Gather ‘round, friends. I’m going to tell you the story of how the system design of a #ttrpg is making a corner of the world a better place in elementary #education.
So California has a teacher crisis, right? It’s not that there aren’t enough good people who want to step up and teach; it’s that the burnout rate is incredible. There’s lots of reasons for that, but that’s not what this story is about.
One side effect of the teacher shortage is that there’s a huge demand for after-school tutoring. Some kids need help with homework, some need someone to push them a bit more, and some didn’t learn a blessed thing in school that day and need someone to start from the beginning.
As you can imagine, a lot of tutoring companies have sprung up. Some of them are trying to meet the needs of students, and some just saw the opportunity to make a lot of money on parents’ desire for their kids to have a good future.
In my experience, mostly that second type of company is winning. Your average tutoring company is a room full of tables with students being assigned work packets. The tutor’s jobs consist mostly of administering those packets and telling kids to stop fidgeting and focus.
The students hate it, the teachers hate it, and the educational value is about what you’d imagine, except maybe a little worse since it teaches kids to hate learning. Our story begins when one of these companies gets acquired by a new owner.
Now the new owner has done a stint of teaching herself, genuinely cares about education, and wants to do right by both the students and the tutors. The trick is, she’s inheriting a system that glorifies paperwork over progress and a staff that’s been trained on the same.
I’m an educational freelancer, and I get hired to help give this system the overhaul it needs. There’s a lot of challenges here, but one of the big ones is that some of the tutors have been teaching for years and some are 18 and utterly inexperienced.
How do you design a system that teaches people how to be good teachers and DOESN’T get in the way of teachers who are already good at what they do?
Good teaching is HIGHLY contextual. There is no one-size-fits-all for kids’ education. There are consistent underlying principles, but the application varies. If you want to enable good teachers, you need a system with a lot of freedom for judgement calls.
On the other hand, tutors without experience tend to freeze up real bad when they don’t have a clear process in front of them. We needed a system that supports them and trains them to be good teachers. One-on-one or even group mentorship wasn’t an option, due to cost constraints.
I was talking to my husband about the problem. I wanted to design a system using what Ursula Franklin called “growth technology”. It’s basically a way of doing things that creates an environment where the desired outcome will happen.
Since growth technology is highly contextual, it’s a good fit for education. The problem is, in our age of prescriptive technology, there’s not an overabundance of working models. The Montessori method shows some promise, but wasn’t a good fit for this company.
“Huh,” my husband commented. “Sounds like an RPG.”
Bingo. A lot of good ttRPGs out there that don’t tell you how to create a good story. Instead, they create a space that prompts people to tell good stories organically. Systems that train people to become good storytellers and say interesting things without a rigid process.
These games equip people with tools and put them in an environment that encourages them to use those tools properly and productively.
Since I’ve had a lot of success with PbtA games and new players, I decided to go back to the source material: Apocalypse World by @lumpleygames and @NightSkyGames.
@lumpleygames @NightSkyGames Apocalypse World lays out Agendas, Principles, and Moves. We set up a similar structure for the new teaching curriculum, focused not just on academic skill sets, but also on all the “soft” skill sets necessary for education.
@lumpleygames @NightSkyGames So for example, one of the principles was “Create a Learning Environment”. Some of the moves were “Set an Expectation”, “Limit a Distraction” and “Give Specific Praise”. We didn’t call them “moves” but secretly, that’s what they were.
@lumpleygames @NightSkyGames Other moves were things like “Teach a soft skill”, “Teach a hard skill”, “Design and play a game”, “Model work”, and so forth. You get the idea.
@lumpleygames @NightSkyGames When players get stuck, they look at their character sheet and their moves list. When tutors got stuck, we told them to look at their moves list.
@lumpleygames @NightSkyGames The system didn’t get in the way of good teaching because it gave lots of freedom for judgement calls, while still training newbies how to become good teachers.
@lumpleygames @NightSkyGames And here’s the thing: it’s working.
@lumpleygames @NightSkyGames The new program was implemented in September of this year. I just had a meeting a week or two ago with the new owner to check in on how things were going. Here’s a few highlights:
@lumpleygames @NightSkyGames Teacher turnover at the semester change dropped from 50% turnover to ZERO. Goose eggs. That saves the company hiring/training time and money, and more importantly, it means the tutors are happier teaching.
@lumpleygames @NightSkyGames Student grades are coming up. Not only are they learning hard skills like how to add fractions, but they’re also being taught organizational skills, so homework is actually getting turned in on time. This is HUGE.
@lumpleygames @NightSkyGames Enrollment is up. Current students are increasing the number of hours they attend, and new students are signing up through parent world-of-mouth referrals.
@lumpleygames @NightSkyGames The students are happier, so they’re not fighting their parents about having to show up, which makes the parents very happy as well.
@lumpleygames @NightSkyGames My personal highlight however, was this: The owner said there was a marked difference in how the tutors referred to the students.
@lumpleygames @NightSkyGames At the beginning of the year, tutors referred to students as “the students”. Now they call them, “my students.” And that, my friends, is what winning looks like. We got community, and we got people who give a damn.
@lumpleygames @NightSkyGames So there you have it. A #ttrpg about an Apocalypse and a world short on hope is helping to shape our world into a better place. Game on, friends. 
