💡This was the first lesson plan I have ever designed to run in-game for ELT.
🕵️♀️I had added “Minecraft” in my classes before 2019, but mainly by 1) talking about Minecraft with students; 2) using Minecraft as a theme lesson for vocabulary and grammar structures with young learners; or 3) “just” playing with students outside the class time and informally to understand how pre-teens and teens used Minecraft for entertainment purposes, mapping out what they learned while playing and what the affordances for language learning and teaching could be.
🤷I had completely forgotten about this lesson plan, but thanks to Facebook I got it as a memory and could go down this memory lane and review some of the wonderful lessons I have learned in 2019. In this post, I’m going to share some of these memories and outcomes from creating this lesson plan, such as the value of running our ideas through other teachers, and the resources available today (lesson plan, recorded session of the event and the wonderful #must-read article that Jane Chien wrote afterwards).
🥇VALUE OF PEER FEEDBACK
When we are not sure of what we are doing, our peers/other teachers are the best people to listen to our ideas and help us reflect on our intended planning. By discussing it with them, explaining what we are trying to achieve and how, not only we gain valuable new insights but we may get an opportunity to collaborate. Jane helped me by reviewing it and adding her own contributions. ❤️ Dakota who is one of the greatest builders I’ve ever seen in MC also collaborated with us. His instructional designer eyes always helped me question my ideas and objectives. He was the one who prepared the area we needed to host this even. ❤️
Thanks to the collaboration that I was open to have with Jane and Dakota, an event was created to test out with EVOMC19 co-mods and participants. While I was more worried about observing how the implementation was going and capturing some of the interactions, Dakota and Jane were helping participants in our Building Challenge to understand the dynamics of our event and mediating the event. We can see a recording of this event here, recorded and posted by Vance Stevens in his Youtube channel. Language was not a barrier for any of the participants when we ran this event as you will see in the recording.
🥈LESSON PLANNING
The Minecraft task I was trying to focus on was BUILDING. Building is one of the core mechanics of Minecraft in Creative mode and a great part of what we do in Survival mode along the need to break blocks (mining ores, chopping trees, etc.) and collecting resources to craft items.
In terms of language level, I was aiming for kids with no ability to speak/understand English to elementary level. These activity ideas were just “ideas” based on our teaching experience “without” Minecraft and we had no English learners at the “beginner/elementary level at the time” when we ran the event in EVOMC19 so we can’t really say how effective this lesson could be in practice. For intermediate level students, this lesson wouldn’t really be difficult to implement as they would be able to understand the instruction and collaborate. In Brazil, however, it is hard to find kids between 8-12 at the intermediate level. They are more likely to be just starting or in the elementary level if they had been going to English schools since VYL or YL ages.
However, after teaching beginners/elementary children and teens in MineAcademy since Jun 2020, I can safely say that more than planning in-game opportunities for learners to use language in Minecraft, we need to carefully consider how we are going to ensure that learners are able to communicate for the intended activity or task proposed, how we are mediating and what resources we can use (in and out of the game) to support language learners and help them go beyond their current level.
Here is the lesson plan for you to review.
If you have watched the recording and reviewed the lesson plan, I look forward to reading your answer to the following question:
Considering that communicating in English was not a problem for participants, how could this lesson plan be pedagogically improved? Did the lesson plan/event gave you new ideas for tasks/activities? What issues would you run into if you tried to implement this lesson plan with your own students?
🥉OTHER VALUABLE RESOURCES
Based on our kids (Mattie and Emanuel) interaction during the building challenge, her research on lexical coverage of Minecraft videos and her experience/studies in CLIL, Jane wrote a wonderful article that I highly recommend reading and reflecting on.
The Language Triptych for Gaming that Jane developed has been particularly helpful for me during planning as it helps me differentiate and map out the language of gaming and language for gaming.
Here is a presentation I did for Braztesol YLTs SIG in October 2020 (I haven’t shared in my blog yet) with the lessons I have learned by running Mineacademy English Club, from June to October 2020, with beginner/elementary level students, and also what I consider when planning and implementing projects in Minecraft.
Why is it so important to consider METHOD, MATERIALS AND MEDIATION when crafting learning experiences? Check out Ludic Language Pedagogy (LLP) Journal to read more about the importance of making pedagogical decisions when using games.
ROSE BARD - Teaching Journal 