- Email: [email protected]
Designing a Place Called School: A Case Study of the Public School Quest to Learn
Katie Salen, University of California at Irvine, USA
Designing a Place Called School: A Case Study of the Public School Quest to Learn Abstract This case study will delve into the organization and engagement models developed to bring game-like learning to the New York City public school sector. It will explore design’s capacity to transform artificial systems, in this case a public school operating within the context of the US Department of Education (DOE). The case explores the role played by Mission Lab, a design studio embedded in the school and staffed by game designers and learning specialists. It then goes on to look at the school’s grade format (6–12) and its non-selective enrollment policy. Each defined a key aspect of the school model, from its innovative approach to collaboration, to it emphasis on continuity and diversity.
Keywords Learning Games Design Public education Play
Received December 6, 2016 Accepted August 24, 2017
Email Katie Salen (corresponding author) [email protected]
Copyright © 2017, Tongji University and Tongji University Press. Publishing services by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/). The peer review process is the responsibility of Tongji University and Tongji University Press. http://www.journals.elsevier.com/she-ji-the-journal-of-design-economics-and-innovation https://doi.org/10.1016/j.sheji.2017.08.002
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1 Greg Toppo, The Game Believes in You: How Digital Play Can Make Our Kids Smarter (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 96. 2 Katie Salen, Robert Torres, Rebecca Rufo-Tepper, Arana Shapiro, and Loretta Wolozin.
“Like most places dispensing big ideas, Quest’s vision and its reality were more complicated than people realized. Like most public schools, Quest is not perfect, and on some days it can feel quite ordinary. But like the best games its creators admire, it exerts a kind of quiet pull that is hard to describe. There’s a purposefulness that captures the imagination and won’t let go. Quite simply, it feels alive.” – Greg Toppo, The Game Believes in You 1
Introduction When Quest to Learn (Q2L) opened its doors in New York City in the fall of 2009, it was the first of its kind—a 6th–12th-grade public school purposefully designed around the core principles of game design and play. Its engagement model proposed to not only support learning with academic, civic, and career implications, but also to support teachers and students in taking on identities as designers. Through collaboration with the small New York City-based non-profit Institute of Play, the school sought to create a twenty-first century model for teaching and learning that placed kids’ interests and expertise at the center. While the curriculum would tackle all the required state learning standards, it would do so in a way that empowered students to see the world as made up of interconnected systems. Learning how to understand, affect, and ultimately transform these systems through a design mindset was a primary goal. I led the team 2 that designed Quest to Learn. This included the design of a pedagogical approach called game-like learning, the design of professional development structures, curricular structures, a student advisory program, an assessment framework, brand, and more. This case therefore presents a subjective viewpoint, albeit one informed by research. It will delve into several of the organizational and engagement models developed to bring game-like learning to the New York City public school sector—the largest in the US, with nearly one million students. In the interests of contributing to a better understanding of design’s capacity to transform artificial systems, I’ve chosen to focus primarily on one key feature of the model— Mission Lab, a curriculum design studio embedded in the school—rather than on the school’s pedagogical model, which is well documented elsewhere. As an organizational model, Mission Lab broke new ground in the way it initially integrated game designers into the day-to-day workings of the school. From a social perspective, Mission Lab played a critical role in cultivating a culture of collaboration that became central to the model’s transformative effects on its educators. Members of Mission Lab collaborated with teachers and students on the design of games and game-like curriculum, produced tools for use by students and educators in service of the school’s learning model, and provided professional development for the school’s educators. (See Video 1.) The decision to integrate such a feature into a public school was made in tandem with numerous other, more seemingly banal design decisions made by any organization opening a school in the United States—its size, grade structure, enrollment policy, status (public, charter, private), to name a few. By highlighting one “innovative” structure alongside several standard policy-level decisions here, I hope to surface some of the productive tensions that resulted. The case explores two policy-level decisions in depth: the school’s 6–12 grade structure and its non-selective enrollment policy. At the end of the article, I will reflect on the limits and possibilities of doing such work within a US public school setting.
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Evidence Base Throughout the case, I draw on research gathered through an extensive mixedmethods four-year study of the school that was directed by Richard Arum, Dean of the School of Education at UC Irvine and an established expert on school research and reform. 3 Arum’s comprehensive study included analysis of longitudinal growth on alternative assessments, including the College Work Readiness Assessment (CWRA+); analysis of longitudinal growth on English and Math standardized assessments in administrative data; and annual district accountability data and reports. Formative assessment reports were shared with the school’s Leadership team annually. The reports included key findings from both public accountability data and from the qualitative research, as well as recommendations and conclusions. Research findings on overall school performance include data from both traditional achievement measures, such as standardized test scores, as well as alternative assessments such as the CWRA+.
Background In 2008, when the idea for the school was developed, studies showed that 40–60% of high school students in the US were “chronically disengaged” from school. 4 A 2013 Gallup student poll highlighted the “school cliff” that saw massive drop off in student engagement between elementary and high school. 5 At the same time, youth were actively engaging with digital media at home, in stark contrast to most inschool experiences. It was becoming clear that the kinds of skills, knowledge, and dispositions that young people needed for success in career and life were evolving rapidly. Groups like Partnership for twenty-first Century Learning and the National Research Council emphasized the need for inclusion of skills like systems thinking, creativity, critical thinking, adaptability, and collaboration in curriculum. They argued that to be effective in the twenty-first century, citizens and workers must be able to create, evaluate, and effectively utilize information, media, and technology. The school therefore sought to create a learning environment that was responsive to the needs of kids growing up in a digital, information-rich, connected era prizing creativity, innovation, and resourcefulness. 6 Games and game design provided the basis for a pedagogical vision that linked research on how kids learn best with an engagement model that placed their interests and expertise at the center. Research has shown that having a passion for a topic or activity has a strong correlation with higher learning outcomes. 7 Inspired by research into the learning affordances of video games by scholars such as James Paul Gee, Kurt Squire, and others, game design served as the basis for a theoretical framework guiding the school’s overall design. The framework was published in 2011, and used as a kind of “design bible” as the school grew to capacity. 8 Learning to “think and do” like a game designer—conceiving rule-based systems, creating worlds in which players actively participated, using strategic thinking to make choices, solving complex problems, seeking content knowledge, receiving constant feedback, and considering the point of view of others—emerged as a primary goal for both students and educators in the school. Game-like learning infused the curriculum and the school’s approach to professional development. Learning was designed to be situated, interest-driven, hands-on, challenge-based, and infused with a spirit of play (Figures 1–4). What kinds of design supports were necessary for such a vision to be implemented and refined? The first section of this case explores this question.
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3 Conducted from AY2011–12 to AY 2014–15, the study includes 122 hours of classroom ethnographic observations, 108 annual interviews of all teachers and administrators, annual pre- and post- student surveys of educational behaviors and attitudes, and 148 interviews of representative samples of students at each grade-level. 4 National Research Council, Engaging Schools: Fostering High School Students’ Motivation to Learn (Washington, DC:The National Academies Press, 2003), 18, DOI: https://doi. org/10.17226/10421. 5 Brandon Busteed, “The School Cliff: Student Engagement Drops with Each School Year,” Gallup, January 7, 2013, http:// www.gallup.com/opinion/ gallup/170525/school-cliff-student-engagement-drops-schoolyear.aspx. 6 Mizuko Ito et al., Connected Learning: An Agenda for Research and Design (Irvine: Digital Media and Learning Research Hub, 2013), 8–9. 7 Diane F. Halpern, “Cognitive Science and the Work of Reform,” New Directions for Higher Education 2002, no. 119 (Fall 2002): 41, DOI: https://doi. org/10.1002/he.68. 8 Katie Salen, et al., Quest to Learn: Developing the School for Digital Kids (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2011).
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Figure 1 Quest to Learn students playing the commercial board game Khet as part of a science lesson on the physics of light. Copyright © 2010 by Institute of Play.
Figure 2 6th grade students playing Galactic Mappers, a game created by Mission Lab with teacher Ross Flatt (pictured) to assess student knowledge of geographical concepts and features. Copyright © 2013 by Institute of Play.
