Teaching with Dungeons & Dragons

[Music] Welcome to the Podglomerate. [Music] Hello and welcome to Plus 7 Intelligence, to show about how games impact people. My name is Chess. This episode continues our series talking about games and education. This conversation was so inspiring for me personally. I talk all the time about how games can impact people, and often it is in the abstract, but the stories that my guests tell today really drive home how revolutionary that games can be in reversing how people can see a situation. In this case, how kids who see school as a hindrance or a hostile environment can come to see it as a way to express themselves, and a place where they can belong. Today on the line, I am talking with the co-founders of Teaching with D&D, which is wonderfully self-explanatory. Even if you aren't big into dungeons and dragons, you'll find a lot of valuable lessons here. My guests, Sarah Roman and Kate Wells, have been pioneering ways to take the key aspects of not just D&D, but gaming tropes and theory to change their classroom atmosphere and to simultaneously address specific academic benchmarks. How do they do that? Well, let's find out in the interview. [Music] All right, with me today, I am very excited to be talking with Sarah Roman and Kate Wells. They are the co-founders of Teaching with D&D. Welcome to the show, Sarah and Kate. Hi. Hi. Great to be here. Yeah, thanks very much. Yeah, it's great to have you. First, can you talk about your backgrounds and education and teaching? I understand that both of you have been teachers. Go ahead, Sarah. Sure. So I had been a teacher for six years at Raridad and High School, out in Highland, New Jersey. I was teaching English, so I was primarily teaching junior honors, British literature and AP literature with a smattering of world lit and ELL. You know, over the time, it was absolutely wonderful. I've thoroughly enjoyed my time teaching and I have recently moved into a concert manager position for a financial tech company out in Lambertville, New Jersey. So that's what I'm up to right now. My turn. Yep. I came into education later in life. I had done pretty much every job there was and decided that I wanted to make up for a bad thing I've ever done and try to leave the world a better place than I found it. So I moved from Minnesota, respectively, to Houston, Texas to work in the Alding District, where I've been for the last seven years. I teach at a school called Davis 9th grade and in my district, they separate the 9th grade campuses from 10th, 11th and 12th grade. And I've been there since the building opened six years ago. I also teach English on the Department Chair of English for my 9th grade. There's never a day that's not without joy and struggle. Yeah, and Sarah and I have been working on this for the last, I don't know, Sarah, what three years probably? I would say at this point just about three years, yeah. And I started my initial contact with Wizards of the Coast. Years ago when I went to the European Literacy Conference in Klogging Fort, Austria, to present what I found on the kids that I had that were just in a D&D club in the gaming strategies that I use in my classroom. But my educational background is, although it seems brief, seven years for teachers, an awful long time these days. So was that your first encounter, Cade, with the idea of using role-playing games in a classroom setting? Your school had a D&D club? No, I started everything, anything that that became was me. And when I went to back to school to get my pedagogy degree for English, all of the things that I was supposed to be learning seemed really familiar, in a lot of ways. And I was building a campaign for my buddies at the time, we're playing a little gentle D&D because I was very busy. But I was trying to figure out why this all sounded so familiar and I opened up my DMG one day and I was like, "Oh, the reason I know all this is because I've been playing D&D since I was 10 years old." So literally all the pedagogical training that they want you to go through in college to be a successful teacher, anybody who's been a dungeon master or a player for any length of time understands exactly what it takes to make an engaging environment. And so I thought, "Well, this doesn't exist yet and I've always been that kind of motivated person." So I started inventing a system for a classroom integration of all kinds of things related to a role-playing. It was the long story made really short. So that was my first encounter with putting games into the classroom was when I was in college. I realized that the framework of learning was the same. And pedagogy, can you explain with that? Pedagogy is the art of learning, the study of learning, teaching and learning. The study of teaching and learning, pedagogy or pedagogy. Did you feel like you learned that through playing D&D or DMing for D&D or a little both? It was bold. I mean, like I'm a lifelong player. So I mean, this game I picked up when I was 10 through some weird circumstances, like it always is. And it was just when I was in college to get my degree as an English teacher because I already had a previous degree. I was getting this degree in teaching and I'm telling you, it was also familiar. All the classroom strategies, all the management strategies, everything was so familiar. That's when I bridged the context. That's when I said, "Oh, this is all from everything that you do in D&D, you also do in your classroom." That's where I made the connection. And Sarah, how about you? When was the first time that you broached the idea of using role-playing games in a classroom? I would say it was a lot later than Cade. I had been running a classroom. I mean, now this phrase has popped up that I wish had been around a little more when I was first starting my teaching career, but this whole guy is of experimental learning. So I had been very heavily invested in microelectronics and microcontrollers in the classroom as a way to teach literature, really attempting to do some kind of innovative cross-curricular projects and things like that. I mean, I think what I found was while I loved blending technology and literature, there are these, and what kind of Cade is talking about, these pedagogical gaps that occur. And while the students are heavily engaged, I felt like I was always at the tip of the iceberg. So to speak, I had started to play around with classcraft. I'm sure you probably hear that from a handful of educators as well. And I just said, like, this is absolutely just a watered-down version of a game system that's meant to modify behavior. It's not meant to immerse them. It's not meant to role-play it. They're to kind of put, and I'm not trying to go heavily on classcraft right now. I'm just saying that's what it had initially felt like to me. So I kind of said, you know what? The classroom already feels like such a great place to experiment. Why don't I start looking around for ways to really integrate role-playing? And I said, you know, I had been more of a magic-thegathering. I will spend, you know, 18 hours on wow kind of thing back in my day. You know, I had seen Dungeons & Dragons and I knew it existed and I thought about it. And I said, this would be actually a pretty neat implementation that I don't see a lot of people doing, which is how actually Cade and I had ended up getting into contact with one another. You know, one of those great fine stories where a friend of a friend says, hey, you know, I see you're doing this and why don't you get in contact with Greg Tito from Wizards of the Coast because he has, you know, an educator who's also trying to do the same thing out in Texas. And that was when, of course, our fate was written in the stars. Yeah, that's really cool. Yeah, because Cade was telling me that you two haven't met in person, but you are working on this pretty bold experiment together. Yeah, yeah. Soon, I hope in July, we will get to meet you. Yeah, we'll meet in July for the first time at the serious play conference in Montreal, which is a big deal. Yeah, that's a very exciting. Yeah, and that's really cool. That's such a testament to the power of games and why I love talking about games is there's so many people out there doing amazing, cool things and you don't even know about it until, you know, someone does a signal boost and the connections are made. It was strange to be working with a stranger that I ultimately ended up trusting so much. That's a really really neat part of the of the process is Sarah and