Zach Diamond  0:03  
Welcome to the modern classrooms project podcast each week we bring you discussions with educators on how they use blended, self paced and mastery based learning to better serve their students. We believe teachers learn best from each other, so this is our way of lifting up the voices of leaders and innovators in our community. This is the modern classrooms project podcast,

Toni Rose Deanon  0:28  
hello and welcome to the modern classrooms project podcast. My name is Toni Rose Deanon they them pronouns, a designated hype person here at MCP, and I am joined by seventh and eighth grade social studies teacher Travis Hammer, he him pronouns, welcome, Travis.

Travis Hammer  0:44  
Hello, hi. Thank you for having me so much. Toni Rose, 

Toni Rose Deanon  0:46  
it is so exciting to be in this space with you. And thank you so much for saying yes to the podcast. I know that you and I had met in Utah before, and I want to say it was last year, and it was a whole vibe, because I felt like we spent the whole night, like the whole afternoon slash night, after the conference of just like cackling and getting to know each other as well, with, you know, with Michael, my co worker, Michael, as well as Ken Shelton. So it was just such a vibe. And I know that you were like, hey, I want to know more about modern classroom. What is this thing that y'all do that y'all are just like, yapping about, and then now you're on the podcast to have a conversation with us about what you do in the classroom, because Michael got a chance to see you in action and wrote this like beautiful email about all the things that you're doing in the classroom. So I'm excited, because I know you're going to expand my brain, because it is a topic that I know nothing about Travis, so I'm probably going to butcher it a lot, and that's okay. Yeah, so before we get started, what is bringing you joy currently?

Travis Hammer  1:49  
What is bringing me joy currently? Okay, I have, like, the really standard, like, teacher answer right now, which is, we're about three weeks away from the end of school, and that is absolutely awesome. That's bringing me a lot of joy personally. But what's actually bringing me joy in my life right now? Who I'll I'm going to give the honest answer here outside of school. I really do try to keep you know professional life and home life two very separate spaces, because I just need time away from both sometimes. So the biggest thing that is bringing me joy at home right now, and this is where it's gonna get really nerdy. I'm so sorry for it. I'm actually playing a game at home that is based on Dungeons and Dragons. Some listeners out there may know of it. It's called balders Gate three, and I'm only playing through it for about the seventh time now. I've spent a lot of my life over the past year dedicated to this game, and I'm finally about to platinum it on PlayStation five. So is it super critical? Is it super important? Absolutely not. Does it bring me joy way more than it should. It involves one of my most favorite things in the world, which is Dungeons and Dragons.

Toni Rose Deanon  3:07  
And I think honestly, too Travis. I feel like, if it brings us joy, it is really important, right? Like it is one of those things where it is a priority, because the world is crusty a lot of the times. And so when we find pieces of joy like, why not continue to embrace and accept it and continue doing it right? So I love this. And now listeners, you know, Travis has talked about Dungeons and Dragons, and you know that is our topic for today. Honestly, and I have heard so much about Dungeons and Dragons, I don't know anything about it. So that's why I'm so excited to learn more. But I like again, before we jump into that though, Travis, tell us more about who you are and how you started your education journey, your MCP journey, whatever you want to whatever you want to share with the listeners.

Travis Hammer  3:55  
Yeah, for sure. So my let's start with the education journey, because obviously that brings me to the MCP journey, the education journey, started quite a good while ago. Let's see, about 12 years ago now. No, no, 14 years ago, no. It started when I was 18. The reason why it starts when I was 18 is because through high school, I was very big into collegiate wrestling, and all I wanted to do going out of high school is like, I really want to keep doing this, but I want to do it as a coach. So I started coaching as soon as I was able to write at 18, and I was done with my own competition year, and I took that. I kept on coaching through college, and I realized, like, oh man, when I leave college, it's going to be really hard to continue coaching wrestling unless I become a teacher. And the first person to actually push me towards that is a professor at Southern Utah University. His name is Professor Lund. And he inspired me to be a history teacher, specifically because it was the first time that I was absolutely enraptured with learning. And there was so much that I wanted to be because of him. There was so much that he was just such a fantastic example. I'm going around in circles here, but Professor Lund really inspired me to be a history teacher specifically. So at that time, I was actually in a different major. I completely changed majors to history, finished my degree, moved up to Salt Lake City, and that's when I got my first job as a paraprofessional. And from there, I bounced around between a few different industries, but ultimately I landed at a school called spectrum Academy up here in North Salt Lake. I first started off as a history teacher there, but history is not quite complete. I was history slash adult living, slash science, slash sociology, essentially, what it came down to is, in my first year of teaching, the school gave me six preps, and yeah, the I'm seeing a face right now, and that face is absolutely warranted. I didn't know what I was getting into. I was just so excited to get into teaching. And bear in mind, at this point, I've kind of moved past wrestling a little bit. I started a few different programs out here in Salt Lake County, but I wanted to focus just on teaching after a while. So that first year was absolutely brutal. I went through a few more years before eventually I did have to take a break for a little bit. Burnout is super, super real. And despite this being something I really wanted to do for many years. I needed to step away for a while, and I did for about two years. But then three years ago, I decided teaching is something I really miss. I talk about it a lot with my family members, and eventually I found my way back, and I am back here at spectrum Academy, but instead of working with the high school, I work with the wonderful group known as seventh and eighth grade students, and that brings me to what brought me to modern classrooms. And it's all just very serendipitous. I was randomly invited to go to a conference by my school because I don't know people just liked me, I guess so they're like, yeah, we'll send that guy to a conference for a couple days. I was just trying different I was trying different presentations. And actually, this is the first time that I saw you, Tony rose, I remember you standing outside the door of the modern classrooms presentation. And I kind of read the description of like that sounds interesting, because at first, one of the major things that drew me to it was it sounds like there's a lot more time in the classroom to do certain tasks, like helping more students on an individual level. One of the big things that drew me was at this time and still today, because the school that I work with works so much in special education, about 95% of our population is on an IEP, so that's a lot of data to track. And after attending my first presentation for modern classrooms, I realized, if I'm able to apply this at the school that I'm working at, I can differentiate a lot better. The kids who just want to run with it can run with it. This gives me more time to track data. Gives me more time to give more individual help to the students who need that, more structured support, and now here we are, one year later, after finishing the courses provided by MCP, doing not only social studies and history classes, but the Dungeons and Dragons class as well.