9 Katie Salen, “Game-Like Learning: Leveraging the Qualities of Game Design and Play,” in Postsecondary Play:The Role of Games and Social Media in Higher Education, ed. William G.Tierney, Zoë B. Corwin,Tracy Fullerton, and Gisele Ragusa (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014), 194.
Designing within Constraints
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Many learning institutions are trapped in an old paradigm—one that emphasizes learners as individuals, recognizes traditional lines of institutional authority, and prioritizes the ownership of intellectual property. As a result, they have very few mechanisms for responding in adaptive ways to innovations centered on creative collaboration, flexible engagement, and open access—hallmarks of living, working, playing, and learning in the digital age. Innovation is stymied by outdated infrastructures and policies, as well as by hardened boundaries between schools and other sites of learning. 9 As a public school, Quest to Learn operates within an urban school system that shares many of these characteristics. The New York Department of Education’s (NYCDOE) information technology policies, for example, have historically restricted student access to many of the websites the school’s educators write into their curricular plans. For example, during the 2009–10 school year, the NYDOE frequently
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Figure 3 Students playing Liferaft, a digital game created by Mission Lab to help students develop collaboration skills. Copyright © 2010 by Institute of Play.
Figure 4 Cell City Showcase. Students sharing the design for their “cell city,” a city designed to model the structure of a human cell. Copyright © 2014 Institute of Play.
blocked any URL with the term “game” in it. Additionally, NYC public schools are required to contract professional development supports for their school leaders and teachers through one of the city’s official school support providers. These providers are accountable to traditional school evaluation measures, such as school quality reports, and standardized tests. Supports stress individual teacher accountability, school compliance, and alignment with rigid assessment regimes. Given this context, one thing was certain—if Quest to Learn was going to achieve any level of innovation from a learning design perspective, it would have to acknowledge these constraints while also pushing against them. The school did so by focusing on its core values of collaboration and creativity. While union rules defined when and how much a teacher could work, they did not restrict how or with whom. Quest to Learn invited game designers to work with teachers on the design of their curriculum, as well as other learning designers and curriculum specialists from Institute of Play, the school’s founding partner. Institute of Play created
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Mission Lab as a design structure to house this team of external collaborators. The lab not only contributed to the creation of game-like learning experiences—it became the central engine of a culture of collaboration and risk-taking that was to become one of its most defining experiential features. The following section explores the design affordances of the lab, its outputs, and some of the productive tensions shaping its work.
Mission Lab
Figure 5 Mission Lab. An initial brainstorm session for a genetics game. Learning designer Eliza Spang, game designer Shula Ponet, and teacher Leah Hirsch pictured. Copyright © 2014 by Institute of Play. Figure 6 Mission Lab. Playtesting an initial paper prototype of the game. Copyright © 2014 by Institute of Play. Figure 7 Learning designer Eliza Spang and teacher Leah Hirsch observing a student playtest of their game. Copyright © 2014 by Institute of Play.
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From 2009–2014, Mission Lab was a working design studio housed within Quest to Learn. It was a structure unique among public schools in the United States for several reasons. The lab brought game designers and educators together with the young people they served, to design the learning experiences that would make up the school’s curriculum. It supported teachers in taking on identities as designers, rather than as content experts charged with delivering information to students. And it produced unique intellectual property—games, game-like activities, and other learning experiences all aligned with state learning standards. While many of these products were designed exclusively for Quest to Learn educators, some were made available to the public. This includes a series of curriculum exemplars 10 spanning different grades and subjects, plus digital games such as The Meaning of Beep, which was published by BrainPOP. 11 At its peak in 2013, Mission Lab sported a full-time staff of seven—three game designers, two learning designers, and two curriculum specialists. Institute of Play funded the lab through grants received from several large, US-based foundations. Members of the lab would meet with teachers daily, during planning periods or after school if the teachers requested it. Using a curriculum planning process 12 developed by Institute of Play and refined over the years in partnership with the school, teachers collaborated with members of Mission Lab on the design of game-like learning (Figures 5–7). Sometimes this included creating a narrative backstory for a learning activity with a role-playing twist. At other times, it meant designing visual assets—posters, playing cards, or videos (Figure 8). The design and play of games of all types—digital, paper, social, board—became part of this work (Figure 9). Mission Lab at times felt like a cross between a design production studio and an experimental curriculum development lab. The lab emphasized playtesting and iteration as core practices. Game designers understand that the only way to know whether or not a game is fun, playable, and engaging is to play it. A game without a player is just a set of rules. “Playtesting” early and often allows game designers to see their designs succeeding or failing in real-time. Well-designed playtests allow designers to tweak rules or features on the fly, providing feedback that can be used to improve the game’s design. Teachers were encouraged to test out early drafts of learning activities with students, and the school supported a student club called Playforce, whose core activity involved playtesting games and other activities designed for their classrooms. Playtesting encouraged a mindset that saw failure as a natural and productive part of teaching and
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learning. One educator explained that teachers “are allowed to take risks with their curriculum and really try new things and whether ... maybe they work, maybe they don’t. You can’t figure out what really works without going through a few things that didn’t work. That’s really successful. Now, that does allow us to make more engaging curriculum.” 13 The lab’s emphasis on iteration led teachers to incorporate student-led “modding” into the design of many of their games and classroom activities. Students would be given the opportunity to modify an assignment after it was run, altering it to better fit their skills or interests. Besides creating a context for valuable feedback, this co-design practice strengthened classroom bonds. Through this process, students recognized that even teachers didn’t always get things right on the first try.
Figure 8 Characters created for a math activity involving the search for the missing Professor Pi. Copyright © 2009 by Institute of Play. Figure 9 Mission Lab game designer Brendon Trombley discusses an early prototype of a math game, Absolute Blast, with game designers from the commercial game company Gigantic Mechanic. Copyright © 2013 by Institute of Play.
Building Capacity At the beginning, teachers worked closely with Mission Lab’s team of game design and learning specialists to create curriculum. As the school grew to capacity and teachers gained experience in developing game-like learning, they began collaborating directly with each other, and then with students. Institute of Play knew that staffing the lab at scale was unsustainable. Besides being too costly, doing so long term would rob the school’s excellent educators of the opportunity to grow into curriculum design leadership roles. Building internal capacity at the school was always a key priority. By time the school entered its fourth year (2013–2014), the process of transitioning away from a full-time lab had begun. One Institute of Play staff member explained, “It’s not that we are going away, but really to understand that IOP doesn’t own the school. The school is its own being. It should live and breathe with the people that are within it, and it should feel like it’s a living, iterative structure.” 14 Initially, teachers applied for a Curriculum Designer role in the lab, and were given course release time for this activity. One educator served as a Curriculum Designer for a year, before taking on the Assistant Principal position at the school the following year. Mission Lab was designed, in essence, to become obsolete as participants in its learning community gained fluency in the model. Research conducted during this transition period concluded “Educators generally spoke highly of the model and its approaches, with an increasing proportion expressing ownership and agency with ideas such as game-like learning and design thinking.” 15 Mission Lab developed toolkits, sample curriculum, video exemplars and other resources of Quest’s curriculum in action to aid in the transition. These resources are freely available on Institute of Play’s website, 16 and have been used by educators from around the globe to integrate game-like learning practices in their own classrooms. In this sense, the impact of Mission Lab has been felt far beyond the school’s walls.
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10 "Quest to Learn," on Institute of Play's website, accessed September 26, 2017, https://www.instituteofplay.org/ quest-school. 11 "The Meaning of Beep," on Brain Pop's website, accessed September 26, 2017, https:// www.brainpop.com/games/ themeaningofbeep. 12 Download the guide at https://docs.wixstatic.com/ugd/4401d6_11ec4a6eff0c4c178db7ad55aa9910a1.pdf. 13 William Max Meyer et al., “Quest Schools Report: AY 2013–2014, Connecting Youth: Digital Learning Research Project” (unpublished internal research report, September 1, 2014), Adobe pdf, 51. 14 Ibid., 7. 15 Ibid., 4. 16 Institute of Play’s website, accessed August 27, 2017, https:// www.instituteofplay.org.
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Figure 10 Collaboration between teachers is a core outcome of the model. Copyright © 2013 by Institute of Play.
