=Paper=
{{Paper
|id=Vol-1997/paper6
|storemode=property
|title=Supporting teachers’ self- reflection and professional development with gamification
|pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1997/paper6.pdf
|volume=Vol-1997
|authors=Francesca Dagnino,Francesca Pozzi,Donatella Persico,Flavio Manganello,Andrea Ceregini
|dblpUrl=https://dblp.org/rec/conf/ectel/DagninoPPMC17
}}
==Supporting teachers’ self- reflection and professional development with gamification ==
https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1997/paper6.pdf
Supporting teachers’ self-reflection and professional
development with gamification
Francesca Maria Dagnino1 (0000-0002-2416-702X), Francesca Pozzi1 (0000-0002-
3592-2131), Andrea Ceregini 1 (0000-0002-8575-3962), Flavio Manganello1 (0000-
0001-7584-939X), Donatella Persico1(0000-0003-4574-0427)
Institute for Educational Technology of the Italian Research Council (ITD-CNR),
Genoa, Italy
dagnino/pozzi/ceregini/manganello/persico@itd.cnr.it
Abstract. The paper deals with a gamified approach developed to support teach-
ers’ reflection and awareness on a set of specific behaviours that can support in-
formal learning. The approach adopts a metaphor, vegetable gardens to be grown,
to represent the teachers’ participatory practice and is enriched with specific
game mechanics (tasks, goals and badges). The metaphor was reified in two dif-
ferent modalities: paper-based and digital. The approach was preliminary tested
with two groups of teachers.
Keywords: Teacher professional development (TPD), gamification, practice-
based learning, awareness.
Introduction
In the literature some authors claim teachers’ professional development is highly in-
formed by practice [1]. Thus, learning opportunities for teachers would lie mainly in
their work and in everyday interactions with students and colleagues. However, teach-
ers often work in isolation with limited sharing and collaborating with peers, which
support the claim that they need to develop further a participatory culture [2].
To nurture teachers’ capacity to work with colleagues and share their practices, we
propose to support their awareness and reflection on a set of desirable behaviours that
can enhance their professional learning by increasing their participatory skills.
Our proposal is grounded in the framework proposed by Littlejohn [3], which de-
scribes how informal learning takes place within communities of knowledge workers.
In the proposed framework, Littlejohn and colleagues [3] focus on the behaviours of
knowledge workers, while they interact within their personal learning network, or com-
munity, at work. In particular, they identify four key behaviours typical of informal
networks, called the 4Cs behaviours:
• Consuming knowledge created by others, by accessing sources of knowledge
wherever they are;
2
• Creating new knowledge, by amending, extending and structuring existing
knowledge. This is a continuous, often collaborative sense-making process that
generates new collective knowledge;
• Connecting with people and resources within one’s personal learning network, by
sharing experience and ideas, providing support to others or collaborating with
them. Connections can be local or global, two-ways or one-way, occasional or sys-
tematic;
• Contributing new knowledge, by offering the results of one’s knowledge creation
to the members of the network.
Persico and colleagues [4] have already instantiated the 4Cs behaviours to the case of
educators, by exploring the interplay between teachers’ professional practice and their
self-regulated learning (SRL) capacity. In the paper, the authors conclude that aware-
ness of participatory mechanisms “is highly desirable because, not only would it im-
prove SRL, but it would transform the pioneer teachers into fully fledged researchers
able to increase not only their own knowledge, but also the knowledge of the commu-
nity of practice they belong to”. This paper furthers this line of work by proposing an
approach to foster awareness of the 4Cs behaviours and, hopefully, increase the partic-
ipatory culture among professional teachers.
A gamified approach to support teachers’ awareness and reflection
on their participatory practice
To support teachers’ awareness and reflection on the 4Cs behaviours, we propose to
adopt a gamified approach. The approach is intended for groups of teachers working
together during workshops or in any other practice-based opportunity (online or face to
face) where teachers work in groups. The experience needs to be led and mediated by,
at least, an expert to guide teachers through it.
According to Deterding, gamification refers to the selective incorporation of game
elements into an interactive system without a fully-fledged game as the end product [5-
7]. Following Zicherman and Cunningham [8], game-design elements comprise game
mechanics (like scoring systems or badges) and dynamics (the effects of the mechanics
on the subjective user experience over time [9]).
The application of gamification in education and training has raised criticisms, since
there is a tendency to use a points-based approach to trigger learners engagement and
external motivation by means of rewards [10]. The limits of this kind of approach seems
to lie in its supposed motivational power, because the literature about motivation in
education stresses that the focus should be on facilitating people’s understanding of the
importance of what they are doing and, thus, favouring the internalization of its regu-
lation so that learners are motivated to perform a specific action or behaviour [11].
Our approach aims to go in this direction and is in line with the vision proposed by
Craven [12] for whom gamification in education should imply the configuration of the
experience in a manner that enables reflection, analysis and insight to occur.
3
In the approach we propose, specific desirable behaviours (the 4Cs behaviours) are
linked with the progression in the gamified experience, which is based on a metaphor
of group and community gardens to be enriched (described below), rather than points
to be acquired.
According to the model proposed by Blohm & Leimeister [13], we pursued two mo-
tives (social exchange and achievement) trough group tasks and badge awarding. The
dynamics triggered by the implemented mechanics were collaboration and collection.
The metaphor
For our purposes, we have adopted the metaphor of the vegetable garden, which is a
fertile ground that needs to be planted and taken care of, and we have developed a
narrative around this metaphor.