Toni Rose Deanon  8:43  
Okay, I love your journey. I have to say, the concept, or just the beginning of you wanting to continue wrestling and knowing that you needed a school environment to continue coaching. And that was kind of an inspiration. That is, that's really cool, honestly. And then the face that I was making y'all when Travis said six courses that first year, I have just heard time and time and time and time again, right? Like, over and over and over again from different educators of how many content or how many different contents that they're teaching in a year. And then sometimes it's like a last minute switch, right? And that, like, stresses me out. So to hear you say that you had six your first year and you lasted all year long, and then even a couple years after, that's really dope. So thank you for doing that.

Travis Hammer  9:33  
You know, eventually I came back around, I'll say, but there is one more key detail in that. So I was primary, primarily social studies, right? Had a few electives in there, the science classes. Oh, my goodness, these science classes. It was relearning science all over again. Initially they wanted me to do eight preps, but then they did me the favor of combining earth science and physics. Biology and chemistry together. So it was just two preps. So really big favor. I love this school. I am still with them, obviously. But, man, they really tested me in that first year, that is for sure. 

Toni Rose Deanon  10:13  
Yeah, they did. They were like, oh, a newbie got them.

Travis Hammer  10:20  
Yeah, no. I was just in the interview like, Would you be willing to do this? I said, Yes, this, yes, this. And I just kept on saying yes, before I realized what I got myself into.

Toni Rose Deanon  10:30  
Oh my gosh, Travis, and then now you're talking about how you know you had to take a break because of burnout. And that's so real. That is a reality for so many educators, right? And I know that's it resonates with me too, because my 10th year of teaching, well, I knew prior that I was going to take a break as soon as I reached my 10 year mark, because I didn't want to be burnt out. I wanted to leave the profession, still loving the profession, and I'm so happy that I did that. And when you said I really missed it, I took a break for two years, and I just could not stop talking about how much I miss being in the classroom. That's me. I miss being in the classroom, so at one point or another, like I really hope to be able to pick up a class soon, just so that I can be back in that space. Because I do feel like that. That really brings me so much joy and so much purpose and so much inspiration as well, just to be around young kids. And so, you know, you're, you're, you've been with spectrum. It seems like you've been with spectrum for majority of your teaching career.

Travis Hammer  11:26  
Yeah, yeah. This is the only school that I've ever been in the role of a teacher at. I've been paraprofessional at other institutions, but this is my only teaching school, okay?

Toni Rose Deanon  11:38  
And then you said that the population, the demographics is like 95% of the kids have an IEP and 504 so does that mean that you have to be sped certified, or do you have a co teacher?

Travis Hammer  11:52  
I do have a co teacher right now, but I am working to get sped certified so that I do not have to rely on this, on the CO teacher that we have here, but yeah, no, we do have a lot of people here in the school who are certified. This is what they're always pushing us towards. So teachers that are coming here with their AEL as an example, we do ask that they do try and get their sped certification in addition to whatever other certifications they have for me right now, though, I do have a co teacher here.

Toni Rose Deanon  12:27  
Got it okay? And what is Travis? Just to follow? What is an AEL? You said an AEL, right? What does that stand for? Do you know

Travis Hammer  12:33  
so? AEL stands for associate Educator License here in Utah. This gives teachers some time to start teaching in the classroom while still also working on their licensure. Is the long and short of it? 

Toni Rose Deanon  12:45  
Okay? And has that always been an option for teachers in Utah? Because I don't, I don't think I've heard of that in like, the states that I taught at.

Travis Hammer  12:55  
I believe it's something that's relatively new, to be honest with you. I don't know the full history of it, but I do know it's something that we've been using over the past couple of years.

Toni Rose Deanon  13:05  
Okay? I mean, that's dope. That's really dope, right? Like, we're trying to get teachers in the classroom, so to have more opportunities for teachers to start that the better. Okay, thank you for, you know, answering all of my follow up questions and sharing a little bit about your story as well. So let's dive right into Dungeons and Dragons. What is this game? Travis, I know that there are movies. I know that there are, like, little action figures. Yeah, nerd out with me, because I don't know.

