Zach Diamond  0:03  
Welcome to the modern classrooms project podcast. Each week, we bring you discussions with educators on how they use blended, self paced and mastery based learning to better serve their students. We believe teachers learn best from each other. So this is our way of lifting up the voices of leaders and innovators in our community. This is the modern classrooms project podcast. Hello, and welcome to episode 177 of the modern classrooms project podcast. My name is Zach Diamond and I'm a middle school digital music teacher in Washington DC, and a modern classrooms implementer and mentor. And today I am joined by Chad Collins, who has taught sixth grade language arts up until January when he transitioned to a role as an elementary and middle school gifted and talented teacher. And I happen to know that Chad is newly a DMCE because I was the one who reviewed his DMCE submission. And we're going to talk about that a little bit later. But anyway, welcome, Chad, I'm so happy to have you on the podcast.

Chad Collins  1:04  
Thank you for having me on here. I'm excited to talk about this modern classroom energizes me a lot. I was basically nine years into teaching. And I think I needed something to energize me. I was also energized by a group that joined a teacher cohort that was part of our educational cooperative, we put together a group called the teacher navigators with kind of this goal of sort of coming together for sharing ideas on deeper learning, just ideas we had from the classroom, getting feedback from each other, sort of like the mentorship, you all do with modern classroom to a certain extent, we were bringing lessons and showing each other and things like that. And working in this group, I think energize me to it gave me new ideas. And that's probably where that's that's where a lot of the stuff with gamification really came to me. And that's kind of how all this got started.

Zach Diamond  2:07  
Love all these collectives and things that are happening in Kentucky, that's such a cool idea. And like such a, such an interesting way of sharing, teaching strategies and approaches and things. And I think that, you know, I wasn't your mentor, I did review your DMCE application. I think that you have just a very open mind when it comes to feedback big and I'm guessing that that's part of the reason that maybe you seek out or like are into these kinds of collectives, right? Because it's like a sharing of ideas. It's not like I'm protecting you, and meaning you need to fix this. It's like, we're gonna just all share, I could try this, you could try that. It was I was, it was just very refreshing to for me, because I gave you some critical feedback. And like the way that you reacted to it was so reflective and open minded. And I was mentioning this to you before as well. And I really appreciated that as a mentor. So yeah, that's just I think it's very cool to be participating in this kind of like, idea share world. Very cool, very interesting. And I'm gonna link whatever I can in there. And I want to learn more about this stuff. 

Chad Collins  3:13  
Yeah, it's been extremely rewarding. I've not been the teacher that it's probably really for me, just in the last two or three years when I've been like, Okay, I want to go get other opinions. I guess I'm usually that teacher who just listens, and hasn't participated in as much in the discussion. But now that I'm like, I'm at this point, I'm 10 years into my career. And I feel like listening up to this point has helped me a lot. But it's time for me to start getting involved. And if I'm going to continue to evolve as a teacher, because teachers have to keep evolving, I need to be a part of the conversation too. And so even, I don't think that necessarily for everybody has to be going and being a part of a big group of discussion. But even doing some stuff like this, where I mean, the mentorship aspect of it, getting some feedback on your lessons just a little bit. Modern classroom isn't a huge time sink, like going through the whole process. I've talked to all my colleagues, and they're just like, I didn't think it would be this easy. It's actually kind of neat, because I know how to make videos now, like the back and forth I think is important for education. And I hope that districts other than mine, I feel like Kentucky, at least around my area is doing a good job of starting to blow up this collaboration that we're doing. But I really hope that in other states, other teachers are having similar experiences where their administration or their district is saying, Okay, let's get you out there to go into other schools and like look and see what people are doing. Because now that I'm getting an idea of seeing what some other teachers are doing, I'm able to take that stuff and bring it in, and it's just been really inspiring, and really helpful. I think one of the neat things about gamifying a classroom or bringing games into a classroom is that it's getting a whole lot easier to do. With a lot of schools, of course, getting a little bit more technology into their system. A lot of websites and tools are building gamification into their platforms, gaming top websites, if there's teachers that are listening that have used websites like blookit, or Gimkit, or quizziz, things like that, I feel like are extremely great formative assessment tools, like study tools, and they've went in the last few years from essentially just being like, Okay, we just have a game for students to play to being these platforms that build in sometimes, like long term progression, the kind of things that you know, when you are out playing a video game, we start playing that game. And it's not like arcade games, where you put a quarter and you play for 20 minutes, and you're done. And you go on to another one. A lot of us are playing games now that we play, you know, for weeks, or months, or sometimes years, people get invested now. And I guess, I had been seeing these more accessible methods of just bringing games into the classroom. What do we ask our students to do? Day to day, if we're looking at the standard that we've practiced for an extremely long time, we have a gradebook where we put in a percentage base score that calculates over time we give our students papers back, they see their grade. And I don't think we're asking enough how much that really impacts or matters to kids. The number to me as a teacher for 10 years is helpful. But I teach a middle schoolers and you teach middle schoolers to and I see a lot of them get that paper, look at the 80 or the 90 on the paper, put it in their backpack and never think about it again. Yep. And I don't think education has to be just that. I'd really like education, it to be a story. And you get this a lot with things like project based learning where kids invest into something and build something and create something. But I think doing something with, you know, thinking about video games, or thinking about tabletop games, where kids are really invested in building something over the time, over time, my thought was, what if we could do that with a class. And so that's when I really started to dig into everything.

