Animal Stickers and Gold Stars

About half my class that year started out sullen and disinterested. Most of this group were male and a year or two older than grade-average. Many were just months away from sixteen when they could, and would, drop out. Their bodies came to school, but their minds and spirits didn’t.

After the usual skirmishes to find out who was really in charge, the lads settled into a state of grim semi-hibernation to serve out their sentences. “Don’t bother me, I won’t bother you” was their code.

It would have been easy to take their deal and teach to the eager half of the class. But that wouldn’t have been right, or professional. Somehow, I had to get the lads on board.

After trying all the tricks I’d learned in Teacher’s College, to no avail, I walked down the corridor to the Primary area and asked a Grade One teacher for a handful of animal stickers and gold stars. I had no idea how transformative this was going to be.

I went back to my desk where a pile of tests waited to be marked. Once I had graded everyone I looked for the best three marks from the lads. That was my baseline for that test, and everyone with that mark or better got a horse sticker.

The three teenage lads who got horse stickers strutted and preened as if they’d won the lottery. They were hooked.

Little by little and inch by inch, at the cost of a handful of animal stickers, the lads came to life. As the year went by they began to realize that they could compete, and sometimes their native skills of analysis were stronger than those of the natural academics. They stopped seeing themselves as losers.

More germane, some of them clued into the fact that their accumulated academic deficits had a real cost in terms of competitiveness, and worked to eradicate the weaknesses.

I won’t pretend that all, or even any, went on to the Ivy League. What I can say, though, is that animal stickers turned around a lot of young lives and made many of my lads linguistically and numerically literate, and consequently competitive in their future careers.

Many years later I learned that this device is known as “gaming” and is used extensively in online education. In the simplest of terms, gaming turns our inherent sense of competitiveness into a powerful motivator for learning.

Gaming isn’t for every situation, but particularly where you need to impart a lot of technical information to an unmotivated audience, gaming can make the learners willing and eager participants.

Do you have a great gaming story? Let me know, and tell me if I can share it.