Victory

Checkmate.  Collect all 6 pie pieces.  Defeat the leader of the ultranationalists.  Discover who killed Mr. Boddy, where, and with what.  Good games must have a victory condition.  Accomplish your final objective and you have won the game!  Good game players have a strategy, and will execute a series of moves, each small victory bringing them closer to achieving that final objective.

In education, we do have objectives.  But do our students know what the final objective of the mission is?  What will the students be able to do when they finish your course? 

Notice I didn’t ask what the students will learn.  Or what students will know or understand.  Learning is a totally personal thing – students within the same class may learn different things, and it’s generally not feasible to try to measure what they’ve learned.  But you can measure what they can do.

Unfortunately, many classes are more like Monopoly than Call of Duty.  We just go around and around, paying here, collecting there, and the final objective is so vague that we just play until we get bored or it becomes time to do something else.  Monopoly is one of the least fun games out there as far as I am concerned.*

Have you ever played a video game where the victory condition wasn’t clear?  Am I supposed to collect these thingies or shoot those thingies?  How often would you play a game where you just completed tasks with no idea where they were taking you or what you were trying to accomplish?

What will your students be able to do?

When I was teaching web design, I had an easy answer for this question.  The students will be able to create web pages using HTML and CSS, including original graphics, hyperlinks, and multimedia.  We worked on a year-long web page project and the kids saw how we added elements as we went along, consistently moving toward our final goal.    

When I taught math (Algebra and Geometry, predominantly), this was not as clear in my mind.  Graph lines?  Solve equations?  I knew I needed a clear idea in my head of what success would look like and how each unit worked to bring us closer to our ultimate objective. 

Because if I didn’t know, how could I tell my students?  Would they feel like they were working toward a goal or that we were just circling the board, killing time, until June rolled around and it was time to move on?

Figure out what your “end game” is.  How do you become a winner at U.S. History or English 2 or PreCalculus?   Post it on the board, put it on the syllabus, and most importantly, make it the focus of what you do all year.

Keep telling your students.  This is where we are going!  Here’s how this skill you are learning will get you another step closer to that ultimate objective and help us complete our mission!

And if what you are teaching doesn’t lead you toward your end goal?  Maybe you need to consider why you are teaching it at all . . .

*note about Monopoly:  I have spoken to students who love Monopoly, but they are generally either hypercompetitive or they introduce rules to make the game more exciting.  I’d rather play Clue.