Zach Diamond  7:42  
It's kind of wild to think that there is a, there are enough teachers in Kentucky who are teaching based off tabletop gaming, to have a whole collective of it or a website of it. But like, this is why it's so important for teachers to share the crazy cool stuff they're doing exactly. I'm sure that there's teachers out there doing all sorts of wild stuff. And if we don't share it, it just lives in our classrooms. And if we do share it, this happens, like we get these really neat and new and different ideas. So yeah, that's that's just so fantastic.

Chad Collins  8:18  
Yes, we've got so Zach we have some theming. for it. We call it the academy. It is a school for heroes, essentially, the, I guess narrative background for it is that the students in my academic team class, the sixth, seventh and eighth graders have been transported to another world. And in this world, they have picked up, I guess, a character class based on the subjects that they are most interested in learning about. And they have a class corresponding to that. And they also have coursework that corresponds to that.

Zach Diamond  8:52  
When you when you say character class, just because this is a teacher's podcast, you mean like a class of character, like a like a healer, or melee fighter or something along those lines? 

Chad Collins  9:01  
Correct. So for example, our I have I've aligned it with the subjects that students would need to stay for academic team, which is basically everything. So arts and humanities students are Bart's if they're studying science, they are Rangers or archers, social studies, Knights, on and on. I've been doing this class for seven or eight years. Our principal kind of gave a suggestion to me when I was a newer teacher, and I was trying to do this academic team. We were struggling to get kids to come to practice. So Mr. Mercer, who's our principal at the time, and as our principal still was just like, Well, why don't you try to make a class out of it, and trusted a baby teacher to try to make something neat, and it ended up being extremely successful. principles that let teachers take risks is something that schools need to have. We built this class we started out with you know, have 20 students probably, I had another science teacher Sarah Parnell helping me out at the time. We ended up today we have a class of 80 students more than 80 students at this point. I've got two other teachers helping me out, we're in three different classrooms. But we all want our students kind of learning at this accelerated pace, stuff that they're not going to pick up typically in middle school. So modern classroom, the framework helps we do everything in this class aligned with modern classroom. To continue with the theming. Our students all have to complete a main quest every quarter. So if you're a ranger learning science, you have to complete the science main quest that aligns with must do activities, every student needs to complete these, if you complete one, you earn five XP for your character, and you need to have 100 XP by the end of the quarter to max out your experience game. For should do we have side quests, these are activities that students you know should get into, they get finished with their main quest stuff for the quarter, they can immediately hop into these. And these allow students to kind of explore things and other subjects because as you know, I think it's really cool that I have students, they can come into this kind of like special elective class, they love science, so they get a chance to study science for an extra class period. But maybe they also love math, so they can go and when they finish their main quests, they can get into some math activities on the side quests. And then we also have feats of strength, which are aspire to do activities, which are more like long term stuff with that we hoped they would complete either over the course of a year, or maybe it's something they build up towards. Because I'll have some of these students in class or collaborating with teachers for three years. And again, with talking about like building a story and getting them invested, I think I have kind of a unique opportunity to do that, with, you know, this longer platform and this collaboration that I have, but the alignment with MCP, and to having kind of this like fantasy branding, or video game branding, tabletop, whatever you want to call it, it just works. We have a little like currency system that students have. So if they complete a should do activity, I have some little like branded coins that I pass out to students, they save those, we've got a little I have a traveling market on a cart that I take to the three different classrooms, we do academic dmn, and they can spend these. So that's that's kinda like, Yeah, they'll save those. That's amazing. It's very fun to add, brought it around yesterday. It's very fun to bring a cart of snacks and candy to a classroom and give them to kids because they went above and beyond doing stuff. Yeah.

Zach Diamond  13:03  
It is a monumental amount of work that you've done. And so the idea isn't for listeners to feel bad that they haven't done it. Right. Just to marvel at how amazing it is. But I think also, like you said how much fun it was. I have said something similar about how I produce my instructional videos. Like I get really into it, you know, I'm into tech, I'm a music teacher, I teach digital music. I like editing video and editing audio. And so I spend a, an enormous amount of time and effort on those videos that I would never recommend other teachers do, right. But like, you know, you were talking before about how you, you felt like you needed some kind of a spark, right? Like you were getting into a rut or whatever, you did something and you found it like this, you do this because you enjoy it, you don't need to, like it could just be a Google site, and that will be fine. It would still be awesome. And it would still be gamified. But I think that just sort of in general, like allowing ourselves to enjoy teaching by by doing it in the way that we that brings us joy. I think that's so valuable. And I can see the fun that you had in making this. It's like it's and listeners, if you go and look at it, you will too. It's it's very evident from from what you've created.