I have gotten to know each other kind of like, you know, at war when you write letters or something. It's kind of what it reminded me of and, you know, we've kind of gone through a lot together from 1100 miles away. So that's been really, really cool and nothing but positive. It's been a lot of work, but it's always been great. So, Kate, you kind of mentioned that in college, you had your first attempt at bringing D&D into an alerting environment. Can you talk about that? Okay, so those are actually separate stories. What I realized was that that Dungeons & Dragons by itself was a two complicated tool originally to be run in a classroom of 30 children. Okay, is that make sense? I've been I've been in a D&D group with like 12 people and I totally understand. Yep, okay, so now imagine you've got 30 kids and you're supposed to deliver test-ready curriculum to them so they can graduate because they take one of their first most important tests in Texas in the ninth grade in English. So my job as far as anyone is concerned is to get these children to pass this test. Okay, so putting Dungeons & Dragons in the classroom, let me just table that for a minute. What I started doing in college was I dissected games because I grew up playing D&D, that's what I dissected and when they came out with fourth edition, they had a role system that and I'm not even going to remember them anymore because I changed them, but I created a role system in my classroom and then the kids create characters that help me manage the class with a classroom economy and some of the tools that class craft uses. So I created my turn my room into a adventuring party. Okay, so like the kids themselves make avatars, those avatars have a job based upon their role, the role is initiator, protector, diplomat, and sage, which match the fourth edition role out almost exactly. So in classroom, the way that looks is the protector keeps the peace. I have my kids in four groups of eight, they're in four oval shaped groups. So their role is overlap, which help a classroom, especially in the beginning stages of a year when you don't know them and they don't know you, the protector keeps the peace, their job is to say, chill out, chill out, you guys are too loud, you know, guys chill out, Mr. Wells is going to get mad. That's pretty much the protector's job is to settle the sputes and keep their groups cool. The initiator's job is to get up, to get anything, okay, they're that kid with 80-D or too much energy. The child you probably know on the first day of school. So the initiator role is designed to help them, you know, utilize that energy. The diplomat's job is to make sure that everybody kind of does their job of the protector isn't keeping the group quiet, then it's the job of the diplomat to keep the group quiet, you know, no leader wants another job to fall upon them. So it's usually pretty, you know, it's usually pretty effective. And then the sage's job is to help me keep the records. They help me take attendance, they help put stuff away, neatly in an organized fashion. And they take a personality test on like I think I do it on the second day of school, where it fits them into one of these categories. And then from those categories, I draw randomly what their initial group is going to be at the very beginning of the year. And I use the teenage mutant Ninja Turtles to explain to the children what those roles mean using images from pop culture that at least if you don't know them and watch the teenage mutant Ninja Turtle, all the kids know about the teenage mutant Ninja Turtle. So for comparison, Michelangelo is the initiator. Donna Tello is the sage, Raphael is the protector and Leonardo is the diplomat and all the kids understand that right away. And so that's how I originally decided to bring games into my classroom. So then what do these jobs do? Well, these jobs, the kids get paid or they don't get paid so that that pay goes into a spreadsheet every day when they do their job and they use that pay on their grade at the end of a three week grading period. They're able to spend what they've earned on their actual grades. So all of a sudden their behavior is in direct correlation to what they're taking home on a progress report. That's the first that's the first way I put day I get I use D&D. So that's the first way I put D&D into the classroom. Then I started running a club and I saw a lot of things grow remind me about that when you come back from Sarah Sarah go ahead. So I think my first big use a lot of reference has been kind of given back to this moment is when I used it with Bayowall. Kate does absolutely wonderful. I feel like use of D&D methodology and I think my strong suit for the classroom was using D&D as a way to immerse students in the text. So I would say and I think Kate you'd agree that's how we are largest differentiator and how we implemented it right? Absolutely. Yeah so in Miss Vane I had decided to kind of introduce D&D to both my honors Britlett and APLIT. They both weren't doing Bayowall but the the same kind of intro lesson stood was where I used it to hit upon their research skills. You know creating a character having to pull together resources to understand what you're doing. Using as a teachable moment to understand right again index glossary really hitting upon those you know nonfiction informational skills and tying it very closely to the curriculum in that way. You know once we established that foundation it became a whole game of really have you read the book and if you have how are we going to play this game? So it was super neat I had them jump into I was calling it the layer of the sea witch so they had to fight Grendel's mother but they had to make choices and I want to say appropriate to the text but that wasn't quite how it went. Like of course they had to defeat Grendel's mother using the great Runex sword right that's in Bayowall. However they could kind of go about this any which way they wanted so they traverse the map you know they're battling monsters who were basically subbed in for the descendants of Cain all of the environment was very closely tied to the literature so what it enabled them to do was really envision what was happening not only did they read about Bayowall and Wigloff and and Grendel they then got to talk to them and hear what they sounded like I mean of course through me but you know it was a whole different level of interaction with the text that of course they don't usually get and sometimes they could really and much to their you know happiness screw up the story right because I would have to adapt to their choices and I think that was another thing like Kay and I talk about it this a lot but parts of this role playing and showing yourself to the students and having the students really take on this kind of different persona to interact with the text it's so humanizing I feel like it brings us all very close together in a different way you know because you always kind of have students at an arms length right you always have that authority figure you kind of have this very set and wrote way of acting but to still have limitations and to still have guardrails and be able to show oh you actually have a sense of humor and yes you can make that wacky group decision and we're going to see what happens and you know what the role of the dice are going to tell us what's going on and it kind of removes that element of like us always dictating which I really like hmm so it was nice I think I think it really created a really nice ebb and flow and throughout our different adventures through different text from me the retention rate skyrocketed in their writing projects in long form essays and anything that had to kind of do with critical text and close reading I'm sorry critical text analysis and close reading they remember that's something it happens there and that was the most important part it wasn't just words on a page anymore and that was really what I felt was so valuable about it wow that's amazing yeah it definitely jumped out to me what you said like the ability to change the relationship between the teacher and the student you know just imagining my teachers English teachers were some of them were really good but you know it's pretty much okay go home read this okay now I'll I'll do a little bit of asking some questions about it and then that's how it's taught but you know I can't imagine any of my teachers trying to get into a voice or a character and then interacting with me in that world that