Shifting Identities
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Traditionally, the teaching profession has been an isolating one. Accountable for the performance of students in their classrooms and faced with an ever-changing slate of rules and regulations, teachers rarely have time for lunch, much less collaboration. Most teachers, in fact, never have the opportunity to go through a process of design, iteration, and reflection on their curriculum. The pace at which they must move to cover the required standards is just too fast. By introducing an intentionally collaborative design structure like Mission Lab into this context, Institute of Play sought to change the experiences of teachers, and in so doing, the professional identities they held for themselves. Participants in the lab found it to be a place of collaboration, community, and creativity—three values central to the school’s design (Figure 10). On any given day a visitor to the school would likely see multiple instances of teacher collaboration—teachers working together on the design of a school-wide activity, students sharing feedback with their teacher about a lesson just run, or teachers collaborating with game designers on a game for an upcoming unit. Collaboration norms developed over the years were documented and shared with the school community (Figure 11). One such norm, “Share Ideas Freely,” took root in the school in an unexpected way. Some teachers began to talk about the fact that they saw themselves as designers. Freed from a feeling that their role was one primarily of content delivery, they underwent a shift in professional identity. As teacher-designers, they could take risks, fail in ways that improved their practice, collaborate, and create. This mode of being was in sharp contrast to the experiences of many educators working in public schools. And it was the reason that many of them chose to stay, or when they did leave, move on to positions where their design knowledge was valued and celebrated.
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Tensions, Failure, and Risk An agenda as ambitious as Mission Lab’s doesn’t come without its share of tensions and failures. Despite a strong professional development focus on systems thinking, many educators in the school struggled to find space for the ideas amid an ever-growing body of learning standards, including the Common Core. School leadership phased out block scheduling—which allotted up to 90 minutes for classes to do project-based work—due to a seemingly immoveable building bell schedule. A middle school internship program sputtered and stopped without proper resources to sustain its efforts. And teachers struggled to balance their workload as excitement over the possibilities of new curriculum collided with the reality of classroom schedules. Further, although Mission Lab was recognized as a support resource for teachers, many were not sure what to make of it. Most teachers saw curriculum design as their domain and wondered how they could make use of this unusual resource. Tensions emerged over the role game designers played in the curriculum design process. Before Quest’s community developed norms around collaboration, everyone struggled. Mission Lab’s game designers would seek input from teachers, but saw the games and learning activities they created as their own. Feedback sessions were fraught with friction as both parties struggled to understand their role in the process. Were the teachers the game designers’ clients? Were the game designers production assistants that could be tasked with designing posters, worksheets, and other classroom materials? This designer-client mindset took time and careful work together to overcome. The community as a whole recognized that they were building a culture from the inside out. Learning to collaborate was not only a student-level competency, but also one that they would need to develop. Mission Lab worked with teachers to develop tools, protocols and other resources to support their collaborative work together. The tensions have eased over the years, but not wholly disappeared.
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Figure 11 Collaboration norms guiding teaching and learning. Copyright © 2013 by Institute of Play.
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17 Richard Arum, “Downtown School Research Memo” (unpublished internal research memo, May 9, 2017), Microsoft Word, 2.
One area of tension threatened Mission Lab’s viability from the beginning. As the founding community partner, Institute of Play was free to create design structures like Mission Lab. But the relationship between Institute of Play and Quest to Learn was only held in place by a non-binding memorandum of understanding. The Institute, and therefore Mission Lab, served at the pleasure of the NYDOE. At any point, the NYCDOE could take the school in a different direction. This created a situation of uncertainty around the school model. Chancellors, superintendents, and school principals would come and go. As a publicly funded institution, Quest to Learn was at the mercy of shifting policy priorities at both the state and national level. How did the Institute of Play mitigate this risk? In addition to ongoing advocacy for the school, they worked with an outside research team studying implementation of the school model, as a way to build an evidence-base for outcomes related to the school’s progressive vision. While the research would in no way ensure ongoing support of the NCYDOE, if the research was used to consistently refine and reflect on the model it could help make a case for the approach. As a comprehensive longitudinal study, it could tell a more full story than isolated data like yearly test scores could. Final results from the study report the following outcomes. 17 • Based on NYC Department of Education academic progress report data, the English Language Arts (ELA) growth scores for students remained flat from the 2009–2010 academic year through the 2012–2013 academic year, and grew substantially in the 2012–2013 academic year. The school’s growth percentile scores for math showed much greater fluctuation. However, since 2010–2011, the school remains in the 60th percentile range, with a score in the 62nd percentile in 2012–2013, indicating the school is performing the same as or better than 62% of NYC schools. • The school was also compared with six other “peer” schools in Manhattan, with similar student demographics, incoming proficiency, and improvement in standardized test scores. In comparison to students in peer schools, students in the school scored higher in both ELA and math growth. The ELA growth percentile scores for the school were 4.5 percentile points higher than the average across all peer schools, and math growth percentile scores were two percentile points greater than the average across peer schools. • Student growth on the College Work Readiness Assessment (CWRA+)—a measure of critical thinking, problem solving, and scientific reasoning—was substantial. On average, student scores on the CWRA+ grew year over year between spring 2013 and spring 2015. Growth was particularly pronounced on the CWRA+ Performance Task, where students respond to a real-world situation, problem, or conflict. Beyond telling a rich story about overall school performance, the study also created an opportunity for reflection. What aspects of the school’s overall design contributed most to these outcomes? Mission Lab most certainly played a role. But were there other, less obvious forces at play? The following section looks at two structural features of the school—its integration of middle and high school and its non-selective enrollment policy. Each was an intentional feature of the school design model. Quest to Learn would enroll students from 6th–12th grade, a fairly unusual model within the NYC public school system but one that captured young people during their crucial middle school years and supported them through graduation. The school would also seek to enroll as diverse a population of students as possible. Quest to Learn would not rank students for admission based on academics, audition, or some other assessment. In what ways did these features shape the experience of school for students, educators, and parents?
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An Integrated Middle and High School As a 6th–12th grade school, Quest to Learn is both a middle and high school. Most schools within the NYCDOE are either middle schools (6th–8th grade) or high schools (9th–12th). Quest chose the 6–12 format because it would create continuity for students and allow them to grow within a community over the course of seven years. Additionally, the school’s emphasis on collaboration and peer learning aligned well with a 6–12 model. It would afford opportunities for mentorship across a larger range of grades. Many parents were excited about the 6–12 model. NYC public schools operate within a “choice” system, which means students in middle school can choose which school to attend within the school district connected to their zip code. Students apply to a number of schools, ranked in order of their preference. Based on selection criteria and available seats, students usually get in to one of their top three choices. Applying for high school operates similarly, except students are not limited to schools within their district—they can apply to any high school for which they meet the admissions criteria. For parents, the choice process is stressful and exhausting. And the process unfairly privileges certain families, as explained by Sonia E. Murrow in “School Choice, New York-Style? For Some More Than Others,” a blog post she wrote on a parent’s perspective of the choice process. “Importantly, many New York City parents cannot make their child’s middle school application process a full-time or second job like many of my peers have. Many parents face getting fired for taking time off from work. Many parents do not have the resources and time to prepare children for entrance exams and auditions.” 18 In a 6–12 school, parents only have to go through the choice process once, making it an attractive option for many. The format allows a family to commit to supporting a single school community from middle to high school. Avoiding the stress and hassle of the high school choice process also affords time to focus on college admissions. But a 6–12 model comes with significant challenges as well. As a new school, Quest to Learn had no high school track record prior to 2016—no record of college admissions, no established relationships with college admission officers, and no alumni. Interviews showed that many parents loved the middle school but were hesitant about continuing beyond that. 19 Keeping their children at the school through high school felt risky. In interviews from 2013, several educators at the school acknowledged that the unproven nature of the high school posed a problem for Quest, both for retention of 8th graders and for attracting new 9th graders. One Quest teacher framed it this way: “Through just conversations that they were having with their peers I kind of overheard that a lot of the parents were a little concerned. Not that they’re saying that this is a bad school, but I understand. We don’t have the proof, we don’t have the stats and we’re still learning and growing.” 20 A subset of parents worried that the unusual pedagogical model wouldn’t work at a high school level, given the increased pressures of the Regents exams, a series of five standardized tests that students must pass to graduate. Each year to date approximately half of the students chose to attend other high schools. While the school knew some parents would opt out at the end of middle school, given the school’s small size, the impact of having almost 50% new students in the 9th grade was larger than expected, particularly on school culture. Each new 9th grade class was a mash-up of existing students who knew the model and new students who didn’t. Because Quest to Learn’s model relied on students developing increasing fluency in a range of competencies not taught at most other schools, new 9th grade students were at a distinct disadvantage. Students who had been at the school since 6th grade had been trained in collaborative, project-based work for years. They understood the game terminology that infused the school’s culture and
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18 Sonia E. Murrow, “School Choice, New York-Style? For Some More Than Others,” WNYC (blog), May 23, 2012, http://www.wnyc.org/story/303165-school-choice-newyork-style-for-some-more-thanothers/. 19 Meyer et al., “Connecting Youth,” 16. 20 Ibid., 30.
