Teaching, and studying education, often forces us to reflect on our own experiences as children. Studying Game-Based Learning - the integration of games in the classroom - has touched a topic particularly closed to my heart. As a child, much of my leisure time was dominated by board games with my father and sister. Most of all, Scrabble. Long, vicious, competitive, triumphant, brutal games of Scrabble, which frequently ended up in full-on arguments. Perhaps it's not a surprise that to this day, I'm still an incredibly competitive person, even if I've gotten better at staying calm when I lose.
I say this, because in studying games, we learned how the emotional and social aspects can be just as important as any specific language objectives. Learning to play means - or should mean - learning to lose, and even how to win respectfully. As a kid, the pleasure of games was in winning, not in playing. It's something I see in the children I teach today, and something that I feel we, as teachers, have a responsibility to manage.
Last week I played a simple game to practise irregular verbs with 9-year-old students, in which they had to work in teams. Eventually, one team lost after a mistake from one of their team. The recriminations from the other children were instant, and I could see the boy getting upset. Instead of letting it happen, I decided to step in and talk as a class about what we do when we lose, when we win, when one of our friends makes a mistake. In the end, I think it was the most valuable part of the lesson.
Games can be a great tool in the classroom, but we need to think carefully about how we manage the emotions that they can cause in our students. I frequently have to remind myself that something which, from my adult perspective, is a fun lesson closer, to some students will seem as intense as a sports match. Whenever we introduce the possibility of victory, we also expose children to the threat of defeat. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but we have to make sure that we're there to help our students learn to deal with both outcomes, and to be able to incorporate games as a source of pleasure, whatever the result.
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