Gamification: The Experiences of International Baccalaureate (IB) Teachers shared

Abstract

With the changes in the educational landscape, holding students’ attention has become an even more crucial point. Educators are having to find creative ways and means to engage students and make learning ‘fun’. There have been numerous research studies to show that gamification can be used to drive student engagement, achievement, and reinforce expectations of classroom behavior. These three areas have been important in the International Baccalaureate (IB) world. The need for the reinforcement of expected behaviors has been a noted area in the most recent executive summary; teachers are struggling to implement Approaches to Learning (ATL) in their daily curriculum. ATL skills include communication, self-management, and organization. Classcraft, a gamification system, can help to reinforce these skills daily driving academic success and student engagement. Gamification is not being adopted by teachers and college-level professors. The concerns and resistance are connected to time, beliefs surrounding gamification, and lack of training/knowledge. This research project set out to shine more light on gamification and its implementation into the classroom. By measuring the experiences of teachers through a mixed-methods process, the importance of professional learning and implementation was shown to be important for teacher adoption.