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Figure 12 Mission Lab staff took on informal mentoring roles in the school, supporting students in interest-driven pursuits. Copyright © 2014 by Institute of Play.
21 Carol Goodenow and Kathleen E. Grady, “The Relationship of School Belonging and Friends’ Values to Academic Motivation among Urban Adolescent Students,” The Journal of Experimental Education 62, no. 1 (1993): 60–71, DOI: https://doi. org/10.1080/00220973.1993.99 43831. 22 Meyer et al., “Connecting Youth,” 30.
had been a part of creating its core values. The school initially struggled to address tensions between these different populations of students. Summer bridge programs aimed at bootstrapping new students into the model had only a small impact; many of the current students reveled in their role as “Q-dents”—a name students invented to describe their status as original members of the school—further alienating many of the students new to the school. In the end, it was the strength of the middle school experience in cultivating a sense of belonging that allowed the upper school to eventually integrate. Peer relationships at the school overall were strong, given the school’s emphasis on peer learning. The culture encouraged students to share their interests with others as part of schoolwork and bonds between students developed around these. Further, students developed positive, caring relationships with the adults in the building— including teachers and members of Mission Lab—who served as mentors for many students (Figure 12). Scholars Carol Goodenow and Kathleen E. Grady report that students’ subjective sense of school belonging has been identified as a potentially important influence on academic motivation, engagement, and participation, especially among students from groups at risk of school dropout. 21 So while many students were new to the school they discovered almost anyone could fit in. One seventh-grader put it this way: “Well, in a sense Quest is a kinda unique school. Everybody there is very strange in their own way. They’re not normal kids, so I fit in well because I am by no means normal, so I fit in well.” 22
Designing for Diversity and Inclusion As a “limited unscreened” school in District 2, Quest to Learn is open to any eligible student interested in attending. The school opened as one of the most diverse schools in the city and remains so today. Over half the student body qualifies for free and reduced lunch. Hispanic students represent the largest racial group, followed by White and Black students. Twenty-eight percent of the school’s students are special education students. The student body is highly diverse academically, creating mixed classrooms with both very high and very low performing students. Research has shown that many kids excel in such heterogeneous classrooms and Quest valued the peer
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mentoring opportunities mixed-level classrooms allowed. But the work was challenging for educators. While the school’s learning model was designed with differentiation in mind—its game-like quests could be customized for groups of students at different levels—significant challenges remained, due in part to ever increasing class sizes. This situation was not unique to Quest, as almost all schools struggle to some degree to differentiate their curriculum. But given Quest’s small size, degree of diversity, and learning model the challenge to effectively differentiate felt at times impossible to overcome. Because of this, Quest’s non-selective status was a consistent topic of conversation and debate within both its educator and parent communities. Many applauded the school’s commitment to diversity. Others felt like the challenges created by its admissions policy were simply too great given the constraints of a public school budget. Some parents advocated for the high school to become selective, which they believed would better the school’s chances of retaining top students from the middle school and attracting high performing 9th graders from across the city’s five boroughs. A large percentage of the school’s educators chose to teach at a public school because they cared about issues related to equity and access. Despite this, the idea that screening kids could be an answer to the challenges they faced daily in the classroom was discussed. One educator described the idea this way: “I think in general, the staff tends to feel like we’re losing our good kids…. They think that … the parents kind of get wise to the fact that we have a lot of special ed kids and we’re not a screening school. They think that the parents decide to have the kids apply to specialty schools or take them to private schools for high school….I think that the staff tends to feel like … it’s become like a city school…” 23
23 Ibid., 33. 24 Clive Dilnot, “The Science of Uncertainty:The Potential Contribution of Design Knowledge,” in Doctoral Education in Design: Proceedings of the Ohio Conference, October 8–11, 1998, ed. Richard Buchanan (Pittsburgh: The School of Design, Carnegie Mellon University, 1999), 66.
The idea that Quest has “become like a city school” strikes at the heart of what has made it so unique for those involved in its design and development. The project was intentionally situated within the context of urban public schooling. It was— from the start—a city school. Quest would serve students from all socio-economic strata, hire teachers following union rules, and comply with the city’s standardized assessment regime. At the same time it would build a parallel narrative around student success based on alternative assessments like the CWRA+ and embed a design studio whose output transformed both the identities and teaching practices of the school’s educators. Reframing what teaching and learning could be at such a school was in part, its primary challenge and its greatest success.
A Place Called School Design can be defined as the practice of exploring the tension between the existing and the potential. It is a mode of transformative action that, according to design historian Clive Dilnot, allows us to see “how we negotiate the limits of what we understand, at any moment, as the actual.” 24 Game design pushes this concept even further by legislating through the design of possibility spaces that arise from a set of rules. These rules give shape to the limits of the actual, and provide opportunities for players to discover these limits by pushing against them in creative ways. When this happens, the experience of play is born, in all of its transformative potential. The rules and constraints that order and govern any urban public school are restrictive. State standards heavily restrict what can be taught and standardized tests constrain how. Swelling class sizes curtail individualized attention and shrinking budgets limit support resources for students. Physical and technology infrastructure are outdated and inflexible; rules around seat-time harden boundaries
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25 Meyer et al., “Connecting Youth,” 29.
between schools and other sites of learning. As a potential site for innovation, the limits of the actual in public schools are both bounded and concrete. Given its unusual pedagogical model and the public school context in which it operates, it is not unexpected that Quest to Learn became something of a fish out of water. Designed to model twenty-first century learning practices, the school operates within an education system more strongly aligned with twentieth century practices. It is a public school that integrates, to greater or lesser extent, practices more often seen in the private education sector—time put aside daily for professional development, a focus on hands-on, project-based learning, and an embedded design studio staffed by game design and learning specialists. The school champions collaboration and encourages collective development of curriculum and learning activities, challenging established norms of individual authorship and teacher authority. It also articulates design as a tool empowering educators and young people to make choices and changes to the systems in their lives. Games teach players that failure is all part of the learning process. Players try and fail and try and fail again in pursuit of a goal, iterating on their play along the way. While certain structures in the school were fixed and immoveable, such as its 6–12 format and enrollment policy, others, such as Mission Lab, were malleable. Over the course of the first seven years of the school, Mission Lab offered a space for failure, iteration, and learning. Roles, relationships, and even its governance structure were redesigned as a way to bring participants together in a shared endeavor. At the heart of its work was a desire to understand the conditions that allow a school to become a good school. This meant moving beyond the idea that the school model was fixed—that it could somehow be bottled up and shared in product form. Quest to Learn was more than a model. It was a dynamic and ever changing place called school. One final note: Quest to Learn was born of the fact that in New York City, anyone can propose a new school. The process was arduous, opaque, and riddled with bureaucratic hurdles. But it was a process open to anyone with an idea, some resources, and a disposition to persist. Institute of Play had a vision and they found a partner in the NYCDOE. Seven years later the school stands, a testament to the hard work of many, especially its educators. Institute of Play has lessened their role in the school in recent years. Today the organization is contracted by the school as an external consultant, providing teacher training in STEAM (science, technology, art, and math) and leadership support around specific aspects of the school model. The change in role was planned from the beginning, but it is still somewhat bittersweet for the team that designed and founded the school. When asked about the possibility that the school might not stay the same, one member responded “I feel like whatever the school is, there’s so many things about it that I think are so fantastic, and … it’s a school. It’s a public school.” 25
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Designing a Place Called School: A Case Study of the Public School Quest to Learn Abstract This case study will delve into the organization and engagement models developed to bring game-like learning to the New York City public school sector. It will explore design’s capacity to transform artificial systems, in this case a public school operating within the context of the US Department of Education (DOE). The case explores the role played by Mission Lab, a design studio embedded in the school and staffed by game designers and learning specialists. It then goes on to look at the school’s grade format (6–12) and its non-selective enrollment policy. Each defined a key aspect of the school model, from its innovative approach to collaboration, to it emphasis on continuity and diversity.