Travis Hammer  13:35  
Nerd out. So yes, there are movies. But did you know there are movies from back in 2000 Dungeons and Dragons the movie. Anyways, we're not going to get into that. That's a whole other podcast that people have done over and over again. What is Dungeons and Dragons? Dungeons and Dragons is a TT RPG, a tabletop role playing game, as the name suggests. You normally play this on a tabletop, and it is a role playing game, so you assume the role of a character, one of the biggest pieces of D and D that attracts people to it is the freedom in creating your character. So in the game, you will create your character. You typically have a party ranging from somewhere between three maybe up to a standard size would be maybe five players, six players. Some groups go bigger. Some groups go smaller. It's really whoever wants to spend the time to play this game with you. And there is one person who is the Dungeon Master, the Game Master. They are the ones who deliver the story to the table, and the table reacts to the story when they state something that they want to do, players will roll dice to see if they are successful in their stated action. This is sorry, explaining this out loud, it sounds so surreal to me, of like I didn't think I'd be this person explaining. Any game on some sort of platform like this, but I digress. So really, what Dungeons and Dragons is it's collaborative storytelling. The company that puts out the game Dungeons and Dragons Wizards of the Coast, they have pre made stories that you as a dungeon master could read about you learn what happens in the story. What are the different possibilities or outcomes of different actions? But a lot of people, and this is what I usually do, do something called home brewing, where we're writing our own story, we just kind of react to whatever the players are doing. A lot of it is improv. I'll be very honest, for my class specifically, almost 100% of it is improv, because coming in with a structured lesson plan is hard enough coming in with a kind of loose lesson plan in a game where kids can do anything, you really got to be bendy brain to make that all work out. So ultimately, Dungeons and Dragons is a dice rolling game that involves collaborative storytelling, promotes things like critical thinking, problem solving, collaboration and yeah. I mean, what other game could you literally make almost anything happen and then in the same day, also go and fight some random dragon? Yeah. So that's a brief overview of Dungeons and Dragons. I hope the people who actually play the game out there are somewhat satisfied with my description.

Toni Rose Deanon  16:26  
No, I mean, that made it made sense in my head. So thank you. I've just always thought that it was such, like an Yeah, I was. I always thought it was such an overwhelming concept, but I knew that, like, there were DND fans, you know what I'm saying? Like people go hard for D and D and I love, okay, you taught me tabletop role playing game. TT. RG, right. I had never heard of that before. 

Travis Hammer  16:50  
TT, RPG, 

Toni Rose Deanon  16:51  
RPG, yeah, great. Now I know that I could use those, that acronym somewhere, you know, wherever, right? And then I also really love that you pointed out that, you know, D and D Dungeons and Dragons is collaborative storytelling. There's critical thinking skills, there's problem solving skills, there's collaboration happening. And these are the skills that we want our students to have in the classroom, right? And so for you to also name the fact that you know, a structured lesson plan is hard enough. I so agree with you, because you can have a structured lesson plan look a certain way and it will never go the way that you want it to go. Even if everything is so structured, the students and how they respond and their behaviors can show up in so many different ways that that structured lesson plan is going to make it look like it was a loose lesson plan. Okay, so thank you for naming that. And so this whole concept of we write our own stories, it's home brewing. It's improv that really allows for a part of the brain to function and to expand, right? Because that is such an important skill to like improv because, or to even just create our own stories, right? Like, those are the things that I feel like we don't provide enough opportunities for students to be creative, to play, to create, you know, just to create, whatever it is that they need to create, to make the things make sense for them, right? So thank you for that. Now I feel like I can go and talk to someone about D and D and be like, Hey, I got the graph, you know, I got the I got the gist of it. I think this is it. And now maybe one day I'll play, I don't know, we'll see so well, okay, so Travis describe a typical DND integrated social skills lesson in your self paced classroom. And how do these two elements work together?

Travis Hammer  18:44  
So this was the trickiest part. When I first started practicing like the modern classrooms model, it was primarily for my social studies classes in that setting. It makes a lot of sense, and which, by the way, fully implementing it this year for the first time has had amazing results. So much task completion. Nobody's missing a lesson. Fantastic. But I digress. Now, integrating the D and D social skills aspect into this, that's where it gets a little bit tougher, because the actual practice is the class, the actual playing of the game is where we're getting all of the skills that we're trying to get from that class. Now there is a little bit of a struggle here, because earlier I mentioned six players in a dungeon master is about as big of a group as you normally want. You can go bigger, but after that, it gets kind of unwieldy. And I know for many people out there, the idea of having a six student class is not realistic, right? So I did get away with it once I had a D and D class that had just six students. It was the most fun I've ever had, but we'll talk about that later. Normally, for example, this semester, I have roughly 15 students in this class. So that means at any one time. Can only play with about a third of the students in that classroom. So the way that I blend these two models together, the DD Social Skills Practice, along with the modern classroom model, is that I have three rotating groups. So if we do a two week cycle, and I say two week cycle because we do a day b days, so there will be four class periods over that two week cycle. I should also mention, just so that this makes sense, we are very fortunate as a school to have a four day school week with directed learning Fridays. Yeah, it is awesome. It's really amazing. Super grateful for it. But that's all context for four classes in a two week rotation group, a will have the first session with me so we will play through the session. I usually have some sort of theme or topic in mind that I'm trying to hit with the particular session we play. And for people who actually play the game, a typical D and D session usually lasts a minimum two to three hours, but I only have an hour for classroom, so I really do have to change the structure of how I would normally play to fit within this hour so these groups can keep rotating in. But I have a particular theme for each session. So as an example, early on, I make a theme of teamwork in order to accomplish the goal that I present them, all of the members in that group are going to have to work together in some way to accomplish that goal. And I don't tell them how to accomplish the goal. I just give them what the goal is and leave clear signs of no one person can do this alone. So that's an example. Now the two other groups, while that first group is playing, what I've started doing is introducing some other skills that they can be practicing in the DND class that are still related to DND. One of the typical assignments that I'll have is a research assignment. DND has lots of rules. There are lots of different types of spells you can cast. There are lots of different types of items you can use. So I will set kids out on these projects of Okay, today you are going to be researching 3/3 level spells. You can choose any 3/3 level spells you want. You must describe to me in your own words what this spell does. And after you give me these summaries of the different spells and what they do. You have to give me a basically persuasive paragraph of why did you choose these three spells over all other spells? So that's one activity that I'll have group two do. Group three will then work on another activity. Lately, I've been using school AI and this very lovely prompt that I learned at the same conference that we actually met each other at this prompt in school, AI will generate a choose your own adventure story for students, so they get to go through a choose your own adventure story that's generated for them. It follows the same themes that they were practicing in the session prior to them working on this assignment, and at the end of their Choose Your Own Adventure, they have several reflection questions that they can work on. So essentially, the way that these two things blend is in a two week cycle, each group will get to play once. On the other days that they are not playing a session, they are either working on these assignments that I gave you examples of, or they're working on leveling up their character for the next session, which is also a whole process in itself, lots of step by step instructions to go through 