that's like a totally different dynamic of understanding understanding literature but also understanding like okay this is a teacher this is another human being we're both improvising we're both trying to figure this thing out together and that's really really amazing the relationship that I built in my classroom using the role system turns me into a dungeon master in class so like I approach my students not like a teacher to a student but to like a dungeon master to a player and if you you know it's a similar relationship but the way that uh that I speak to them is very different than the way that other teachers speak to them so what you're saying is very true about like the power of that of disintegrating that bridge and I'm telling you if teachers could just adopt the gaming theory into their heart and treat their kids like players instead of kids they'd see a lot greater success a serenite teacher very very different schools my kids are title one high-risk high-poverty every problem there is you know you you name it they've been through it very different uh populations of educational level you know you got a kid in the class that you know it's scoring you know high 80s on standardized tests you got kids in the same class score in 23s and uh you know you have to teach them all so what she's saying about the relationship building and how the games end up breaking that down there's a bigger metacognitive process to all that where if teachers could adopt what gaming theory really is it's like your room isn't just a classroom your room is whatever environment you make it into and I've seen teachers plenty of teachers turn their classroom environment into a very negative bad environment I've seen teachers do nothing and then the kids run that environment my game environment in my room is is as good as a classroom in in my district I feel could possibly be problems are managed in class I have the lowest right-up rate of almost any teacher I know in a district where it is very hard to negotiate with some of the problems that these children have. And so I'd love to tell you that I sit around and play D&D with them all day, and that's ultimately completely untrue. But the philosophy of gaming and what it can bring into your classroom holistically as an idea has great, great power that could really change the way that kids approach school and the way that teachers feel about their kids. And I still haven't told you how I put D&D in the classroom yet. I still have my pinky up, that's how I remember. I have a lady in my department who crosses her fingers. So my second year as a teacher, I decided I was going to do it. I was going to roleplay D&D with my huge classes. I was going to train a dungeon master and I was going to create a Google slide adventure so that the dungeon master could take them through curriculum. And I did see some success in that and here was the issue I ran into. They had great fun. They were engaged and they were pretty much making up the game as they went along. Time ends up being the enemy for teachers nine times out of 10. It's time. So to train a kid, to be a dungeon master, to read the script, to take the kids through the adventure, you've got you've got hundreds of state standards to go through. You've got tests to prepare for. Like ultimately just the equity and time that it takes to teach them the game isn't equitable on first sight. Now what I'll say about that is if everybody gave time to teachers to actually do that, they wouldn't have to worry about all the test prep that comes later because the kids would be brilliant. I mean it's unfortunate. It's unfortunate truth. You've got benchmarks. You've got middle of the year exams. You've got papers to write and all of that implies. And so the idea of teaching these kids how to play a game, which would take about nine weeks, honestly. You're talking about the first quarter of the year to properly train four GMs in every class. And how to do this. It's not effective. At this time, it's not effective. If you put it on a one-to-one device where a child is going through a Skyrim style adventure with curriculum being delivered into their face would be highly effective. And it's probably the way that education is going to have to go. So what I decided to do is start an after-school club. And what I noticed in the club kids was kids who didn't talk, who were maybe sped and lap language learners and special education reading deficiency, whatever I might have been. All of a sudden the teachers were coming to me a few weeks after I started the club and they said, "Sounds so senior club, aren't they?" And I would say, "Yeah." And they said, "Man, she is a different girl. She helps peers. She raises her hand in class to ask her and ask questions." So my teacher's in the building started to notice the differences in these like 10 kids. I think it was at the time. And I was feeling pretty proud about that. And then I noticed the students that I had that were in that club. Their score started to increase. You know, I think we were talking about a percent or two, but in our business a percent or two is a lot. So then I decided to take them second semester my club kids and put them into reading intervention class, which is a class designed to help children with their deficiencies. So I took the D&D club kids and plopped them into an intervention period and I watched all the kids, all the kids scores go up. So there was something there ultimately and I created a creative writing role playing game that I call radioactive. And the kids were basically role playing and writing at the same time. And I saw some of the greatest success that a teacher can see and was so proud of what they were doing. And these children actually helped build a whole world. You know, not only did they make one character, they generated dozens of characters, factions, locations. You know, it was very, very cool. And then I realized fully in my second year there what role playing could truly do for a classroom and how many different ways teachers could use it. I think also, Kate, I want to go back to one of the great points that you illustrated. And I feel like you and I both get asked about this frequently, whether or where in the forum chatting right on a panel. But how do we actually tie this to benchmark, SGOs, you know, any of our actual objectives. And I think in part that's why we have really, especially for 2019, I've really tried to truly collaborate on teaching with D&D and really pull it together because this can happen in so many different ways in the classroom. But decisively, it's going to be the teacher having intimate knowledge about their actual standards that's going to kind of make or break this. I don't think it's really one of those things where you can phone it in and say the game will make the classroom better because ultimately the backbone still is formed through your lessons and through what you need to be teaching. And I think that's one of those things like we can't treat this as a silver bullet, but it's certainly, you know, it's magical to the students. And I think when teachers start to realize like they can almost, and the way I describe it is like you can wrap your classroom in D&D as if it's like a gift to your students. That was a really kind of corny analogy. But it's, I almost see it like that. Like you must have a good idea of where you want to go before you can implement something that, you know, it seems so far in the left field. But it's honestly just kind of like K to sing, you're taking that gaming theory truly to heart and you're implementing it and your lessons in a slightly different way than, you know, what we consider the norm. Yeah, absolutely. You two have kind of touched on it before, but I wanted to ask, you know, what are the qualities of D&D that first made you realize that it could be good for teaching literature and what have you found has been the beneficial aspects of it? I'm going to pop in real quicks there and then you take it. Yeah, you definitely start. Character creation covers about 15 standards of the standards and texts. 15. I probably have like, I don't know, 85 to 100 standards. 