Keywords Learning Games Design Public education Play
Received December 6, 2016 Accepted August 24, 2017
Email Katie Salen (corresponding author) [email protected]
Copyright © 2017, Tongji University and Tongji University Press. Publishing services by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/). The peer review process is the responsibility of Tongji University and Tongji University Press. http://www.journals.elsevier.com/she-ji-the-journal-of-design-economics-and-innovation https://doi.org/10.1016/j.sheji.2017.08.002
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1 Greg Toppo, The Game Believes in You: How Digital Play Can Make Our Kids Smarter (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 96. 2 Katie Salen, Robert Torres, Rebecca Rufo-Tepper, Arana Shapiro, and Loretta Wolozin.
“Like most places dispensing big ideas, Quest’s vision and its reality were more complicated than people realized. Like most public schools, Quest is not perfect, and on some days it can feel quite ordinary. But like the best games its creators admire, it exerts a kind of quiet pull that is hard to describe. There’s a purposefulness that captures the imagination and won’t let go. Quite simply, it feels alive.” – Greg Toppo, The Game Believes in You 1
Introduction When Quest to Learn (Q2L) opened its doors in New York City in the fall of 2009, it was the first of its kind—a 6th–12th-grade public school purposefully designed around the core principles of game design and play. Its engagement model proposed to not only support learning with academic, civic, and career implications, but also to support teachers and students in taking on identities as designers. Through collaboration with the small New York City-based non-profit Institute of Play, the school sought to create a twenty-first century model for teaching and learning that placed kids’ interests and expertise at the center. While the curriculum would tackle all the required state learning standards, it would do so in a way that empowered students to see the world as made up of interconnected systems. Learning how to understand, affect, and ultimately transform these systems through a design mindset was a primary goal. I led the team 2 that designed Quest to Learn. This included the design of a pedagogical approach called game-like learning, the design of professional development structures, curricular structures, a student advisory program, an assessment framework, brand, and more. This case therefore presents a subjective viewpoint, albeit one informed by research. It will delve into several of the organizational and engagement models developed to bring game-like learning to the New York City public school sector—the largest in the US, with nearly one million students. In the interests of contributing to a better understanding of design’s capacity to transform artificial systems, I’ve chosen to focus primarily on one key feature of the model— Mission Lab, a curriculum design studio embedded in the school—rather than on the school’s pedagogical model, which is well documented elsewhere. As an organizational model, Mission Lab broke new ground in the way it initially integrated game designers into the day-to-day workings of the school. From a social perspective, Mission Lab played a critical role in cultivating a culture of collaboration that became central to the model’s transformative effects on its educators. Members of Mission Lab collaborated with teachers and students on the design of games and game-like curriculum, produced tools for use by students and educators in service of the school’s learning model, and provided professional development for the school’s educators. (See Video 1.) The decision to integrate such a feature into a public school was made in tandem with numerous other, more seemingly banal design decisions made by any organization opening a school in the United States—its size, grade structure, enrollment policy, status (public, charter, private), to name a few. By highlighting one “innovative” structure alongside several standard policy-level decisions here, I hope to surface some of the productive tensions that resulted. The case explores two policy-level decisions in depth: the school’s 6–12 grade structure and its non-selective enrollment policy. At the end of the article, I will reflect on the limits and possibilities of doing such work within a US public school setting.
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Evidence Base Throughout the case, I draw on research gathered through an extensive mixedmethods four-year study of the school that was directed by Richard Arum, Dean of the School of Education at UC Irvine and an established expert on school research and reform. 3 Arum’s comprehensive study included analysis of longitudinal growth on alternative assessments, including the College Work Readiness Assessment (CWRA+); analysis of longitudinal growth on English and Math standardized assessments in administrative data; and annual district accountability data and reports. Formative assessment reports were shared with the school’s Leadership team annually. The reports included key findings from both public accountability data and from the qualitative research, as well as recommendations and conclusions. Research findings on overall school performance include data from both traditional achievement measures, such as standardized test scores, as well as alternative assessments such as the CWRA+.
Background In 2008, when the idea for the school was developed, studies showed that 40–60% of high school students in the US were “chronically disengaged” from school. 4 A 2013 Gallup student poll highlighted the “school cliff” that saw massive drop off in student engagement between elementary and high school. 5 At the same time, youth were actively engaging with digital media at home, in stark contrast to most inschool experiences. It was becoming clear that the kinds of skills, knowledge, and dispositions that young people needed for success in career and life were evolving rapidly. Groups like Partnership for twenty-first Century Learning and the National Research Council emphasized the need for inclusion of skills like systems thinking, creativity, critical thinking, adaptability, and collaboration in curriculum. They argued that to be effective in the twenty-first century, citizens and workers must be able to create, evaluate, and effectively utilize information, media, and technology. The school therefore sought to create a learning environment that was responsive to the needs of kids growing up in a digital, information-rich, connected era prizing creativity, innovation, and resourcefulness. 6 Games and game design provided the basis for a pedagogical vision that linked research on how kids learn best with an engagement model that placed their interests and expertise at the center. Research has shown that having a passion for a topic or activity has a strong correlation with higher learning outcomes. 7 Inspired by research into the learning affordances of video games by scholars such as James Paul Gee, Kurt Squire, and others, game design served as the basis for a theoretical framework guiding the school’s overall design. The framework was published in 2011, and used as a kind of “design bible” as the school grew to capacity. 8 Learning to “think and do” like a game designer—conceiving rule-based systems, creating worlds in which players actively participated, using strategic thinking to make choices, solving complex problems, seeking content knowledge, receiving constant feedback, and considering the point of view of others—emerged as a primary goal for both students and educators in the school. Game-like learning infused the curriculum and the school’s approach to professional development. Learning was designed to be situated, interest-driven, hands-on, challenge-based, and infused with a spirit of play (Figures 1–4). What kinds of design supports were necessary for such a vision to be implemented and refined? The first section of this case explores this question.
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3 Conducted from AY2011–12 to AY 2014–15, the study includes 122 hours of classroom ethnographic observations, 108 annual interviews of all teachers and administrators, annual pre- and post- student surveys of educational behaviors and attitudes, and 148 interviews of representative samples of students at each grade-level. 4 National Research Council, Engaging Schools: Fostering High School Students’ Motivation to Learn (Washington, DC:The National Academies Press, 2003), 18, DOI: https://doi. org/10.17226/10421. 5 Brandon Busteed, “The School Cliff: Student Engagement Drops with Each School Year,” Gallup, January 7, 2013, http:// www.gallup.com/opinion/ gallup/170525/school-cliff-student-engagement-drops-schoolyear.aspx. 6 Mizuko Ito et al., Connected Learning: An Agenda for Research and Design (Irvine: Digital Media and Learning Research Hub, 2013), 8–9. 7 Diane F. Halpern, “Cognitive Science and the Work of Reform,” New Directions for Higher Education 2002, no. 119 (Fall 2002): 41, DOI: https://doi. org/10.1002/he.68. 8 Katie Salen, et al., Quest to Learn: Developing the School for Digital Kids (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2011).
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Figure 1 Quest to Learn students playing the commercial board game Khet as part of a science lesson on the physics of light. Copyright © 2010 by Institute of Play.
Figure 2 6th grade students playing Galactic Mappers, a game created by Mission Lab with teacher Ross Flatt (pictured) to assess student knowledge of geographical concepts and features. Copyright © 2013 by Institute of Play.
9 Katie Salen, “Game-Like Learning: Leveraging the Qualities of Game Design and Play,” in Postsecondary Play:The Role of Games and Social Media in Higher Education, ed. William G.Tierney, Zoë B. Corwin,Tracy Fullerton, and Gisele Ragusa (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014), 194.