Toni Rose Deanon  23:30  
Travis. This is fascinating. This is really, really, really cool, I guess. I mean, okay, first of all, school. AI love their program, so I'm glad that you were able to take something away from them at the conference as well, and and also this two week cycle. Thank you for all the background information as well about how your school functions. Congratulations on implementing the modern classrooms for full year. By the way, I wanted to say that and then naming all the things that have have happened with the with employing the model, so thank you for that. But okay, who all right, there's a lot that you said here, which I think is really beautiful again. So you are you created a schedule that works for you and your students, which I think is very lovely, right? My follow up question is like, how did you come up with this idea to implement? Or, yeah, to introduce your students to Dungeons and Dragons. That's one question. And then the next question is like, how are your How did your students respond to this in the beginning? Did they embrace it? Did they like it? Were they hesitant? How did they feel about it?

Travis Hammer  24:38  
So how did this whole idea start? Well, it really started from a place of I wanted to have even more fun at school. If you can't tell by now, Dungeons and Dragons is literally my favorite game of all time. I cannot express the how much it's helped me in my own. Personal life. It has allowed me to create even deeper friendships with the friends that I've already had. It's allowed me to create new friendships with people I didn't know where it all came from. Actually, it was from a podcast. I learned to play D and D by listening to podcasts. This is for the adults out there, because these things are primarily adult entertainment, I will say, as far as like the content in them. But the podcast that I learned how to play D and D from was not another D and D podcast, also known as NAD pod, as well as dimension 20 from dropout.tv which is an online streaming service, these two things together helped me learn how to play the game. So one of the programs that dimension 20 also does, in addition to these actual play shows, is they have a show called adventuring Academy, and this talked about relevant social issues in relation to Dungeons and Dragons. It talks just about the game itself. They talk about people's experience playing the game. And as I was listening to these podcasts, there's a lot of people saying, Yeah, I started playing when I was a kid, and honestly, it really helped me open up. It really helped me, like, form into the person that they were going to be. So that little seed of an idea gets in my head of like, wow, that's really cool. I wonder if I could do this at school. And I started looking into it, because if I just go to my administration, I have a really great administration team, and especially when this all started, they were very supportive. If I just came to them and said, Hey, I have this idea. Let's do it. They would. They would have probably said yes, but I tried to do my due diligence. I did look through some studies to just make sure what I found to be anecdotal evidence in my own personal life was actually true, and a lot of studies do suggest that these soft skills we want our kids to learn can be improved through games like D and D. So I brought these to my administration. They approved it. I was stoked. I went into the next year fully ready. And then how the first group of students who I did this with took it, there were some who are just purely excited. Wait, you want us to be creative, and we can propose like an OC for you, and then we get to take that OC and play in a story. Yeah, we're all about that. So there were some kids who were just excited by the creative bit. There are some kids who already had experience with DND and were just amazed that there was a DND class, not just a DND club. Because, like you mentioned earlier, Dungeons and Dragons has gotten wildly more popular over the last 10 years, I would say, especially from where it started, which was, you know, akin to a witch hunt. If you used to play D and D in the 70s or 80s, you might get yourself in some trouble. So we have those two groups, and then you have the third group of students who have no idea what you're talking about. When you try to explain it to them, doesn't quite make sense. And you know, I knew we were going to run into them eventually, but having said that, once they have the chance to actually try playing the game, they quickly come to realize, oh, this is just fun. We are just trying to have fun here. It is fun to tell stories. It is fun to listen to Mr. Hammer make a fool of himself as he tries on different voices for these silly little characters. So there are a few kids who come in not really knowing anything about it, not having a lot of interest, but typically, by the time the class is done, they know Dungeons and Dragons, and they want to share it with their friends, which is awesome.

Toni Rose Deanon  28:41  
I think it sets the tone for the classroom and the culture, right? Like, hey, my teacher is really excited about this thing. So, and then I see a couple of my classmates are also excited about this thing. So now I'm curious. You've got my curiosity. I'm like, I am interested, right? I want to learn more. And I love this concept that you started out with, I wanted to have more fun in the classroom. I this is something that I absolutely love, so I wanted to go ahead and implement it in the classroom. Because why not, right? And this is such a great reminder to everyone, honestly, to continue showing up as yourself in the classroom spaces, right? Like, bring the things that that make you happy, bring the things that make you so excited to show up every single day and create a space for you and your students to thrive, to bring back that joy and teaching and learning. And I love that you also, you know, had this whole notion of, like, you know what I'm going to listen to podcasts, and now I'm hearing that that games actually do increase the soft skills that students need to have to function as human beings in this world. So why not? I love Dungeons and Dragons. My students need the soft skills. So I'm going to go ahead and combine that. And then you had admin who completely supported this idea of yours. Dollars, which is amazing, right? Because I know that sometimes that could be a really, that could be a challenge if you wanted to try something new and you didn't get the support.