15 of the most important research standards are, are gleaned by just character creation. Okay, so that's just a very tip. I mean, that's the very beginning and you talk about kids who are reluctant readers. All of my students are reluctant readers, okay? When you put a player's handbook in front of them, just like when I was 10 years old, I think it's the artwork that pulls you in first. But then these children are reading graphs and charts, you know, all the stuff for leveling up is all on a chart. I mean, it's, it's, it's, and they flip in the pages and you can kind of see in their little faces. They're like, I feel kind of dirty looking through this book, but I'm going to keep terms of the page just somehow I'm kind of interested. So I wanted to start with that just character creation is 15 standards in English. Go ahead, Sarah. For me, I love that from the research aspect and having those kind of base standards. Like I mentioned before, retention, close reading, critical thinking skills, character motivation, and it really opened the doors for a lot of interspersion of like you know, I can still ask the same classroom questions to check in and make sure my students understand what's going on. But like I had easily hid them in monsters, like sometimes monsters would speak up and say like, before I can let you go down this path, you know, answer this question. And the kids would hop and puff about it, but they love the adventure so much that you know, they get excited to answer it so they can continue, you know, still being in that like immersive world. So for me, it was very much blending like things I already know that I would ask in a very standard lecture, but now, you know, maybe one of them is taking up a slip of paper. Maybe one of them is running across like I made something that was a little non-standard to D&D like these encounter tiles. I just called them that where you know, they knew if they stepped on it, they were getting a like standard English class kind of question, but you know, the rewards were, you know, gold, silver, copper or cool weapons or things like that. And like Kate had said, even running a classroom economy where they can start to trade in this gold to merchants to townspeople, to me, you know, we see a lot of teachers run classroom economies where you pay of course for a homework pass or things like that, you know, go to this along even further where, and I guess, you know, Kate would agree with this. Like it's not even like you're running an adventure at this point. You're now running an entire world and you have all these NPCs to take care of. You have these towns. You have students interacting on so many different levels with so many different, you know, people and all these people are you. So it's like, it's all these different facets of what you already know and what you already want to teach them, just spread out and I want to say almost like mirage like there's just like a thin veil in front of them, but that's what makes it fun. Yeah, you're totally tricking them into learning is what it is. I mean, that's, that's okay. Yeah. I got a good, I got a good caveat for that. So as, as department chair, I get the opportunity now. I don't have an intervention period of my own anymore. What I do is I pull students who are at need of intervention for special projects. Well, guess what that's special project. So I pulled 10 kids who are highly identified, which means they've got paperwork. If that makes sense to you, I know it makes sense to Sarah. So I've got an autistic child who's both special education and a language learner this year and autistic. So he's got three labels. I've got a child with a reading deficiency who's also got a special education. Mark, I've got a serious, lep student, a language learner from Honduras whose family has been devastated by what's going on there. I've got a child who another sped child who has another reading deficiency. So these are the kids that I picked. to do this and I pull them every other day to play 45 minutes of Dungeons and Dragons. And most of them, I want to say probably seven of the ten wouldn't say a word to anybody in the building all day long. And after a couple of weeks of making characters and you know getting them started with you know the idea of roleplaying is like, hey, what do you say to this person? And they had to get used to actually saying it. So when you're talking about language proficiency from a language learner, somebody who speaks Spanish in my case, when you're talking about I have to read this and synthesize the information in my brain and come up with an idea to speak to you. And then I have to listen to what you tell me back to be able to speak again in a character that's in an imagining a world in my head. The process that's going on in the human brain, I would have taken for granted as a 10 year old boy playing Dungeons and Dragons as a teacher seeing what it's doing for these kids. Oh man, in this intervention period that I have this year, I have watched these children grow socio emotionally, mostly. You know, the social emotional growth is happening right before your eyes where they all of a sudden they feel like they belong all of a sudden they feel like they're not alone all of a sudden they feel like their ideas matter. All of a sudden their character helps validate this child's existence in the world. For instance, beautiful kid, just wonderful, wonderful boy from Honduras. He plays a barbarian, his barbarian can kill anything. It brings this kid great joy to see the power that his character brings him through his imagination, through the camaraderie of the group. And I just think how unfortunate it is that it's only really effective at 10 kids. That's about where you really have to draw the line or you nobody get you know you don't get to take enough turns. And how the modern classroom of public education is going to make that so difficult to just let the kids play D&D because what I'm seeing is I'm just running a campaign with these kids. I do things like I gave them the first 12 pages of my fantasy novel and said yeah the puzzle coming up to dungeon rooms from now is going to you're going to need this or you'll die. And that was imprinted of course on the dungeon walls in previous rooms that they had disseminate. And so all of these students ended up having this paper folded up in their back pocket had highlights and annotations all over it. Now I got to tell you my students are not the kind of kids that walk around home work in their back pocket. So all of a sudden we came to play D&D and I was like okay guys it's the dungeon room. I've been waiting warning you about they all pulled this out of their back pocket. I see it's all marked up and everything. And they had to solve this puzzle based upon the knowledge that was in the reading that they had to do in terms of teachers doing classroom strategies for how to use role playing in their classroom. That's the easiest solution like they have to read a text just like Sarah was saying you got to read a text in order to answer the puzzle puzzle or your dead you know your characters will die. And they are aware of how much work it takes to make a character and they although they enjoyed it they don't really want to do it again. Oh yeah. Yeah. I mean even just to illustrate to that point I had one class and again I'll just use Baywolf as my reference. I know about half of them didn't read the text and Grendel's mother like wiped out half the class. It was awesome. I was laughing the entire time. I mean I was having a good time but they weren't but they kept wanting to play like it was this idea that like they knew that they kind of got caught out but they also let the group down. You know they were trying to achieve this mission and you know ultimately they couldn't because they just do a general lack of knowledge. And you can kind of see and this is where we see all that collaboration and teamwork really start to be instilled because it wasn't it's different letting me down. They don't care if the teachers let down. It's not something that's really a problem for a lot of students. But when they rely on one another in a game like that and in a scenario where they have special skills that they can employ at different moments that's when it becomes really different. There's a gravity then suddenly to these classroom choices. What you made me think of is people enter a game with the expectation that there is a path for them forward. There is a way for them to win or advance and school does not feel like that much of the time. You know even if it's not a test just homework you might not feel like the homework was fair because of one reason or another. But if you put into the context of a game you feel like games are designed for people to win for people to advance so it kind of changes your expectations about what's