Designing within Constraints
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Many learning institutions are trapped in an old paradigm—one that emphasizes learners as individuals, recognizes traditional lines of institutional authority, and prioritizes the ownership of intellectual property. As a result, they have very few mechanisms for responding in adaptive ways to innovations centered on creative collaboration, flexible engagement, and open access—hallmarks of living, working, playing, and learning in the digital age. Innovation is stymied by outdated infrastructures and policies, as well as by hardened boundaries between schools and other sites of learning. 9 As a public school, Quest to Learn operates within an urban school system that shares many of these characteristics. The New York Department of Education’s (NYCDOE) information technology policies, for example, have historically restricted student access to many of the websites the school’s educators write into their curricular plans. For example, during the 2009–10 school year, the NYDOE frequently
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Figure 3 Students playing Liferaft, a digital game created by Mission Lab to help students develop collaboration skills. Copyright © 2010 by Institute of Play.
Figure 4 Cell City Showcase. Students sharing the design for their “cell city,” a city designed to model the structure of a human cell. Copyright © 2014 Institute of Play.
blocked any URL with the term “game” in it. Additionally, NYC public schools are required to contract professional development supports for their school leaders and teachers through one of the city’s official school support providers. These providers are accountable to traditional school evaluation measures, such as school quality reports, and standardized tests. Supports stress individual teacher accountability, school compliance, and alignment with rigid assessment regimes. Given this context, one thing was certain—if Quest to Learn was going to achieve any level of innovation from a learning design perspective, it would have to acknowledge these constraints while also pushing against them. The school did so by focusing on its core values of collaboration and creativity. While union rules defined when and how much a teacher could work, they did not restrict how or with whom. Quest to Learn invited game designers to work with teachers on the design of their curriculum, as well as other learning designers and curriculum specialists from Institute of Play, the school’s founding partner. Institute of Play created
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Mission Lab as a design structure to house this team of external collaborators. The lab not only contributed to the creation of game-like learning experiences—it became the central engine of a culture of collaboration and risk-taking that was to become one of its most defining experiential features. The following section explores the design affordances of the lab, its outputs, and some of the productive tensions shaping its work.
Mission Lab
Figure 5 Mission Lab. An initial brainstorm session for a genetics game. Learning designer Eliza Spang, game designer Shula Ponet, and teacher Leah Hirsch pictured. Copyright © 2014 by Institute of Play. Figure 6 Mission Lab. Playtesting an initial paper prototype of the game. Copyright © 2014 by Institute of Play. Figure 7 Learning designer Eliza Spang and teacher Leah Hirsch observing a student playtest of their game. Copyright © 2014 by Institute of Play.
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From 2009–2014, Mission Lab was a working design studio housed within Quest to Learn. It was a structure unique among public schools in the United States for several reasons. The lab brought game designers and educators together with the young people they served, to design the learning experiences that would make up the school’s curriculum. It supported teachers in taking on identities as designers, rather than as content experts charged with delivering information to students. And it produced unique intellectual property—games, game-like activities, and other learning experiences all aligned with state learning standards. While many of these products were designed exclusively for Quest to Learn educators, some were made available to the public. This includes a series of curriculum exemplars 10 spanning different grades and subjects, plus digital games such as The Meaning of Beep, which was published by BrainPOP. 11 At its peak in 2013, Mission Lab sported a full-time staff of seven—three game designers, two learning designers, and two curriculum specialists. Institute of Play funded the lab through grants received from several large, US-based foundations. Members of the lab would meet with teachers daily, during planning periods or after school if the teachers requested it. Using a curriculum planning process 12 developed by Institute of Play and refined over the years in partnership with the school, teachers collaborated with members of Mission Lab on the design of game-like learning (Figures 5–7). Sometimes this included creating a narrative backstory for a learning activity with a role-playing twist. At other times, it meant designing visual assets—posters, playing cards, or videos (Figure 8). The design and play of games of all types—digital, paper, social, board—became part of this work (Figure 9). Mission Lab at times felt like a cross between a design production studio and an experimental curriculum development lab. The lab emphasized playtesting and iteration as core practices. Game designers understand that the only way to know whether or not a game is fun, playable, and engaging is to play it. A game without a player is just a set of rules. “Playtesting” early and often allows game designers to see their designs succeeding or failing in real-time. Well-designed playtests allow designers to tweak rules or features on the fly, providing feedback that can be used to improve the game’s design. Teachers were encouraged to test out early drafts of learning activities with students, and the school supported a student club called Playforce, whose core activity involved playtesting games and other activities designed for their classrooms. Playtesting encouraged a mindset that saw failure as a natural and productive part of teaching and
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learning. One educator explained that teachers “are allowed to take risks with their curriculum and really try new things and whether ... maybe they work, maybe they don’t. You can’t figure out what really works without going through a few things that didn’t work. That’s really successful. Now, that does allow us to make more engaging curriculum.” 13 The lab’s emphasis on iteration led teachers to incorporate student-led “modding” into the design of many of their games and classroom activities. Students would be given the opportunity to modify an assignment after it was run, altering it to better fit their skills or interests. Besides creating a context for valuable feedback, this co-design practice strengthened classroom bonds. Through this process, students recognized that even teachers didn’t always get things right on the first try.
Figure 8 Characters created for a math activity involving the search for the missing Professor Pi. Copyright © 2009 by Institute of Play. Figure 9 Mission Lab game designer Brendon Trombley discusses an early prototype of a math game, Absolute Blast, with game designers from the commercial game company Gigantic Mechanic. Copyright © 2013 by Institute of Play.
Building Capacity At the beginning, teachers worked closely with Mission Lab’s team of game design and learning specialists to create curriculum. As the school grew to capacity and teachers gained experience in developing game-like learning, they began collaborating directly with each other, and then with students. Institute of Play knew that staffing the lab at scale was unsustainable. Besides being too costly, doing so long term would rob the school’s excellent educators of the opportunity to grow into curriculum design leadership roles. Building internal capacity at the school was always a key priority. By time the school entered its fourth year (2013–2014), the process of transitioning away from a full-time lab had begun. One Institute of Play staff member explained, “It’s not that we are going away, but really to understand that IOP doesn’t own the school. The school is its own being. It should live and breathe with the people that are within it, and it should feel like it’s a living, iterative structure.” 14 Initially, teachers applied for a Curriculum Designer role in the lab, and were given course release time for this activity. One educator served as a Curriculum Designer for a year, before taking on the Assistant Principal position at the school the following year. Mission Lab was designed, in essence, to become obsolete as participants in its learning community gained fluency in the model. Research conducted during this transition period concluded “Educators generally spoke highly of the model and its approaches, with an increasing proportion expressing ownership and agency with ideas such as game-like learning and design thinking.” 15 Mission Lab developed toolkits, sample curriculum, video exemplars and other resources of Quest’s curriculum in action to aid in the transition. These resources are freely available on Institute of Play’s website, 16 and have been used by educators from around the globe to integrate game-like learning practices in their own classrooms. In this sense, the impact of Mission Lab has been felt far beyond the school’s walls.
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10 "Quest to Learn," on Institute of Play's website, accessed September 26, 2017, https://www.instituteofplay.org/ quest-school. 11 "The Meaning of Beep," on Brain Pop's website, accessed September 26, 2017, https:// www.brainpop.com/games/ themeaningofbeep. 12 Download the guide at https://docs.wixstatic.com/ugd/4401d6_11ec4a6eff0c4c178db7ad55aa9910a1.pdf. 13 William Max Meyer et al., “Quest Schools Report: AY 2013–2014, Connecting Youth: Digital Learning Research Project” (unpublished internal research report, September 1, 2014), Adobe pdf, 51. 14 Ibid., 7. 15 Ibid., 4. 16 Institute of Play’s website, accessed August 27, 2017, https:// www.instituteofplay.org.
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Figure 10 Collaboration between teachers is a core outcome of the model. Copyright © 2013 by Institute of Play.
