Imagine, as a teacher, you walk into a colleague’s classroom, looking for the teacher to ask about some paperwork that is due soon. You know it’s test day so it should be easy to pop in quickly while the students are silently sitting doing their tests. When you walk in and are surprised to see the class working in pairs or small groups. They are quizzing each other on the material they recently learned. You find the teacher in the back of the room, verbally quizzing a student on the material. You pause for a second to wait for the teacher to be done. As you are waiting, the teacher says something with a smile to the student. The student lifts his arms up and happily exclaims in victory, “Yes!” Then he practically skips back to his seat. You approach the teacher and ask what the student is so excited about. The teacher tells you, “he just passed his unit test.” You ask, “Why is he so excited about that? It’s just a test.” The teacher says, “It means he’s just leveled-up and he’ll get his badge for defeating the boss. This is why gamification works.” You reply with a confused, “Huh?”

The first step to creating your first Mastery Gamified Level is ensuring your administrator is on board with this objective. While the Mastery Gamification Methodology has a lot of scientific evidence behind it (see this previous blog post to read about the science) some parents and administrators are reluctant to jump on board until they see it starting to work for you. They are often curious about why gamification works. The important thing is that, when parents are confused and not sure why you are teaching this way, your administrator has your back.

Once your administrator is on board, it’s time to have some fun! We get to create the story arc for your game narrative. This is the big-picture story to give you an idea of where you want your story to go. First, we must decide what genre of story you would like to create. This depends on your interests and sometimes the subject you teach. Do you like sci-fi or fantasy? What about adventure? Would you prefer mystery or maybe historical fiction? As a Spanish teacher, I chose adventure. I helped a math teacher who chose sci-fi. History teachers tend to go for historical fiction.

Once you have your genre, the next element to decide is your setting and characters. For your characters, you’ll need a role/title for the hero of the story who is the student. It’s also helpful to have a companion that will travel with your hero. This makes it easier to write about the actions that the hero completes because you’ll have a companion character that you can name. You’ll also need a wise and experienced guide. Some teachers enjoy writing themselves into the story as the guide. However, you can also write a fictional guide if you don’t want to write yourself into the story. The last character you’ll need is a big boss and minions that students will “boss battle” to level up or you can use obstacles for students to overcome if you don’t want them to battle.

For my Spanish I class, I chose an adventure/fantasy genre and I made the hero a “Luchador Monster Hunter.” Luchadores are from Lucha Libre (Mexican masked wrestling). That means we get to start the year learning about the Mexican tradition of Lucha Libre. Then I made the hero a monster hunter because my bosses are mythical legends from Spanish-speaking countries like La Llorona and El Chupacabra. This demonstrates why gamification works by directly engaging students with culturally rich narratives. I also have a “big boss” that students will boss battle at the end of the year. He is a Luchador Monster Hunter who has gone rogue. He is reviving the legendary monsters instead of vanquishing them like he swore to do. For my guides, I have a different fictional expert on the boss that the students are battling that level. The guide teaches the Luchador Monster Hunters the “enchanted words” (Spanish vocabulary) and “incantations” (Spanish grammatical structures). They will need to know these to magically battle and vanquish the boss on that level.

I worked with a middle school math teacher who went sci-fi. She decided that math was all about order and logic so together, we created her big boss, the Kaos King. He looks like an orange octopus that wears a top hat and he is from the 5th dimension. His mission is that he has come to the third dimension to unleash his chaos on our dimension and destroy it. He has minions that he sends like The Fraction Fracturer and the Graphon the Grid Wrecker. Each minion tries to unleash chaos to destroy our dimension. The students, titled Logic Lords, must use their application of math to power up the reality stone and use its power to banish the bosses back to the fifth dimension before they destroy our dimension. This teacher also wrote herself into the story as the guide. Her character is called Mathematica. She faced the Kaos King previously when she narrowly escaped the 2nd dimension as the Kaos King destroyed it. This teacher is amazing and even put together a costume complete with a red cape to become Mathematica.

I also worked with a high school teacher who teaches a leadership/character class. He decided to make his students into secret agents for the Secret Social Service. Their mission, to seek out and battle the character vices that keep the population from being their best selves. The Secret Social Agents have a 6th sense to be able to locate vices like, procrastination, hostility, hate, apathy, and many more. They fight these bosses with their spy gadgets that are powered by character traits like patience, kindness, or leadership. We had a lot of fun creating the spy gadgets that students are using. There are great images (essential) for each gadget. We even wrote an analysis of what the gadget does and what situations it is most useful for. This teacher wrote himself into the story as Chief Agent DC. He will be guiding the new recruits in their training to become Secret Social Service field agents.

Now, for the elementary teachers out there, all these battles and monsters may be sounding too aggressive for your K-2 students. If you don’t want your students fighting a boss to complete a level, you can make the boss battles be challenges or overcoming obstacles instead. For example, the mission for a kindergarten classroom could be that all the books in the library have been launched all over the world. The students must complete tasks to find the books and bring them back to the library. To find the book Anne’s Awesome Animals, they have to complete their practice on the letter A. This will open a secret door, revealing the location of the lost book. Once they collect all the lost books from the library, they celebrate!

Once you have the overall story outline created with your location and characters, it’s just a matter of breaking it down into individual levels that correspond with each unit. Each level should have a specific boss that students have to beat or a challenge that students need to complete to show their mastery, finish the level, and “level up.”

Step 5 – How Students Demonstrate Mastery

Before you write the gaming narrative for each level, it’s helpful to know how students will show their mastery of the level, showcasing why gamification works by aligning game mechanics with educational outcomes. If you have a good curriculum that has a good unit test that accurately reflects student learning and is based on your subject’s standards, feel free to use that. However, even if you have a good curriculum, the assessments are often not quite up to the teacher’s standards. If this is the case in your classroom, there are some good options available.

When I mastery gamified my Spanish I class, I simply converted my standards into “I can” statements and created my assessments from the “I can” statements. This resulted in an assessment that had elements of reading, writing, speaking, and listening in the assessment based on the standards for what students should be able to do at that level. A lot of teachers like to have students complete a project that shows their mastery of the material. This provides a kinesthetic way for students who show all they have learned.

Part of the magic of the Mastery Gamification Methodology is that it engages students but the real magic is its ability to raise classroom expectations for work. When students have a goal higher than  “passing” to aim for, they will often achieve that higher standard. When teachers ask what the minimum mastery level should be, I recommend 70%-85%. I’ve set my minimum mastery level for my Spanish classes at 75%. This results in a C which should be a challenge but still achievable for everyone with enough time, effort, and support. Depending on your student population, you may set the minimum mastery level higher or lower than 75% but I don’t recommend going below 70% (C-). Once the minimum test level goes below 70%, it becomes a stretch to call it mastery.

Once you’ve completed these steps, you are well on your way to creating your first mastery gamified unit, embodying why gamification works to enhance engagement and learning. I hope that this process is exciting and invigorating for you. I know it breathed new life into my teaching. However, if you want to level up your classroom but find this process stressful, I’d be happy to help you out! I’ve coached teachers to help them make their first mastery gamified unit for the classroom. Often, once the teacher has one unit under their belt, the process becomes much easier. If you’re interested, just send me an email at stephanie@segrovestrategies.com or find me on Facebook. And make sure you’re subscribed to my email list by entering your email address below Hope to hear from you soon!