gallup report reveals that just 49 percent of students in grades 5 and up feel engaged in school. While facts and skills are still important, they are not akin to information where knowledge is organized around important ideas and concepts and the expectation is that students are examining deeply to determine generalizations, connections, and patterns (Bransford, Brown, & Cocking, 2000). Engagement increases when teachers introduce and students pursue quests. Teachers design them to become increasingly student driven as they progress. While the teacher and student clarify the why, the student takes a much more significant role in developing what to learn and how to demonstrate that learning.
This chapter examines the realities of sit-and-get learning or lower-level thinking such as Benjamin Bloom’s (1956) remember and understand in many classrooms and explains why questing, which requires apply and evaluate, is preferable. To begin questing, teachers can tap into what moves students and tie those topics into the required standards to increase engagement, embrace technology, and build a community of learners.
Bypass Sit-and-Get Pedagogy
In 1930, students were being prepared for jobs that valued a command-and-obey structure with clear hierarchies. In 2017, employers lament that students struggle to think, create, and problem solve because of lack of school experience and training (Breene, 2016). Because the post–World War II factory boom has evolved into another kind of global job market, virtually every job, blue and white collar, requires employees to regularly solve a range of intellectual and technical problems (Wagner, 2010). Some blame the absence of problem solving and creativity on a “general lack of curiosity” (Wagner, 2010, p. xxiii). A lack of curiosity might explain so little engagement, as might a linear, teacher-led process filled with content acquisition. Because people can easily access information, they no longer have to memorize it for retrieval. The sit-and-get pedagogy favors isolated academic experiences and progress in tight sequence.
Students can feel at a loss when these important small parts do not connect to broader concepts or applications. For instance, when students memorize words for weekly spelling tests, the words are isolated. There is no connection to bigger ideas or related texts. Students wonder why teachers compel them to memorize the words. Worse, they grow accustomed to passively receiving assignments that someone else designed and content curated completely. They may participate in completing the assignments, but are not engaged.
This book is a sort of macroscope, as opposed to a microscope, for looking at the learning process. With this macroscope, you can see connections between our content and ideas. A questing framework offers both—specific content and skills instruction as well as empowering, purposeful learning experiences. There is no need to decide between ensuring coverage and digging deep into Bloom’s (1956) higher-level-thinking skills of applying and evaluating.
It is time for schooling to distinguish itself from a culture that required seat time, regimented curriculum pace, and relentless standardized testing. Questing is a solid step toward a more responsive learning experience that encourages curiosity, creativity, and problem solving.
Increase Engagement
Teachers need their students’ hearts and minds when they teach the curriculum. The challenge is how to create the favorable conditions for that attention that is in line with what we know about the brain. Neural connections and long-term memories result when teachers combine emotionally compelling classwork and personal relevance (Bernard, 2010). Research proves that “choice plays a critical role in promoting students’ intrinsic motivation and deep engagement in learning” (Evans & Boucher, 2015).
How learners feel about the learning also relates to their likelihood of engaging and further development. Neuroscientist Lila Davachi and her colleagues Tobias Kiefer, David Rock, and Lisa Rock (2010) describe