Shifting Identities
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Traditionally, the teaching profession has been an isolating one. Accountable for the performance of students in their classrooms and faced with an ever-changing slate of rules and regulations, teachers rarely have time for lunch, much less collaboration. Most teachers, in fact, never have the opportunity to go through a process of design, iteration, and reflection on their curriculum. The pace at which they must move to cover the required standards is just too fast. By introducing an intentionally collaborative design structure like Mission Lab into this context, Institute of Play sought to change the experiences of teachers, and in so doing, the professional identities they held for themselves. Participants in the lab found it to be a place of collaboration, community, and creativity—three values central to the school’s design (Figure 10). On any given day a visitor to the school would likely see multiple instances of teacher collaboration—teachers working together on the design of a school-wide activity, students sharing feedback with their teacher about a lesson just run, or teachers collaborating with game designers on a game for an upcoming unit. Collaboration norms developed over the years were documented and shared with the school community (Figure 11). One such norm, “Share Ideas Freely,” took root in the school in an unexpected way. Some teachers began to talk about the fact that they saw themselves as designers. Freed from a feeling that their role was one primarily of content delivery, they underwent a shift in professional identity. As teacher-designers, they could take risks, fail in ways that improved their practice, collaborate, and create. This mode of being was in sharp contrast to the experiences of many educators working in public schools. And it was the reason that many of them chose to stay, or when they did leave, move on to positions where their design knowledge was valued and celebrated.
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Tensions, Failure, and Risk An agenda as ambitious as Mission Lab’s doesn’t come without its share of tensions and failures. Despite a strong professional development focus on systems thinking, many educators in the school struggled to find space for the ideas amid an ever-growing body of learning standards, including the Common Core. School leadership phased out block scheduling—which allotted up to 90 minutes for classes to do project-based work—due to a seemingly immoveable building bell schedule. A middle school internship program sputtered and stopped without proper resources to sustain its efforts. And teachers struggled to balance their workload as excitement over the possibilities of new curriculum collided with the reality of classroom schedules. Further, although Mission Lab was recognized as a support resource for teachers, many were not sure what to make of it. Most teachers saw curriculum design as their domain and wondered how they could make use of this unusual resource. Tensions emerged over the role game designers played in the curriculum design process. Before Quest’s community developed norms around collaboration, everyone struggled. Mission Lab’s game designers would seek input from teachers, but saw the games and learning activities they created as their own. Feedback sessions were fraught with friction as both parties struggled to understand their role in the process. Were the teachers the game designers’ clients? Were the game designers production assistants that could be tasked with designing posters, worksheets, and other classroom materials? This designer-client mindset took time and careful work together to overcome. The community as a whole recognized that they were building a culture from the inside out. Learning to collaborate was not only a student-level competency, but also one that they would need to develop. Mission Lab worked with teachers to develop tools, protocols and other resources to support their collaborative work together. The tensions have eased over the years, but not wholly disappeared.
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Figure 11 Collaboration norms guiding teaching and learning. Copyright © 2013 by Institute of Play.
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17 Richard Arum, “Downtown School Research Memo” (unpublished internal research memo, May 9, 2017), Microsoft Word, 2.
One area of tension threatened Mission Lab’s viability from the beginning. As the founding community partner, Institute of Play was free to create design structures like Mission Lab. But the relationship between Institute of Play and Quest to Learn was only held in place by a non-binding memorandum of understanding. The Institute, and therefore Mission Lab, served at the pleasure of the NYDOE. At any point, the NYCDOE could take the school in a different direction. This created a situation of uncertainty around the school model. Chancellors, superintendents, and school principals would come and go. As a publicly funded institution, Quest to Learn was at the mercy of shifting policy priorities at both the state and national level. How did the Institute of Play mitigate this risk? In addition to ongoing advocacy for the school, they worked with an outside research team studying implementation of the school model, as a way to build an evidence-base for outcomes related to the school’s progressive vision. While the research would in no way ensure ongoing support of the NCYDOE, if the research was used to consistently refine and reflect on the model it could help make a case for the approach. As a comprehensive longitudinal study, it could tell a more full story than isolated data like yearly test scores could. Final results from the study report the following outcomes. 17 • Based on NYC Department of Education academic progress report data, the English Language Arts (ELA) growth scores for students remained flat from the 2009–2010 academic year through the 2012–2013 academic year, and grew substantially in the 2012–2013 academic year. The school’s growth percentile scores for math showed much greater fluctuation. However, since 2010–2011, the school remains in the 60th percentile range, with a score in the 62nd percentile in 2012–2013, indicating the school is performing the same as or better than 62% of NYC schools. • The school was also compared with six other “peer” schools in Manhattan, with similar student demographics, incoming proficiency, and improvement in standardized test scores. In comparison to students in peer schools, students in the school scored higher in both ELA and math growth. The ELA growth percentile scores for the school were 4.5 percentile points higher than the average across all peer schools, and math growth percentile scores were two percentile points greater than the average across peer schools. • Student growth on the College Work Readiness Assessment (CWRA+)—a measure of critical thinking, problem solving, and scientific reasoning—was substantial. On average, student scores on the CWRA+ grew year over year between spring 2013 and spring 2015. Growth was particularly pronounced on the CWRA+ Performance Task, where students respond to a real-world situation, problem, or conflict. Beyond telling a rich story about overall school performance, the study also created an opportunity for reflection. What aspects of the school’s overall design contributed most to these outcomes? Mission Lab most certainly played a role. But were there other, less obvious forces at play? The following section looks at two structural features of the school—its integration of middle and high school and its non-selective enrollment policy. Each was an intentional feature of the school design model. Quest to Learn would enroll students from 6th–12th grade, a fairly unusual model within the NYC public school system but one that captured young people during their crucial middle school years and supported them through graduation. The school would also seek to enroll as diverse a population of students as possible. Quest to Learn would not rank students for admission based on academics, audition, or some other assessment. In what ways did these features shape the experience of school for students, educators, and parents?
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An Integrated Middle and High School As a 6th–12th grade school, Quest to Learn is both a middle and high school. Most schools within the NYCDOE are either middle schools (6th–8th grade) or high schools (9th–12th). Quest chose the 6–12 format because it would create continuity for students and allow them to grow within a community over the course of seven years. Additionally, the school’s emphasis on collaboration and peer learning aligned well with a 6–12 model. It would afford opportunities for mentorship across a larger range of grades. Many parents were excited about the 6–12 model. NYC public schools operate within a “choice” system, which means students in middle school can choose which school to attend within the school district connected to their zip code. Students apply to a number of schools, ranked in order of their preference. Based on selection criteria and available seats, students usually get in to one of their top three choices. Applying for high school operates similarly, except students are not limited to schools within their district—they can apply to any high school for which they meet the admissions criteria. For parents, the choice process is stressful and exhausting. And the process unfairly privileges certain families, as explained by Sonia E. Murrow in “School Choice, New York-Style? For Some More Than Others,” a blog post she wrote on a parent’s perspective of the choice process. “Importantly, many New York City parents cannot make their child’s middle school application process a full-time or second job like many of my peers have. Many parents face getting fired for taking time off from work. Many parents do not have the resources and time to prepare children for entrance exams and auditions.” 18 In a 6–12 school, parents only have to go through the choice process once, making it an attractive option for many. The format allows a family to commit to supporting a single school community from middle to high school. Avoiding the stress and hassle of the high school choice process also affords time to focus on college admissions. But a 6–12 model comes with significant challenges as well. As a new school, Quest to Learn had no high school track record prior to 2016—no record of college admissions, no established relationships with college admission officers, and no alumni. Interviews showed that many parents loved the middle school but were hesitant about continuing beyond that. 19 Keeping their children at the school through high school felt risky. In interviews from 2013, several educators at the school acknowledged that the unproven nature of the high school posed a problem for Quest, both for retention of 8th graders and for attracting new 9th graders. One Quest teacher framed it this way: “Through just conversations that they were having with their peers I kind of overheard that a lot of the parents were a little concerned. Not that they’re saying that this is a bad school, but I understand. We don’t have the proof, we don’t have the stats and we’re still learning and growing.” 20 A subset of parents worried that the unusual pedagogical model wouldn’t work at a high school level, given the increased pressures of the Regents exams, a series of five standardized tests that students must pass to graduate. Each year to date approximately half of the students chose to attend other high schools. While the school knew some parents would opt out at the end of middle school, given the school’s small size, the impact of having almost 50% new students in the 9th grade was larger than expected, particularly on school culture. Each new 9th grade class was a mash-up of existing students who knew the model and new students who didn’t. Because Quest to Learn’s model relied on students developing increasing fluency in a range of competencies not taught at most other schools, new 9th grade students were at a distinct disadvantage. Students who had been at the school since 6th grade had been trained in collaborative, project-based work for years. They understood the game terminology that infused the school’s culture and
Designing a Place Called School
18 Sonia E. Murrow, “School Choice, New York-Style? For Some More Than Others,” WNYC (blog), May 23, 2012, http://www.wnyc.org/story/303165-school-choice-newyork-style-for-some-more-thanothers/. 19 Meyer et al., “Connecting Youth,” 16. 20 Ibid., 30.
