In August 2018 I had the immense pleasure of attending my first live action role-playing game at Bothwell School of Witchcraft. Everyone was given a character to play, and the action unfolded over 3 days based on the group’s collective improvisation skills as well as the groundwork laid by the organizers. I thought I was merely vacationing while indulging in my fascination with a certain fictional British magical boarding school, but it turns out even in a real castle in East Sussex there is pedagogical inspiration to be found.
Bothwell participants play either as a student or as a professor. While applying, I indicated I'd be willing to play a professor, since I literally am one. You can bet I would have added "3 days teaching Magical Defense at Bothwell School of Witchcraft" to my CV if I had been accepted! But as a role-playing novice, I was assigned a first year student character.
Those who were designated as professors had to develop their lessons for three years of students and teach each cohort twice. Each professor had their own distinctive style, and had clearly put vast amounts of work into thinking about their pedagogy. Without collaborating beforehand, and mostly with no teaching experience, these nine strangers from four different countries converged on some common ideas about what makes an effective lesson:
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Structure
Professors used a mix of practical and theoretical content – a discussion of background first, then practice in a simplified environment, followed by a larger challenge to test our newfound knowledge. -
Motivation
Professors used everything from awarding House points for participation (or removing them for misbehaving!) to "this might save your life one day". They all recognized the importance of keeping the material interesting and relevant through both intrinsic and extrinsic means. -
Delivery
This varied widely from person to person, but all were able to harness their creative energy to come across as effective and engaging speakers who were passionate about their subject. -
Interaction
Intuitively everyone knows that listening to someone talk uninterrupted for an hour is boring. So each professor included tons of interactive activities. We summoned (and banished) Daemons, fought monsters, brewed potions, and even acted out a play. Even in more theoretical parts, there were lots of questions posed to us and we were given the opportunity to ask questions as well. -
Peer Learning
Many professors had students work in small groups helping each other with problems. This benefits both the stronger students, who have an opportunity to learn through teaching, as well as providing additional perspectives on the material for all students. -
Connections
There were several themes of the overall plot of the game which were reinforced by the in-class lessons. This enhanced meaning by linking the individual lessons within the larger curriculum. The examples from my experience* won't necessarily translate, but it's easy to link statistics and actuarial science concepts with ideas that cross courses. You could note the similarities between Multiple-State-Models in a life contingencies course and regular Continuous-Time Markov Chains in a stochastic processes course, or emphasize the importance of checking model assumptions in every statistical modelling course. -
Facilitated Class Discussion
A particularly effective tool was allowing students to debate, ask questions and respond to each other, while the professor occasionally provided guidance or posed questions to direct the discussion.
These concepts of effective lesson design transcend disciplines and even provide value within a world of make believe. Perhaps we can remember some of these ideas in our own (albeit slightly less magical) classrooms! And if you'd like to give magical instruction a try, registration is open for Bothwell 2019.
* Magical History explored relations between magical and non-magical populations, Magical Defense taught about the power of casting spells as groups, and Daemonology taught how to recognize and exorcise people who are possessed, all of which played major roles in the overall story development.