going to happen and you have a feeling that if you try harder if you try something new if you do things a different way that you can move forward. And I think that that's an amazing addition to education because oftentimes it's past fail. It's well you got this bad grade and it's going to stick with you for the next six months or the next year and it feels very very unforgiving whereas games are the opposite they want you to succeed. Yeah and and Kate I think says this maybe two to five times every phone call that we have but this idea that like here we said like we're building heroes right Kate I mean like that. That's the title of the book. Your I think everything that Kate really truly believes in for this is really encapsulated in in that concept of building heroes. My children after a D&D club I have them do a reflection at the end of every year and one of the reflections from a kid that I have in the paper when I went to Austria was something to the effect of. It helps you prepare for the real world because you were able to make the decision before you actually made the decision so like should I steal this loaf of bread because my team is hungry while I'm you look way the options and so. You know in a role playing world where the stakes are maybe some hit points or some jail time or maybe the mayor will hang you or who even knows at least it's happening to an imaginary character okay so say you're playing the sneaky hapling thief who just happens to get in trouble all the time and you get caught stealing something while that child in some ways gets to experience what it's like. To have get caught having get caught stole silly something excuse me that's a difficult sentence so they get that experience of oh you know I failed but I personally didn't have to go through it I just got to see it by extension and I've noticed that is a really powerful psychological tool for for kids very so as a parent let's say if you're a parent and you want to give your kids life lessons and do asips fables. You can actually teach them great life lessons using a role playing game because you can present them with the things that will happen without it actually having to happen. Yeah absolutely and long time listeners will know that most of the context that I talked about Dungeons and Dragons and role playing games is a talk to a lot of therapists and counselors who use Dungeons and Dragons to to build up people's self esteem to like you said with social skills. And that aspect of games being their real but they're not real they're definitely real and they're definitely not real at the same time because you get into that mental state of being invested invested in what happens to your character and what happens to the story but the consequences are in that world and they're not in the real world. So they like you said they let you play things out let you see how things happen how things unfold and think about you know how you feel about them how you react to them what what you would do in that situation and what regrets you might have yeah it's truly an amazing aspect of games. And there's a little chance to experiment like you know as I teach ninth grade kids in the hood so like experimentation is part of their life and if they get a chance to experiment with with low stakes they will have a better opportunity when the stakes are very high. I mean they they get it you can and as a teacher then as a teacher or a dungeon master giving them that adventure you give them the same kinds of little clues that they will give in their life and say hey you get a funny feeling the hairs on the back your next stand up what do you do oh I hide in the shadow you know like you know so they get a chance to kind of emulate the world in in low stakes and i've had lots of kids comment on that. The reading involved you know we're talking about an all time low literacy deficit in America and it's going to continue to get worse so something has to happen and done just the dragons as as a catalyst i've seen has done very very well just getting them to turn the pages and read informational text and then follow the trial because they're looking at the same kinds of things they see on a test you're looking for bolded heading you're looking for underlying words you're looking for vocabulary where do I find it looking. The index to me you know whatever might be look at the chart look at the graph look at the picture look at the look at the post script look at the foot note they learn to do all those things in just the players handbook for example. One question I want to ask was this is an experiment you know you've done these experiments in your classrooms were there any big speed bumps and your first implementations that you've learned and adopted from. Yes yeah it's very difficult to do it in a large class it's very difficult it's very very difficult now I did succeed in it in an intervention period for the last three years where I was running radioactive which was basically a boil down role playing system that I designed co designed with the Kennedy center. Rand this made this thing where you could turn literature into a game and blah blah blah so we we created some models and created some character sheets and once we created a model. character sheet. I was like, "Oh, I kind of like that character sheet." And it's just a really poise. I was playing a lot of fallout at the time. And I thought, "Well, that's a really cool world." I think that the kids, because one of the problems that the kids had in my district, is they couldn't understand a fantasy world. I mean, these children come in with very limited background knowledge. Okay, parents who, you know, 50% of their parents never read a book to these kids when they were growing up. So you're looking at kids who have never seen Lord of the Rings, who have no idea what Dungeons and Dragons are. And I would have a muse of a program called Hero Machine to make a character portrait. And here their fantasy paladin has got, you know, hat on backwards and saggy pants. You know, it's like, "Do it." Wizards, magic, dragons, castle. They just, there's no approach for them. And so I built this world called radioactive, which I felt was going to be more reachable for them. And it was. So I had game masters trained. And so in an intervention period, it doesn't matter what you really do as long as it works. And so it's a really great opportunity to experiment. So I experimented for three years. These kids helped me build the whole world. Okay, the whole world. And then they went on adventures together using the system that I designed. And then they reflected upon it using writing as a team on a shared document through Google, which has been beautiful, where all the kids can get on the same document and start writing. Well, then I realized, well, a document isn't really very game-like, is it? So I decided to start using slides. And slides allows the kids to put in an image with the text. And all of a sudden, their adventures became a storybook that they all really bought into. So we'd spend a couple of days playing at a couple of days writing at a couple of days playing and a couple of days writing. And oh, here's a test. Oh, wow, you guys did really good on your test. Let's play some more. Let's write some more. Here's another test. Oh, you did really good. And so it was successful, but I had to really boil it down. So what I would say to teachers is the rules are really very arbitrary. Whatever system you use doesn't really matter. I'm going to go back to the idea that it's the game philosophy in your heart and in your mind that will make the most difference. Yeah, I absolutely agree with that. The way that I run Dungeons and Dragons in K-DIS, that's an excellent point. It is so distilled and basic that it's almost as if we're not even using D&D at this point. But the inner is some very basic functional mechanics that I will use, but to his point, right, time is one of your greatest enemies and also classroom size. I had a very, very classroom classroom setup for my, you know, last year there. I had one class of 28 students and I had one class of nine students and then I had everything in between. So how do I manage that? Really, you know, is one class going to now be so set up in the adventure that the others are falling behind? What do I do with, like Kate said, a classroom of 30 students practically? How do you manage that? And, you know, these are all great questions that we've thought about for some time and it's really