Barbara Whitacre shivered as she walked into her classroom on this cold autumn morning. She flicked the wall switch and illuminated her empty classroom, bringing her world to life once more. This time of the day was her favorite. In the hour she had before her students showed up, she had the opportunity to gather her materials and review her lesson plans one final time, ensuring that everything was ready for the day. As was her morning routine, she opened her binder and raised her coffee mug to her lips, when suddenly, her smartphone buzzed on the desk next to her, revealing a tweet.
Cassini gave us Saturn, but also gave us Earth — as only deep space could reveal: Small. Frail. Lonely. Steeped in darkness. pic.twitter.com/zjF6jNUFyU
— Neil deGrasse Tyson (@neiltyson) September 14, 2017
Mrs. Whitacre smiled as she tore a page out of her binder, crumpling up her meticulously laid out script for today’s lesson and tossing it into the recycling bin. “This could be better” she mused to herself, opening a number of Google tabs on her computer. As she read and researched, the cogs inside her head began to turn faster and faster. Today was going to be a little different. Today, she was going to the margins.
My favorite game of all time is Dungeons and Dragons by Wizards of the Coast. It’s an amazing role-playing game in which a number of players gather around a table, playing creative and unique characters that they made themselves as one player called a “Dungeon Master” takes them through an adventure that they wrote. The game world is completely and totally the Dungeon Master’s domain, and the fun of the game comes from the players coming up with unique solutions to problems, forming bonds with characters, and interacting with this organic, reactive, world that the dungeon master controls. No other game can accomplish this in such a way.
So, obviously, when my older cousin introduced me to the game at age seven, immediately I wanted to start writing adventures. I could get all of my friends involved, I could flex some creative muscle, and I could write an exciting, interactive, story that allows everyone involved to have an adventure. I spent my free time in the following months fleshing out my world, drawing maps, writing scripts, coming up with villains and characters, completely and totally ready to take my friends on this epic and awesome journey through my mind. Imagine my distress when we finally played the game and my friends immediately started going off the rails. The evil wizard kidnapped the princess in front of their very eyes, said that he would be retreating to his evil mountain fortress, and suddenly my players are running off the other way, trying to steal from merchants that I never bothered giving names to and wanting to explore the town that I had just intended to be a cardboard starting point. I was heartbroken that my friends weren’t interested in my rigidly constructed, highly scripted story, and I ended up never using about 80% of the preparation I had worked so hard on.
As I got older and wiser, I started to learn what it took to be a better Dungeon Master. Yeah, sure, maybe I could write an awesome story a la “Lord of the Rings” and just basically read it to my players as they go to each location I tell them to and do exactly what I want them to, but that defeats the purpose of the entire game. D&D players don’t want to be kept on-rails the entire time, they want to have the opportunity to explore the world, push boundaries, and make their own choices. As time went on, my D&D preparations shifted. Instead of writing highly scripted events, I would work more on the world as a whole, coming up with big, arching ideas and events that organically change the areas around them. I decided that by giving my players freedom, they could come up with way better stories than I ever could on my own, shaking the rules that I had established and letting us write something greater than the sum of its parts.
My side-tangent about D&D may seem a little off topic, but I realized the connection between being a good teacher and being a good DM a long time ago. Rigid, structured, planning, no matter how well thought out, can never carry the same gravity as letting your players (students) explore and discover on their own. This is what going to the margins is all about. Once I had decided that I was going to give my friends a little more freedom, my focus shifted to crafting the sandbox that I would let them play in. I knew what each place was like, I knew what my villains and important characters were up to and what they wanted, but I would always try and find a way to work that into whatever they were doing at the time. They wanted to explore a random cave system that I mentioned offhandedly? Sure! There’s a sleeping dragon in that cave that the antagonist of the adventure is trying to enslave. I was able to let them tell their own stories and relate said stories to what was going on in the world. This lead to all of us having more fun with the game.