Travis Hammer  30:09  
I'll definitely say I'm very fortunate to have that supported team around me, because ever yeah, like I said, from day one, they've been super supportive. And just before we move on, just to speak to what you just said, Yeah, bringing that level of sincerity to your work, like that, being genuine with your students, you know there is a boundary, right? We're not an open book to our students, because that should be separate, but when you show them little pieces of who you really are, they are way more likely to get on board with you so that even when things do get hard, you can kind of push them in that direction of like, I know this is not what you want to do right now, but can you do me the favor? Just give it in a shot. I'll help you out through it, and I get so much more buy in because of things like that. So yeah, no, I also just wanted to echo what you're saying, because I fully agree that sort of behavior tends to work out a lot better for our students. 

Toni Rose Deanon  31:05  
Yeah, our emotions, the way we move and the way that we the tone and the tone that we set for our classrooms really impact right like so if we're excited about something, our students are going to be excited about something. I taught English, and so I was obsessed with books, and I can talk about books all day long. And my students, who are my my students who were reluctant readers, who were the ones that were like, Nope, I'm not touching a book ever. You're not going to make me touch a book ever. They see how much joy it brings me. And then they see the conversations that I'm having with peers, with their peers, and then they get that curiosity, right? Like, okay, well, maybe tell me more, right? Maybe I am a little curious about what these books are, you know, and so I, yeah, I always say, like, don't I understand the boundary between work and personal, right? That professional and personal, there is that line. There is that boundary that we don't want to cross, and at the same time, we do want to give, like you said, those bits and pieces of who we are as human beings in the classroom, so that our students can also feel safe and brave to show up, even just bits and pieces of themselves in the class. So I really like this, and I know sometimes I think about too, when I was back in the classroom, of how like, oh, well, what if my kids won't like this about me, right? Because it's like adults, we do that. That's just like, natural for human beings. It doesn't matter the age, right and right? And so for me, I'd be like, no, just go do it anyway. Because if you're excited about it, they're going to get excited about it. And that was something that I always just kind of hung on to. And it's always been right every single time it could be like, the dorky, dorkiest thing that I'm like, obsessing about, and my students would also get obsessed with it because I'm just so excited about it.

Travis Hammer  32:50  
So 100% I feel that sometimes I do approach it in a slightly different way, though, and as opposed to just being excited, right? Because I've had those feelings too when I'm doing things outside of my personal life or home life, I should say, not necessarily personal. And I'm trying to think, like, if I make this change about myself right now, is this going to, you know, impact my students? Example, would be like, man. I was tired of all my hair once I shaved it all off, completely clean, and I was really thinking like, Man, am I gonna get roasted by the students today because of this, all that? And the one thing that I always remind myself, and this really does help me personally, when I'm ever having a little bit of doubt about who I am as a teacher, especially because I work with that middle school age group, right? The one thought that I have is, no matter what, like, I love my kids. They're great, but no matter what, I'm always going to be cooler than them, because I'm an adult and they're middle schoolers, and it's going to be fine because I'm cooler than them, it's okay. So, yeah,

Toni Rose Deanon  33:51  
I love, I love the affirmations here, Travis,

Travis Hammer  33:56  
you know, sometimes you just got to make it through the day.

Toni Rose Deanon  33:59  
So you do? You do honestly? I mean, my professors in school when I was going through, when I was getting my bachelor's in education, my professors always said, if you you are all working with middle schoolers, so middle schoolers are going to roast you. So you better know who you are as a person. You better have that, that strong foundation, because those kids can and will ruin you.

Travis Hammer  34:25  
They will find the tiniest little things. You know, I've always been very self conscious about my ears because they're, you know, a little bit on the smaller side. Also through wrestling, I had cauliflower ears, so they're hard as rocks on the side of my head. But I hadn't had a comment about my small ears since high school, then my first year working with middle schoolers. It got brought up, and I was like, oh, no, this is almost traumatic. Yeah, yeah, just reliving those times

Toni Rose Deanon  34:54  
they're quick to hurt your feelings. Okay? And this is and I always tell people too, like I worked with middle schoolers for 10. Plus years, like, my feelings will not get hurt. Like, tell me how it is. I've had lots of practice. Okay, so what were I know that we had talked about the different, the different soft skills, right? Like critical thinking, problem solving, what other specific social skills or concepts or like, Yeah, anything like that, that D and D effectively teaches that we haven't covered before. And can you show an example of a quest and its learning objectives? And I know that you had kind of already went over that a little bit with especially the research you know, like thinking about the persuasive essay when we were talking about the different spells, right choosing the three spells, and why you would choose those three spells, was there anything else that you wanted to add on that you haven't said already? 