coming down to, you have to be very knowledgeable about what you can actually put your students through and what you can put yourself through as a teacher. That's why a big thing that, you know, we're pushing towards is making very modular adventures for teachers. You know, kind of having this, I had the luxury of 86 minute block schedules. You know, some teachers, you know, have the luxury. They have that 40 minute. Let's get started and let's go. So they really have to be careful and choose wisely, like which part of the adventure they want to use to best illustrate what they're trying to teach. And I think that's where a lot of those nuances come in and how they themselves are adapting the game. So I know it sounds like it's like, oh, well, you can pretty much do anything. It's not quite anything, but it is driven so much by that philosophy, like Kate is speaking to. A friend of mine who teaches world geography and social studies, we developed a tool over Chris's break on a Thursday that is a house building, slash country building activity. And he's a super geography nerd, super duper duper good at building game stuff. And we're just about to put, we're just about ready to put it on the website. And it's a cross curricular tool that shows all the things you would need for a functional society. And you have to buy out of a point system to decide what your household is going to be like and how that household interacts with other households that might be created in the classroom. So all of a sudden you have a game of thrones kind of dynamic that's happening among groups in a classroom. And it's like, oh, we got all the gold. Yeah, but we got all the soldiers. Hey, I'll trade you some of this gold, some of those soldiers. So then the kids will actually make the characters as members of households having stake in those households as a character. And so you're starting to see an overlay. What's the what's the religion of this household? What's the culture of this household? What's the who are the enemies or the allies? And this is all based out of world geography standards. And yet all the while they're having to read and make decisions. So it boils into English very recently. I've started delving into Starfinder, which is a super cool game, but smarter than Dungeons and Dragons. So even harder for my students to reach and I'm doing it anyway. So Mr. Westonized, the name of the guy, we're redesigning the household builder into a planet builder, which then go overlaps into science a great deal. So now you're starting to see a gamification that ends up overlapping into three subjects. And then you start having the kids draw a picture of their starship. Well, then there's art. So you have to start to do analytics on the, you know, the the numerics behind how often you're going to hit or not. And there you have algebra. Some of the dioroll stuff that I've been reading out of Starfinder straight out of an algebra problem on their on their assessment for the state. You know, it's it's really, really, really cool. But just tools can be built with gaming in mind. The kids will tie on to it if they see that you are trying to work as a teacher to make their learning experience fun. And that cannot be underwritten. Whatever game you want to use, I have teachers that use apples to apples in intervention period or in tutorials. And just the fact that the kids get to play a game will apples to apples is played with words, right? So anything that you can do with with games that are especially especially kinesthetic. My students in intervention when they roll the dice to see if they hit the monster or not or whether they made their check or not. The role is this this moment that connects them to this universe. And every child is on the edge waiting for that diet to stop rolling. And then they go, oh, you know, and it's super duper duper neat to see that experience that I got as a 10 year old boy that these children never would have gotten had they not come through my classroom. Mm-hmm. Oh, that really, yeah, I had a big D20 like an oversized one. And I sometimes felt like the tension was so real when I would roll it. I just, it was so interesting. I mean, it was just so wonderful to see how they reacted. I agree with that entirely, Kate. Well, and dice is recursive math. When you roll a D20, you're looking at variable numbers on your character sheet and those variables change when you level up. They change based upon what monster you fight. They change based upon the lock that you're picking or the mountain that you're climbing or whatever. So you're talking about a mini algebraic equation. And I'm very bad at math. And I worry to think what would have happened to me had done just in drag is not been a part of my life since I was 10 because of the purpose of math that's there. I've always been very, very creative. And I could write you a novel right now. But the recursive math that D&D forces you to do in order to play the game made me much better at math than I would have been had I never met the game. I mean, I can't, I don't even know. I should have horror that I think. I'm sure you're a very good a math as a rocket scientist. Yeah, just don't ask me to do it on air. Yeah, one time, one time I did a kilometer, some miles conversion in my head on air and it didn't work. So I don't do that anymore. Yeah, and you know, that's that's amazing too that kind of what you were talking about before that to play a role-playing game, even just a regular, you know, even just one at your house. It involves so many different skills and so many different ways of thinking. And then these things like the the math of it, you know, understanding things about like you were talking about from all areas of science, of geography, of culture, all of that can play in. And it's really incredible and, you know, it kind of leads you to the conclusion that maybe there's so much more that can be done with this and possibly even cover basically the entirety of or the variety of school curriculums of different subjects and combine them. Let me explain it to you this way. Yeah, this is this is going to be super easy. The children that I have that play fallout or Skyrim versus the kids that I have that play NB2K or Madden are very, very different students academically. Very, very. Now if the kids that play Madden, which I love, I love footballs, football players and all-star mental linebacker, which is hard to believe when I look at myself today. If I could get my kids that play Madden to play Skyrim, we'd have higher test scores overnight. You force them to play it like, I don't really like this game. I don't care, Timmy, you're going to play this game until you're smart. 30, I'm smart now. Yeah, you are because you know how to make iron daggers, you know how to upgrade them. You know what shopkeeper to talk to you, you know which world to go to in order to trade this or buy that. I mean it's you're talking about an immersive learning at its finest. I use Skyrim because that game has survived, you know, a long time and has just gotten cooler every time they've touched it. And the children that I have that play that game are very intrinsically bright and do like that immersive world. And I do know that if I took a kid who plays Madden and I showed them, hey dude, you can learn everything you want to learn by playing this game. They would play that game and they would pass their tests and everybody would be happy. That's a hard sell. Going up. Yeah, I know that a lot of people do see video games that way that games have helped them to think strategically or I know people who have have learned English by playing video games that, you know, the draw of games, like you said before, it's tricking you into learning. It's just so absorbing that you don't even realize how much learning you're doing, the types of skills that you're learning that an educator knows is valuable or there's a larger context to learning these skills and how they can be helpful in the future. Well, teachers' opportunity in a classroom is limited by what your students are going to be willing to do. Okay? So what teachers in other districts that aren't mine, what they don't see, or whole class as a kid saying, no, I'm not going to do that. What are you going to do, Chaz, when 30 kids look up at you and shake their head and say, I'm not doing that, what are you going to do? You're going to write them all up. They know they're getting zeros. Guys, I'm going to give you zeros. You know, like they're not, they