After many years plugging away with gamification, flashy screens with micro-rewards and high-energy learning activities in a bid to secure his students’ interest in learning, elementary school teacher Kevin Stinehart realised this approach was completely misguided.

The irony was that students’ engagement wasn’t hinged on the actual learning material at hand, he says.

“I noticed that kids were excited about it, but it was really surface level, they were more excited about the activities themselves that we were doing than the content that we were teaching,” the 4th Grade teacher tells EducationHQ.

“And it’s a tough battle, because we want rigour in our classrooms, we want engagement, but often it’s easy to go for the cheap, quick, dopamine hit instead of that deeper, slower, more difficult (instructional) method…”

Over the years Stinehart woke up to the situation, but he says it’s one that’s playing out for more and more for teachers.  

He’s now urging educators to fight the urge to entertain at all times.

“I’ve seen some really great teachers that kind of pushed that (engagement) model, that were not necessarily personal mentors of mine, but teachers that I looked up to on social media or different videos that I’ve seen online, and it’s like wow – at the end of the day, they’re really an entertainer…

“I read a quote from someone that talked about how teachers feel like they need to be ‘juggling chainsaws that are on fire’ to keep their students’ attention, and I totally can relate to that…”

Stinehart ponders the true cost if teachers are always afraid that their students will disengage.

He questions if the gamification of learning is really preparing children to thrive in the long-run.

“The real world doesn’t award you glowing digital tokens for doing your job well. There are no brightly-coloured review games to teach you all your workplace skills. No choreographed pop songs to help you prep for college exams. Your boss won’t throw digital confetti when you meet a deadline,” he writes on Substack.

“Marriage doesn’t award ‘power-ups’ for listening during hard conversations. Being a good parent isn’t unlocked with a cheat code. And grief isn’t gamified. It isn’t flashy. It isn’t fun. In fact, most of life isn’t fun.”

Stinehart suggests there's an over-reliance on technology in schools now.

A strong advocate for unstructured play time in schools, Stinehart has a bone to pick with the overwhelming focus on tech tools that can dominate the average classroom environment.

Children are already sucked into the virtual world and its various dopamine loops at home, he says, and so it’s especially problematic when they’re also glued to screens throughout the school day.

It was another realisation that came after a 1:1 Chromebook policy came in at his previous school, fuelled by the premise that ‘we don’t want our students to get behind, we want them to keep up in this technological age’, the teacher explains.

“It sounded like a great idea at the time, but of course, you know how pendulum swings work, [the devices] started to become something that we were using all the time…”

It soon became very clear that children across the multiple schools he taught in, for the most part, were not OK.

“A lot of students were just really struggling, they didn’t have a lot of what we used to call ‘soft skills’ – they didn’t really know how to converse, they didn’t really know how to work together, how to negotiate, collaborate.

“I saw the problem for years, but I really didn’t know what the solution was,” Stinehart reflects.

A dependence on technology and a lack of unstructured play time sit at the core of the crisis, he concludes.

“I’m not a luddite, I’m not against technology, but I am seeing an over-reliance on it and how we need to give these kids real life experiences as well.”

Stinehart has since abandoned the mission to plug student engagement with fun-focussed activities that use micro-rewards to drive progress.

Now he takes every opportunity to design lessons that incorporate the arts and he makes sure his students get out into the nearby forest for a deep, screen-free learning session whenever possible. 

“This has been the best teaching practice for me to learn over the years,” he says.

“So, for example, the Boston Tea Party is part of what we learn in social studies, the event that led to the American Revolution.

“In the past we may have done it through an online simulation or watched a video or did different things, but instead the kids and I go out to the forest, we have this outdoor stage that we’ve set up in one of our outdoor classrooms, and they have costumes, they have props, they actually build the set pieces themselves.

“It’s a fully tactile experience, and we actually activate all five senses.”

The 'forest classroom' at Stinehart's elementary school is used to great effect, the educator says. 

As part of the class, students get to sample one of the historic tea blends that were inside the 342 chests famously thrown into Boston Harbour by American patriots disguised as Mohawk Indians in 1773, in what was a protest against the tax on tea at the time and the perceived monopoly of the East India Company. 

“It really becomes a memory for them,” Stinehart says.

“It’s not something they heard about, it’s something that they feel like they kind of experienced in some way.

“And retention levels obviously go up because [we’re] activating all their senses and giving them a true experience. It’s just learning on a whole other level.”