Travis Hammer  35:48  
Let's see as far as those soft skills go, let's see, we mentioned problem solving, we mentioned critical thinking, we mentioned teamwork and collaboration. This is also a great chance for students to practice a little bit of empathy. Yeah. So sometimes, you know, I'll present them with a character where upon first glance, you really don't know what you're getting into. There's a lot of the time where I introduce these little, tiny, funny cartoon characters to the students, and it turns out, oh no, it's a monster. They're coming after us. But other times, there is these characters who can be a little bit monstrous looking, maybe they're a little bit gruff, maybe they're a little bit rude, and the students have to investigate, what is going on. Why are they acting like this? What is appropriate for behavior for them in this moment? So one such example. Let's see if I can come up with a specific one off the top of my head, one such example. And this is actually also a really good example of how things don't always go the way you think they're going to go. I had a very simple task for the students in this session. Their task was to find a way into the city, and really, if they had approached and been kind and respectful, they would have been let through the gates. But instead, they immediately go to, let's be really funny, and let's create some harebrained scheme of getting into this. So they split up into two groups. One's coming in from the sky, the other one is trying to run this little ruse at the front gates with these guards, like trying to talk circles around them, convince them to go in. And really what they needed to do is they just really needed to listen to the guard. So after going through all of these Looney Tunes type of plans, eventually all of their characters get arrested, because at a certain point they were breaking the law. Unfortunately, that's just what happens. So the resolution to all of that, to bring it back to the lesson that guard who was out in front, who did bring them back to the gates, or, sorry, back into the prison cells where they were going to be held. And eventually, their next session, they escaped from the prison. You know, we support a lot of different ideas here in the DB class, the guard came to them and kind of gave a little bit of his story, kind of told them a little bit about their day, and we kind of just ended on, you know, all I really needed was somebody to listen to me and just hear what I'm going through right now. And at that point, the students kind of felt not, I don't want to say they felt bad, because it's all in good fun and just jokes, but they kind of realized, like, wow, we really made a mockery of this very simple task that we wanted to accomplish. And if we had just done the good right thing at first, it would have been way easier, but now instead, we have to break out of jail. So that's just an example of how chaotic it can be. Again, I know this is kind of going all over the place, but that is kind of how these games are sometimes, especially with the age group that I'm working with, where sometimes they just want to be funny and silly, and you have to take what they give you and make something out of it,

Toni Rose Deanon  39:04  
yeah, and the seal the silliness, right? Like we often at schools, right and classes, we often take that silliness away. We take away that curiosity as well, because it's like, No, we got to focus on this, this and this and this, right? And and what I'm hearing you say is that from play, from Dungeons and Dragons, students are able to be silly, right, be creative, and then they're learning lessons from that. I also wanted to point out that, like active listening skills, those are hard that is a hard skill,

Travis Hammer  39:37  
yeah, it's one that we practice a lot. But definitely a hard skill. And you know, it just speak to that, like, silliness, just a little bit more. You know, it's also really good for students to be able to start to define, like, okay, where exactly was a line, and at what point did I cross that line with my silliness? Because, you're right. I. Do want to encourage these things. And sometimes you have that one class clown, right, who wants to be the silliest out of everybody, and you have the rest of their group kind of looking at them and saying, Hey, we're trying to get a job done here. We really need to get this job done. And it can go one of two ways. Either one, the class clown is going to hear what the group is saying, take that into consideration and maybe change how they're approaching the problem a little bit. Or the class clown doubles down. And I love it when they double down, because at that point, I have to put my hands up to the rest of the group, like, okay, hold on. Let's, let's let them make their choices. Let's let them cook for a second. Let's see what where this leads. In my head, I know exactly where it's leading, and it's nowhere good for this character, but you know, at a certain point, this is what they have to learn, is that when you choose to make these choices over and over and over again, it's not always going to work the way you want. One quick, quick, quick example, students were in a mission where they were going up against a ghost, ghost a ghost in D. And D has a really fun ability where they scare you so bad that you can age potentially 40 years. And it's one of my favorite mechanics to use, because for a seventh grader, their worst possible nightmare is being 45 so there was one student who just couldn't help themselves. They were, they were kind of messing around the whole session. And then they complete the session. They're about to walk off into the next chapter. And before they do, they sign off with like, one last little jab, one last little insult, towards this ghost captain that they were facing off against. And that's when the ghost Captain turned around, activated this ability and made his character become 65 years old, which again, one of the worst nightmares for a seventh grader. And that was just a great lesson in Hey, when you've accomplished the task at hand, when you finish the job, or when you've overcome this obstacle, you don't need to turn around and gloat. That's not necessarily the best trait to have.

Toni Rose Deanon  42:00  
It's this whole, it's this whole notion of, let them make their choices, right? Because they're not going to learn if we're not, you know, we're not providing opportunities for students to make those choices themselves, right? And that kind of leads to the autonomy piece as well, right? When it comes to teaching and learning, we want to give our students autonomy to teach and learn the way that they need to. And so it's like, you know what? You're being silly, cool. Go make those mistakes, and you're going to learn the hard way. My mom used to always say that I never wanted to listen to anybody. I had to learn the hard way for me to actually learn from a mistake. And so I love that you're you're creating this environment as well. Like no no cool. We'll hear each other out. We're going to hear each other out because that's, that's what we do as a community, that's what we do together as a class. We're gonna hear we're gonna hear them out, and then let them, let them go, and then they is a natural consequence, right? Like, hey, if you did this, this is gonna happen. And that's, that's real life. That is honestly real life. So I really appreciate that. And I'm just chuckling at the fact that seventh graders, one of their biggest fears is to be 65 or 40. In their 40s.