don't, you know, if they don't care about the product of the grade, what do you do? Then the only thing you can do is get them interested in the product that they can create. So you create the most creative things that you can think of that the kids will build along the way and you get them to be proud of what they build instead of the grade that's going in the grade book. And that is very, very effective. You get them to build something they can be proud of. Now that might be a game or it might be a project like I do a project called Literal Analysis, which has the kids look at their music. They analyze two songs. They find the theme and they put it all in slides where they can put in images that relate to the song. They have to come up with an artist's purpose based on the themes of the two songs and then they have to make an inference whether that music will be listened to by their grandchildren or whether it will fade away. And they love these presentations that they're building. They dig deep into text. And although it may not seem like it, that does come from gaming because when I was a kid growing up and playing Dungeons and Dragons, I loved music just as much as these kids. And so although it may not seem like direct gamification, what you are doing is you're tapping into the same vein of the brain. So that same thing like I am a person who wants to show the world what I am and who I am. And my music is a big part of me, just like games are a big part of us. And so those sorts of products right now my kids are doing short plays. And I'm watching how the character creation thing I do at the very beginning of the year is now being very beneficial to them as they're writing these little bad five minute plays. So the learning all ends up being connected together and people shouldn't get too tied down on what they think a game is or isn't. What a game isn't is open your books to page 88 and do the questions at the end of the chapter. That's what a game isn't. Pretty much anything else that you can design that's you know got a one or more thought and it may be a little closer to what a game actually is. So earlier you talked about the origin story of how you two connected and started comparing notes. So can you talk about what your organization teaching with D&D is and how you help other educators? Yeah so the way that we've decided to go about this is I feel like recently we've decided to put together what I would call a community hub. So I think what Kate and I ran into over the past few years is that we have so many people reaching out to us from all across the globe. Sometimes and I can't I think you'd agree like our inboxes are frightening. There just isn't enough time to even answer to talk and it's like you see all these great stories out there and people wanting to connect and I think that's really what we're striving to do is to connect teachers who are doing vastly different things with D&D or even in the same we can just call it role playing games. They're all doing all sorts of different variations of these things and they're all seeking each other and I think that's the most important part. You know we'll get things from middle school teachers are saying oh have you seen it done this way anywhere else and I'll dimly think oh well I think I heard someone say something like that you know six months ago in an email so I think what we're really striving towards right now is creating content for teachers that guides them. So like we would talk about classroom management is a big problem modules picking out how to break up adventures is a larger issue when do you do certain things how do I time my curriculum. So of course some of the most basic things that you encounter as a teacher you want those you want those answers so we're striving to build those out to serve the community a bit better in that vein. I know that I'm trying to build right now a network of educators who want to contribute their thoughts to the site. I think that's going to be very valuable as people are going to start writing in. I just actually got my first recent article submission that will be going up probably next week but a teacher out in Canada how he uses it in his high school. So I think really having a lot of different voices come together and show what they do is going to be very powerful as we move through this. Hey and you have some great thoughts moving forward for what you were saying with radioactive and your world geography builder what other kind of things are you really excited for. I chased and came to mind I've got a neighbor at the at the high school next door who is an AEA teacher and AEA teachers teach the first year immigrants. So these children speak almost no English at all and he's running them through the minds of Fandover and he really larks a lot in order to help them with the language acquisition. He has all these cool little tools where one day he showed me a video where the kids are tracking goblin prints down the hallway and tutorials to find this goblin. So he's actually using the physical, the live action role playing along with Dyson. So these children are walking around the building with the 20s in their hands and when they find them then they have to roll a diplomacy check so they got a character sheet one hand and a die and the other. That's one of the coolest things that I've seen in a long time and I think that Chaston is going to be great for the website because he's doing constantly constantly. He's such a neat guy. What else moving forward in the future? That's what we're talking about. Oh boy. Yeah, I'm going to I'm trying to formulate a database that will utilize the core mechanic that Dungeons and Dragons released at the end of 3.5 on their conversion to 4.0 where everything became public domain and if that database can be created then learning systems can be added to that at infinite item really. So once you have the database created and as a rocket scientist this will be familiar to you. Once that database is created you can overlay whatever genre you could possibly imagine and push the button and it'll go. So that's something to me that's important using the radioactive system and refurbishing it to utilize that database so that I can start writing adventures that are specifically standard driven and that's what really needs to happen. So imagine you're a child and you're in a dungeon and you have to unlock the lock and on the outside of the lock is an algebraic equation and on the inside of the lock are some numbers and you got to line up the number with the algebraic equation before that door opens and if that's your whole learning experience you're going to learn a lot and you're going to learn it really fast. I really I'm striving towards building something that's one to one because what I see in my school the most effective tools unfortunately are through a screen. Children it's unfortunate like this is this is catch 22 because kids are getting worse and worse at interpersonal communication and I'm seeing that year after year. So when I roleplay a tabletop with the kids I see that interpersonal communication coming out but relationships in a classroom are becoming harder and harder to form. It takes longer and longer for them to come out of their screen shell. So in the forward movement of public education a tool is going to have to be designed unfortunately where a child sits in front of a screen goes on an adventure pushes the button gets an output takes an exam writes a writes a paper and all that exists in this world for this one child. Now it's possible that you know a multiple online roleplaying system could be fabricated out of that but you have to end up holding each child accountable for the learning okay that's one of the challenges is that yeah you agree got roleplaying party and the kids are what do you do about the kid that's trying to sneak you know Instagram on their phone or pretend seconds while their group is going through the dungeon. So the data stream that comes out is the important part for administration and superintendents and so forth. So in order for that stream to occur a product has to be built where an output is given for every input that is shown to the students. I hope that makes sense it's kind of a complex idea. So Sarah and I like it's cool because we we are very different people but we see the same thing and so we kind of work on opposite ends of the same rainbow and I feel that the pot of gold is actually in the middle. We have connected a lot of