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Figure 12 Mission Lab staff took on informal mentoring roles in the school, supporting students in interest-driven pursuits. Copyright © 2014 by Institute of Play.
21 Carol Goodenow and Kathleen E. Grady, “The Relationship of School Belonging and Friends’ Values to Academic Motivation among Urban Adolescent Students,” The Journal of Experimental Education 62, no. 1 (1993): 60–71, DOI: https://doi. org/10.1080/00220973.1993.99 43831. 22 Meyer et al., “Connecting Youth,” 30.
had been a part of creating its core values. The school initially struggled to address tensions between these different populations of students. Summer bridge programs aimed at bootstrapping new students into the model had only a small impact; many of the current students reveled in their role as “Q-dents”—a name students invented to describe their status as original members of the school—further alienating many of the students new to the school. In the end, it was the strength of the middle school experience in cultivating a sense of belonging that allowed the upper school to eventually integrate. Peer relationships at the school overall were strong, given the school’s emphasis on peer learning. The culture encouraged students to share their interests with others as part of schoolwork and bonds between students developed around these. Further, students developed positive, caring relationships with the adults in the building— including teachers and members of Mission Lab—who served as mentors for many students (Figure 12). Scholars Carol Goodenow and Kathleen E. Grady report that students’ subjective sense of school belonging has been identified as a potentially important influence on academic motivation, engagement, and participation, especially among students from groups at risk of school dropout. 21 So while many students were new to the school they discovered almost anyone could fit in. One seventh-grader put it this way: “Well, in a sense Quest is a kinda unique school. Everybody there is very strange in their own way. They’re not normal kids, so I fit in well because I am by no means normal, so I fit in well.” 22
Designing for Diversity and Inclusion As a “limited unscreened” school in District 2, Quest to Learn is open to any eligible student interested in attending. The school opened as one of the most diverse schools in the city and remains so today. Over half the student body qualifies for free and reduced lunch. Hispanic students represent the largest racial group, followed by White and Black students. Twenty-eight percent of the school’s students are special education students. The student body is highly diverse academically, creating mixed classrooms with both very high and very low performing students. Research has shown that many kids excel in such heterogeneous classrooms and Quest valued the peer
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she ji The Journal of Design, Economics, and Innovation
Volume 3, Number 1, Spring 2017
mentoring opportunities mixed-level classrooms allowed. But the work was challenging for educators. While the school’s learning model was designed with differentiation in mind—its game-like quests could be customized for groups of students at different levels—significant challenges remained, due in part to ever increasing class sizes. This situation was not unique to Quest, as almost all schools struggle to some degree to differentiate their curriculum. But given Quest’s small size, degree of diversity, and learning model the challenge to effectively differentiate felt at times impossible to overcome. Because of this, Quest’s non-selective status was a consistent topic of conversation and debate within both its educator and parent communities. Many applauded the school’s commitment to diversity. Others felt like the challenges created by its admissions policy were simply too great given the constraints of a public school budget. Some parents advocated for the high school to become selective, which they believed would better the school’s chances of retaining top students from the middle school and attracting high performing 9th graders from across the city’s five boroughs. A large percentage of the school’s educators chose to teach at a public school because they cared about issues related to equity and access. Despite this, the idea that screening kids could be an answer to the challenges they faced daily in the classroom was discussed. One educator described the idea this way: “I think in general, the staff tends to feel like we’re losing our good kids…. They think that … the parents kind of get wise to the fact that we have a lot of special ed kids and we’re not a screening school. They think that the parents decide to have the kids apply to specialty schools or take them to private schools for high school….I think that the staff tends to feel like … it’s become like a city school…” 23
23 Ibid., 33. 24 Clive Dilnot, “The Science of Uncertainty:The Potential Contribution of Design Knowledge,” in Doctoral Education in Design: Proceedings of the Ohio Conference, October 8–11, 1998, ed. Richard Buchanan (Pittsburgh: The School of Design, Carnegie Mellon University, 1999), 66.
The idea that Quest has “become like a city school” strikes at the heart of what has made it so unique for those involved in its design and development. The project was intentionally situated within the context of urban public schooling. It was— from the start—a city school. Quest would serve students from all socio-economic strata, hire teachers following union rules, and comply with the city’s standardized assessment regime. At the same time it would build a parallel narrative around student success based on alternative assessments like the CWRA+ and embed a design studio whose output transformed both the identities and teaching practices of the school’s educators. Reframing what teaching and learning could be at such a school was in part, its primary challenge and its greatest success.
A Place Called School Design can be defined as the practice of exploring the tension between the existing and the potential. It is a mode of transformative action that, according to design historian Clive Dilnot, allows us to see “how we negotiate the limits of what we understand, at any moment, as the actual.” 24 Game design pushes this concept even further by legislating through the design of possibility spaces that arise from a set of rules. These rules give shape to the limits of the actual, and provide opportunities for players to discover these limits by pushing against them in creative ways. When this happens, the experience of play is born, in all of its transformative potential. The rules and constraints that order and govern any urban public school are restrictive. State standards heavily restrict what can be taught and standardized tests constrain how. Swelling class sizes curtail individualized attention and shrinking budgets limit support resources for students. Physical and technology infrastructure are outdated and inflexible; rules around seat-time harden boundaries
Designing a Place Called School
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25 Meyer et al., “Connecting Youth,” 29.
between schools and other sites of learning. As a potential site for innovation, the limits of the actual in public schools are both bounded and concrete. Given its unusual pedagogical model and the public school context in which it operates, it is not unexpected that Quest to Learn became something of a fish out of water. Designed to model twenty-first century learning practices, the school operates within an education system more strongly aligned with twentieth century practices. It is a public school that integrates, to greater or lesser extent, practices more often seen in the private education sector—time put aside daily for professional development, a focus on hands-on, project-based learning, and an embedded design studio staffed by game design and learning specialists. The school champions collaboration and encourages collective development of curriculum and learning activities, challenging established norms of individual authorship and teacher authority. It also articulates design as a tool empowering educators and young people to make choices and changes to the systems in their lives. Games teach players that failure is all part of the learning process. Players try and fail and try and fail again in pursuit of a goal, iterating on their play along the way. While certain structures in the school were fixed and immoveable, such as its 6–12 format and enrollment policy, others, such as Mission Lab, were malleable. Over the course of the first seven years of the school, Mission Lab offered a space for failure, iteration, and learning. Roles, relationships, and even its governance structure were redesigned as a way to bring participants together in a shared endeavor. At the heart of its work was a desire to understand the conditions that allow a school to become a good school. This meant moving beyond the idea that the school model was fixed—that it could somehow be bottled up and shared in product form. Quest to Learn was more than a model. It was a dynamic and ever changing place called school. One final note: Quest to Learn was born of the fact that in New York City, anyone can propose a new school. The process was arduous, opaque, and riddled with bureaucratic hurdles. But it was a process open to anyone with an idea, some resources, and a disposition to persist. Institute of Play had a vision and they found a partner in the NYCDOE. Seven years later the school stands, a testament to the hard work of many, especially its educators. Institute of Play has lessened their role in the school in recent years. Today the organization is contracted by the school as an external consultant, providing teacher training in STEAM (science, technology, art, and math) and leadership support around specific aspects of the school model. The change in role was planned from the beginning, but it is still somewhat bittersweet for the team that designed and founded the school. When asked about the possibility that the school might not stay the same, one member responded “I feel like whatever the school is, there’s so many things about it that I think are so fantastic, and … it’s a school. It’s a public school.” 25
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she ji The Journal of Design, Economics, and Innovation
Volume 3, Number 1, Spring 2017