Travis Hammer  43:04  
I have literally used it every semester. Semester that I've run this class, I've used that mechanic. And it's always the worst thing to happen to whoever's character. It happens to

Toni Rose Deanon  43:13  
Yeah, yeah. That is that that is so funny to me. Okay, so Travis, how do your students react to learning social skills through DND compared to traditional methods, because have you always done DND or no,

Travis Hammer  43:29  
this is a class that I actually started at. Let's see. When did I exactly start this at the beginning of last year, so not this school year, but the beginning of the previous school year. And what sort of differences I see. We actually have a dedicated social skills class here at the school, because it is such a big part of our curriculum. With so many students on an IEP, a very important section of that is social emotional learning, and they have goals written out for it. There's minutes that we have to put into this. So it's a big part of our school here. But the difference I see between our normal social skills class and the D and D class is when kids go to the normal social skills class, they like to tout why are we learning about this? We know how to talk to other people. I have friends. I don't need a social skills class. And you know, I will say about 99.9% of the time. That's never true, but that's how they feel about it. When we are giving it to them that way, when we're trying to deliver these lessons to them in that way, they struggle a little bit more because, you know, they have to learn about it, even though it's really cool skills to learn, and they'll recognize that more as they get older. You know, they don't like being told things that they have to do with the D and D class, we were working on a lot of the same stuff, especially when it comes to the specific soft skills that we've mentioned before, and just the social skills curriculum. Even though we're working on all those same things, because it's something that we do in practice, because it is a game, it almost feels. Like, I'm pulling the wool over their eyes a little bit of like, yeah, this games, or this class is about a game, and you your grade is based on, you know, these tasks that you complete and your participation in the game. But really, it's me trying to teach them how to interact in groups a little bit better, how to overcome these social challenges that they may face growing up throughout their lives, and my favorite form of teaching is sneaky teaching. I'll have to say

Toni Rose Deanon  45:27  
that sneaky teaching is where it's at when the kids think that they're just playing a game, and then they know all the skills that you had planned for so yeah, you know something that made me think about when you said with with students, especially right? Don't tell me what I have to do, don't tell me what to do, like I'm gonna do what I want, right? And I think that also speaks for adults, right? Adults also hate being told what to do, but we love when we have options. We love when it is also kind of like a sneaky teaching for adults too, right? So I think that that's just really funny, because now, you know, I'm working with mostly now all adults, right? All teachers, and I have to be creative with how I teach, or at least share information so that it doesn't, it doesn't feel overwhelming, or it doesn't feel like it's a huge Ask, and it feels like that is part of their ideas anyway, and I'm just here enhancing and supporting it. So I think it's really interesting that that's kind of what you're doing too. Like you kind of already know, middle schoolers love to play games. I mean, honestly, anybody loves, like, everybody loves to play games, right? It could be any kind of games, and so you being able to put that in the classroom, and when it when you're teaching social skills, that's really important, because it's like, oh, they're playing this game and and they are utilizing the social skills that we are teaching. So I love that. Thank you for sharing that. And so for teachers hesitant to try game based learning, because I know for me, for my neurodivergent brain, I'm like, Oh my gosh, that's so much. I would love to implement something like this, but I don't even know where to begin. What's your top tip for starting small in any class, or if you want to also talk about social studies?

Travis Hammer  47:17  
So for tips to get started out on something like this, I will say MCP. This class that I do, there is one major hurdle to it. No matter what this is going to be a class, the teacher running it has to know how to play the game. This is for dungeons, dragons specifically, because I don't know if this was clear enough up top, but it's a complicated game, right? The way that I put it makes it sound very simple, and for players, it can be very simple, but for the person running it, there's a lot of rules that you need to know, and you can reference these rules, but unless you have a really solid foundation of that of this game, it's not going to be successful. So if you are a teacher that's interested in doing something like this, make sure that you have practice with it outside of the classroom. First, play with your friends. Learn the rules a little bit, listen to some of these podcasts to learn how to play the game. But if you wanted to start smaller than that, because introducing games in the classroom is one of my favorite things to do of all time. As an example, one that I still do to this day is I do a version of the Oregon Trail, but it's done through a PowerPoint presentation, and they get to make different choices. I have this whole cool little sheet that I use to help keep track of, like, their money, their supplies, and it's all added together at the end for their final score. That's a much more complicated version. And there is those sorts of games on for example, Teachers Pay Teachers. But to start even smaller, there was an example of a trivia show that I did. And I will say this before I describe this. The best game for your classroom is one that you make up yourself. You make the rules. It doesn't have to be overly complicated. So an example of one that was not overly complicated that I did include a little bit of D and D in this as well. I did a trivia show for my students where I played the role of didaskalos, the knowledge hoarding dragon. I drew a little health bar meter up on my board back here with 100 health points, and I wrote three different abilities kids could choose from to help them answer the questions. So one of the abilities was call on a friend to help you with the answer. One ability was being able to answer twice or give two different answers and still getting it correctly. And every time they got an answer correct, the kids got to roll a certain dice, a D 20, and however many or whatever number they rolled on that D 20, that's how many health points I would subtract from the dragon. And health points. So while I'm giving this kind of trivia show review, I am putting on a voice. I'm having kids describe how they run up and hit the dragon after they answer a question correctly. And kids got super into it. They're very excited. They even introduce a little bit of their own creativity in it as well. I think they finished off the Dragon by producing a giant spoon, and sorry, a little bit gruff, they scooped out the dragon's eye, and I just had to pretend like I was a one eyed dragon at this point, yelling about, hey, whoa. This is a trivia show. Why are you guys being so violent? It was a lot of fun, but it wasn't that hard to plan. I had the review questions already, the review questions that I would have used for like a gym kit or a Kahoot or just any sort of test prep, and then I just added a couple rules. And by doing that, kids loved it. I still have some of those kids come from the high school now and tell me our recount with me that time I played a dragon in the classroom and had my eyes scooped out, creating memories like that, I think is so important to learning, because when I think back on it, when I think about what has stuck with me throughout my whole educational career, obviously, all the skills and all the knowledge my teachers gave me as a kid growing up, they built on each other, so even If I don't remember them specifically, they're still there, but the parts I do remember were the parts that were fun and impactful, like that. So helping create these memories for students is going to help them retain this information we're trying to provide to them on a daily basis. You can't do it every single day, but every time you can, it's going to make a difference.