teachers I one guy keeps coming to mind is this this dude in Brazil who is teaching his kids English and he says you know all standard based driven stuff is arbitrary because these kids are learning English for the first time and he said I don't like long roleplaying and it occurred to me hey D&D is well how I learned like English. And so he's like, how do I get books? And we're like, oh, man, you know, like, bro, we got to buy him. You know, you got to just, you just got to just buy him. Um, you know, share, you know, come, come on, do a, do a, do a fundraiser or cook some brownies. You know, I don't know what to tell you. So it's, it's an interesting to see, like, literally how many different ways people are using it. And if you have low English learners, you know, it can be as simple as, hey, we're just going to play D&D and that will help them learn English. And then you have like what Sarah is doing, modifying pale wolf teaching them British and everything in between. So let Sarah and I are really trying to do is, is, is, is way too much work for two people. Um, yeah, we've, we've done decent at communicating with people to help as much as possible. And I see that community coming together more and more every day. I had to remind one guy one day where I said, uh, dude, we're two full-time teachers, you know, running this, you know, like on our, on our very limited free time. And he was like, oh, I'm really sorry. You know, I apologize for being hot. And I was like, hey, you know, I, as a guy who's hot most of the time, I understand where you're coming from. But the future of what this looks like, um, is the future. Honestly, as I see it, that if public education does not start to indoctrin some of these philosophies, you can say goodbye to it. Uh, if you've read Ready Player One, I think that's the most likely dystopian future that's going to be up. This may be ever been written. All right. Well, this has been a really amazing conversation. So how can listeners find out more about you? I mean, you say you're swamped, but all I can offer to you is hopefully get you more swamped with people who are interested or people who want to learn. Working people find you online. Of course, anybody can head to teaching with dnd.com. It's the endy, not the everstand. And they can check out the site, see where we're headed, kind of like our whole mission statement and values. And, you know, if anyone's interested, I guess my little call to action here is if you have something you want to say about Dungeons and Dragons and Education, a role-playing games and education, and you want to post and help build the community and help, you know, spread ideas via monsters, via modules, via even just like thought leadership. I am so ready to hear what you want to do and we'll make it happen. So I think it's really just again, for me, growing the community, seeing where it can go and really just helping out teachers. I think right now, Kate and I are pushing to go beyond the theory craft, right? We know that this works. We know it in our hearts. And right now, teachers need actionable items. They need things in their hands that they can say, okay, I can do this. I have a framework. Let's think about it and I can implement it. So that's really where we're striving to head right now. We have some very active members on our forum that have begun to help us with the workload. And so if folks have pressing questions, they can go to the forum, they can post the question. And there are a couple of guys there that are pretty diligent about answering questions. I think I thank God for them because it did it quickly grew. It's going to continue to quickly grow. Sarah and I are going to do more videos. One of the problems that I have is while I'm doing it, I don't really want to film it because I'm doing it. So I'm helping kids grow and learn. It's like, what am I going to do to set up a camera and have them panor to the camera and you know, it's just, it's the one extra thing where I believe in the philosophy so much that I almost don't want to taint it. And there are other people who are so much better at tainting it with, with, with, I get very much immersed in into the child's life and I want to help them. But yeah, the website and the forum are great. Sarah and I will eventually get to you a good story, maybe to close with as I had the senior in high school who's doing his graduation project on education, alerting what's his name, Avis, I think is his name from Chicago. And he emails me one day, the cutest thing or cutest little guy. He emails me and he says, "Hey, I'd really like to do an interview with you guys. I can't believe what you're doing. It's so great. I lead the D&D club for my school." And so I do this interview with this little guy, I think, and you know, hopefully 10 years from now, you know, it'll be one of my movies, this interview. And it just warmed my heart that this kid understood what I understood, you know, and he's 18. And he's like, "Yeah, I've seen what this club does for kids and I've seen what it does for their learning and I've seen what it can do for their future. And I want to know all about what you know all about." And for me, that was the ultimate validation was Avis wanting to do this as his graduation thesis on time. And I was like, "I can die now. It's good. Like, little brother at 18 years old understands it all and he'll take the torch if I happen to drop it." And so the reason I'm closing with that is because that is the future. That is truly the future. Well, I'll get old. We'll all die. Avis is 18. He's live in the dream. He understands what it can do. Sarah and I will leave a product that's continuing to build that other people can utilize. And I think as she and I continue to work and be and do the serious play conference this summer, all kinds of good is going to come out of that in July. And I think it's going to blow the community up in a really major way. I hope so. Yeah. All right. Well, thank you so much for coming on this show and talking to me about all the work that you do and all the crazy experiments that you've tried and all the ways you've been trying to build heroes. And I wish you the best of luck. Yes, Sarah. Thanks, Chad. Very much. I can't thank Sarah and Kate enough for coming on plus of intelligence to share their story and their methods. You know, I don't even play Dungeons and Dragons, but it keeps coming up because there are so many amazing things happening as role playing games continue to grow and demonstrate how they are a unique environment for people to learn and to grow. And of course, it's all based on the power of games to impact people. I really encourage anyone out there who has the capability to take a moment and check out the teaching with D&D forum and see how you can contribute. That's it for this week's intelligence boost. The subject of next week's episode was actually mentioned briefly in this one. We are going to be talking about a system for turning any type of classroom into a video game adventure. Next episode we are talking about class craft. As always, please subscribe to the podcast so you don't miss future episodes and join the Community Discord channel. You can reach the discord channel at discord.gg/+7. That's discord.gg/plus7. Thanks for listening. I'll see you in seven. universe. Have you ever wondered what businesses are doing and should be doing to tackle climate change? Then check out the award-winning and chart-topping podcast, Climate Rising, produced by Harvard Business School and hosted by me, Professor Mike Taufel. Recently named one of the best environmental podcasts by earth.org, climate rising shares a behind-the-scenes look at how some of the world's top entrepreneurs and business leaders are addressing climate change from climate storytelling and marketing to AI or generative agriculture and beyond. Don't miss out. Follow and listen to climate rising wherever you get your podcasts. Do you want the truth about the organic food on your plate? Then check out the chart-topping rail organic podcast. Recently named one of the best climate podcasts by earth.org, it's hosted by Dave Chapman and me, Lindley Dixon. Each week we feature eye-opening interviews with farmers, scientists, authors and journalists to uncover the forces reshaping the food system. From why corporate lobbying is redefining what organic means to how organic farmers are fighting back. So don't miss it. Follow and listen to the Real Organic Podcast wherever you get your podcasts.