Chad Collins  14:25  
And I have to say that the engagement is just it's crazy. It's the most of this most engaged this class has ever been. And we've tried neat stuff in the past. We've had some cool like badge systems and some really neat project based learning but I think this brought everything together. And the options they have combined with the theming the competitive aspects of it. These kids just really like coming into this class. And like like you asked, Are there kids that bounced off it? And I would say there's some kids that are absolutely don't care about the theming of the class. And that's totally fine. Like those kids that, you know, could care less that they, you know, when they're completing a mastery check are defeating a monster are still like, enjoying the fact that we have this system that still allows them tons of choice that allows them to play like a game when they're doing something instead of just a worksheet like, they're loving that.

Zach Diamond  15:30  
Because it's such an authentic experience, there's different avenues to extract enjoyment from this, if that makes sense. Like, I'll say that when I play video games, I tend to to be what you would call a gameplay person like I, I kind of don't care that much about the stories because I like developing the actual motor skill of playing the game and beating difficult bosses and things like that. Whereas some people are really, really into the story. And they put the game on easy mode, because they don't want it to be hard. They just want to see the story, sort of as if it were a book or a visual novel. Some games are called right. And I guess that even as I wrote this question, I wasn't thinking that that students might have different ways of engaging with what you've made. Maybe it's the theming, maybe it's the actual academics because they're interested in science, and just motivated intrinsically to to learn science. So that's really interesting.

Chad Collins  16:26  
Like a video game, you don't lose the video game, and then the game, your Xbox just shuts down and you're done forever, and it explodes. Like that's luckily, not that what happens, because none of us would be able to afford it. But it asked you usually most of the time, especially with modern games, what we're playing today, if you fall off the cliff, and Mario, it's going to bring your character back ready to go in just a second, like, you might have to wait a second, you might be a little bit frustrated that you have to go back a little bit just like a student would be in a mastery check. They don't want to not, you know, get 80% or whatever I'm asking. But I think they're also recognizing, particularly where what we do is kind of competitive that it's working. And you don't necessarily master it the first time. Okay, you can do this. And that's kind of inspiring for me as an adult to I think at this point, like, going back to talking about being terrified of this not working, it would be fine. If this didn't work sack like if we as teachers build something, it is extremely painful. If we put together what we think is an awesome lesson, and it flops, and the kids hate it and they're not engaged. It unfortunately happens. But it's also one of those things where I think we've got to be the same way with ourselves, we have to be like, Okay, I didn't get it this time. What can I do to make that work the next time. I would also say, if you're at the point, where I am, where you're working with other teachers who are getting into modern classroom, and they're actually getting help from you, like I've worked with some of my colleagues that are, you know, needed help recording videos, or just wanted to ask me how the process was, if I'm okay describing to them and helping them get into things. If I can teach it a little bit, then I would say to me, then that would put me on a track where I am a distinguished modern classroom educator. And that's kind of I guess, what I felt about the process, I felt that it was awesome, I felt that it was useful. And I feel like anybody who's been doing this for at least, you know, I don't know what the average length of time teachers who have done modern classroom has been in before they've applied. But a year is definitely, to me, I feel like you can have some good experience in the program by that point. One of those points of feedback was to try to build in some collaboration in the class that was kind of like cross object areas. So I could have something where like our magician class students who are learning math, maybe team up with students in science, the rangers and they do like a project together. We do have, you know, some students they want. They don't necessarily want to do those like collaborative things. They want to be in their own zone. And I think we have to respect that. But also give them some opportunities to kind of like, branch out and work with some others. I really loved that idea. And tried to do the thing with that where I was like, oh, let's try that and see where that hat where that goes. So I'm planning on doing that.

Zach Diamond  19:53  
listeners. Remember, you can always email us at podcast at modern classrooms.org And you can find the show notes for that. This episode which you should at podcast dot modern classrooms.org/ 177. We'll have this episode's recap and transcript uploaded to the modern classrooms blog on Friday, so be sure to check there or check back in the show notes for this episode if you'd like to access those. We are also asking our listeners to leave a review if this podcast has been helpful in supporting you to create a blended, self paced mastery based or maybe gamified learning environment. It does help other folks find the podcast so that would be super helpful. Thank you all so much for listening. Have a great week, and we'll be back next Sunday. Thank you so much for listening. You can find links to topics and tools we discussed in our show notes for this episode. And remember, you can learn more about our work at www dot modern classrooms.org. And you can learn the essentials of our model through our free course at Learn dot modern classrooms.org. You can follow us on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram at modern class proj. That's p r o j we are so appreciative of all you do for students in schools. Have a great week and we'll be back next Sunday with another episode of the modern classrooms project podcast.