We envisage several gardens (one for each group of teachers) as well as a shared
garden for the whole community. In our metaphor, knowledge is represented by vege-
tables: knowledge produced by each group is represented by a specific type of vegetable
(carrots, tomatoes, etc.) and knowledge coming from the expert or from external
sources is represented by radish (see Fig. 1).
Fig. 1. Knowledge representation in the garden metaphor.
A single vegetable can represent knowledge at different levels of granularity: a sin-
gle resource or an idea created/consumed/contributed or connected by a group of teach-
ers, or something more complex.
In the metaphor, the 4 desirable behaviours (Consume, Create, Connect and Con-
tribute) are represented by actions teachers carry out in the gardens:
• Consume is represented by moving a vegetable from the shared garden to the group
own garden and consists in a group making use of knowledge items available in
the common garden.
• Create is represented by adding a new vegetable in the own garden (a carrot in the
carrot garden, etc.) and consists in the group producing a new item of knowledge.
• Connect is represented by connecting two (or more) vegetables in the shared gar-
den and consists in two or more groups communicating around an item of
knowledge
4
• Contribute is represented by moving a vegetable from the own to the shared garden
and consists in a group making available an item of knowledge to the other groups.
This metaphor, therefore, visually represents the 4Cs behaviours of the teachers by
displaying the knowledge made available by each group and /or by the whole commu-
nity.
Reifying the metaphor
In order to reify the metaphor, we have experimented two different modalities: reifica-
tion through paperboards and cards, with a first set of teachers, and through digital
boards and padlets, with a second set (see Fig. 2).
The two different modalities have been tested in similar contexts. The game mechan-
ics in the two versions were the same; the two versions were developed and experi-
mented to understand whether and to what extent teachers showed any preference re-
garding using tangibles in respect to digital objects. However, the preliminary data re-
ported in this paper do not compare the two sets, rather, they provide information about
the opinions of the involved teachers about the effectiveness of the metaphor used.
Fig. 2. Tangible version of the garden (left part) and digital version of the garden (right part)
In any case, the proposed narrative puts teachers in the role of farmers, who have the
scope of growing their own group garden with different vegetables and, at the same
time, to grow the shared garden. While working in groups to carry out a task during a
workshop, teachers discuss and – in doing so – they create, consume, contribute
knowledge and connect with other groups about a piece of knowledge. For each of these
4Cs actions, teachers are required to add the related cards to their boards (paperboards
or tablets), so that during the workshop the various gardens would gradually be enriched
with the vegetables planted by the groups.
To further support mutual exchange among groups, each group is invited to choose
one ‘connector’ (i.e. a member of the group) in charge of collecting knowledge from
the other groups and coming back to the group bringing the knowledge from the others.
At specific moments of the workshop, time is devoted to observing (in plenary ses-
sions) the gardens (paperboards or digital boards) and the ways they were evolving
5
through time, with the aim of supporting teachers’ reflection on the practiced 4Cs be-
haviours: vegetables observables in gardens reveal behaviours put into practice by sin-
gle groups and by the community as a whole.
To conclude the process, at the end of the workshop/working session, groups are
awarded badges, according to the most practiced behaviour. Such badge assignment
have the scope of increasing teachers’ self-awareness about their 4Cs behaviours. In
this way, groups can set their goals, session by session, to collect the whole set of
badges or just free to reflect on their behaviours.
Preliminary results
Teachers filled in an end-of workshop questionnaire about the proposed gamified ex-
perience. In the following, some preliminary results are reported. The sample was com-
posed of 34 teachers of upper secondary school, 10 teachers used the paper version, 24
the digital one.
Teachers were asked to rate their level of agreement about some statements on a
scale from 1 (Completely disagree) to 5 (Completely agree). Quartiles were calculated
for each question using SPSS 1.
Results are reported in the table hereunder (Table 1)
Table 1. Perceived usefulness of the vegetable garden metaphor (Quartiles)
Statement: “The garden metaphor was useful for…” 50°
25° 75°
(median)
Stimulating reflection on the use of ideas and re-
sources (made available by trainers, colleagues). 3 3 4
[Consume]
Stimulating reflection on new ideas generation in my
3 3 4
group or ideas/resources adaptation. [Create]
Stimulating reflection on the importance of discussing
3 3,5 4
ideas with colleagues. [Connect]
Stimulating reflection on the importance of sharing
3 4 4
ideas with colleagues [Contribute]
Stimulating reflection on the ongoing process of pro-
3 3 4
fessional development
As shown in Table1, teachers gave a moderately positive evaluation of the support
provided by the gamified approach to reflection about the different behaviours consid-
ered (4Cs) and, in general, about the process of professional development they under-
went. Medians are higher than the central value for the behaviours “Connect” and “Con-
tribute”.
1 Statistical Package for Social Science (https://www.ibm.com/analytics/us/en/technol-
ogy/spss/)
6
Conclusions
As already mentioned, recently the gamified approach was proposed and tested dur-
ing a teacher training initiative and delivered to two communities of teachers. During
the experience, the approach was reified through a paper based version of the approach
as well as a digital version. The preliminary results reported here do not distinguish
between the two versions, rather, they provide a preliminary feedback on the acceptance
of the approach by the teachers. A first analysis of the reported data reveals positive
results in terms of perceived usefulness of the gamified approach proposed to support
reflection and awareness in respect to the behaviours enacted. Results are encouraging,
considering that the approach is still under study and, of course, will benefit of a more
in depth evaluation.
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