This is what teaching in the margins is all about. We refer to structure (written lesson plans, lectures, practice, discussion) as “The Center” and the chaotic, free, unknown areas of the classroom are “The Margins”. Just like in D&D, the important stuff often happens here. In education, I believe that the key to mastering the margins is exactly the same as it is in D&D. A good teacher needs to know their content, they need to know what their objectives are, and they need to have some ideas in their back pocket to keep things on track. However, the story that’s being told isn’t your big C.S. Lewis-esque fantasy epic. It’s the unique and wonderful tale that you and your students tell together. You give them the freedom to explore and create and learn, you back them up with the knowledge they’ll need, and you help them along the way as they grow into a more complete person.
That said, in D&D, a DM that makes no plans and has no structure is just as bad as one that wants to read to you. Wanting to go to a tavern and having the DM say “I didn’t actually think of anything to put in there, you guys will have to go somewhere else.” is infuriating as a D&D player, and it’s just as infuriating as a student to have your teacher either A: Assume you know how to do things without being taught, or B: Have you do things with seemingly no rhyme or reason behind them. If you let students loose without having a goal in mind or an idea you want them to explore, then what exactly is going to get accomplished? Keeping things grounded in the center at least some of the time is necessary in order to remind everyone involved what the objective of the learning is.
An important part of being both a good teacher and a good DM comes from your ability to capitalize on opportunities for cool stuff to happen. In D&D, this might involve allowing one of your players to plug his brain into that of a giant monster spider. In teaching, this might involve cancelling class to watch the eclipse, or watching an episode of Nova in response to a students’ question about dark matter. These teachable moments are completely unpredictable, but if you’ve created a safe environment for students to be curious and you’ve got enough improv skill under your belt, you can make learning so much more real and powerful by jumping on the situations that arise.
The ultimate goal of playing D&D is for the DM and their players to write an epic story together, being creative and exploring their imaginations along the way. I believe that the ultimate goal of school is similar. You enter school a child, and you exit an adult, supposedly ready for the world and everything in it. In school, teachers and students should work together, writing stories that will teach students things they’ll always remember, exploring the world around them, and growing into better, more complete people. So, if you want to try and give this experience to your own students, who knows? Maybe you should dust off that 20-sided die and give my favorite game a shot.
I absolutely loved the D&D analogy, Aesa. It was really well thought out and as someone that adores video games and role playing games, it kept me thoroughly interested the entire time. The idea of linking it to D&D is definitely a more original one, and one that made so much sense to me. I love how you talked about that it gives you a sense of improvisation that you can use to work into a margins activity or even just a teachable moment. The little story at the beginning was the icing on the cake. It was interesting and I loved that you linked it to a real life tweet, and thought out how to incorporate it into an idea with the margins!
Thank you! I’m really glad to hear that you liked it so much. In any exercise that involves working together to tell a story or create a narrative, the key to making things work lies within freedom and creativity. A good classroom and a good campaign both make the best of the individual’s talents and mind.
Aesa, your introduction paragraph had me engaged from the start! Social media is great and can connect us to what’s happening not only in our world, but also in the universe (look how small we are!). You’re correlation with D&D was a perfect analogy. To be honest, I’ve never played D&D. We should definitely try to play some time because there is obviously some skill involved that is related to teaching students! I think it can be hard to throw out a lesson plan that you’ve spent hours preparing, but if students are going to learn something by going off the rails and into the margins, ultimately, that’s time well spent.
I’m glad you liked my D&D analogy! I realized years ago that teaching and DMing were sort of similar. Honestly, it’s one of the reasons that the profession compelled me so much. When I would work on my adventures, it was a lot of fun to create a playground for my friends to run around in, but it was even more fun to see what sort of crazy solutions they’d come up with to my problems and how they’d interact with the parts of the world I hadn’t even considered. Teaching is a lot like that! If you guys wanted, it might be a fun and worthwhile time investment to start an EDT431 D&D group. 🙂