Toni Rose Deanon  51:41  
You said so much here, Travis, and I'm processing because they're so they're so great, they're so beautiful. And this is something that I want to hear all the time as well. And I think my biggest thing that I'm hearing is that there are, there's a lot of play involved, right? And the teaching and the learning, there's a lot of play. And I think this is something that I am also internalizing, because you know when, if and when I do go back in the classroom, I want to incorporate more play. I was very playful with my students, but we didn't play right like there weren't enough opportunities for students to play, to be creative, to be funny, to be silly in my English classes, which is wild, because it's storytelling. That is where role playing should be happening. That is where, like imagination, visualization, all of these things should be happening. And so I I love hearing that there's a lot of play happening in your classroom, because I think, like you said, that's very important. That's what that's what students are going to remember. And it's also another reminder Travis that, yes, we have a review packet like we do have to review for tests. It doesn't have to be dry. It can actually be a lot of fun. And you bringing in what you were already excited about and knowledgeable about, and sharing that with your students, that makes review that much more fun, that makes coming to school that much more fun and engaging, and so thank you for sharing all of your experiences.

Travis Hammer  53:12  
Actually, one more thing came to mind, and this one might be just one more idea that I've used before in my classroom, as far as the Review Game goes, that I think anybody could actually put into their own classroom. And again, this is me ripping off somebody else's idea. I got, I got it from a show, once again, from dropout.tv if you guys don't subscribe to them, it's a lot of fun. But the the show, or the the game itself, is called, um, actually, so especially for like science and history, where you can just give a lot of statements of fact, right? You would give the statement of fact, but you change one detail about that fact. And the game is, when you buzz in, you have to identify what is wrong with the statement, but you have to say the words, um, actually, before you identify what's wrong with the statement. That one has been a lot of fun, because at a certain point, even if a kid doesn't know the answer, they're looking at the statement, and there's a little bit of strategy to it, of like, okay, what is out of place here? I may not know exactly what we're talking about with this whole, you know, American Revolution thing, but something has to be out of place in the statement. So it's, it's a fun little review game where you still get to go over all the concrete points that you need to go over for a review, but also allows the kids to kind of problem solve through statements like that.

Toni Rose Deanon  54:32  
Yeah, and it's error analysis, right? Like there's a mistake, so let's analyze a mistake and correct it. And it's not a big deal. If there's a mistake, we're going to correct it, though. We're not going to let it be we're going to correct it. And you said this was more so for like history and science, but I can see that in math as well, right? Here's a problem that you can here's a problem and there's an error, actually, you know, it should be a two instead of a three. And then. Even thinking about English, yeah, grammar would be one of the things, even writing skills, reading skills, right? Like, even when we're thinking about, like, context clues and expanding students vocabulary, that could be a great actually, like that is not the right word to use. This would be the word that I would use for this paragraph instead. Oh, that's so cool. 

Travis Hammer  55:20  
Yeah, I wish I was creative enough to come up with all of these ideas on my own, but I'm standing on the shoulder of giants, very funny giants, and I just keep on pulling ideas from different places like this. And this is one of those ways that we are, like bringing parts of ourselves into the classroom. These are the kind of things I enjoy in my home life, and being able to bring a piece of that and apply it to what we do in the classroom. Has been so much fun.

Toni Rose Deanon  55:45  
That's so cool. You're giving me so much life right now, honestly. Okay, Travis, so what is your future, or what is your vision for the future of games and interactive storytelling, in social studies, education, in social skills in anything, and then any new D and D ideas you're excited about,

Travis Hammer  56:06  
oh, man, I can answer this question in one fell salute, because that's what I was going to reference anyways at the end of this statement. So the future of what this class looks like for me personally, and what I hope I can do more in my social studies classes as well. As far as the adventuring academy class goes, the D and D class I refer to as adventuring Academy, once again, ripping it off shamelessly, next year, I would actually really like to bring that a little bit more into social studies. Not it's still primarily going to be a social skills class, but I realized, you know, what am I doing? I have d and d stories built in to some of these social studies lessons I could be doing, or that I used to do when I had a myths and legends class. So next year, I'm going to be incorporating a little bit more mythology into it. Normally, at the beginning of these D and D classes, I do have a fake history lesson of the world that they're playing in, so we present it very much like a history lesson, but of a world that I created. We're going to do that again next year, but next year we're going to be focusing more on different mythologies, you know, we'll start off with the standard ones. You know, big Greek history buff here in college, again, shout out to Professor Lunt at Southern Utah University. But, you know, starting with Greek mythology, and then I can see it kind of building from there, starting to get into other mythologies and other cultures that the kids at our school not otherwise be introduced to, and that's something I want to really make sure I'm taking my time with and doing it correctly as much as I possibly can. And that's why we're starting with Greek mythology, because that one I got a little bit more solid already. So that's just one idea that I have for bringing this social skills class into a more social studies world. As far as bringing the D and D to social studies. Yeah, there are a lot of things that I can see using this game to kind of apply in that classroom. I don't have to do the full game of Dungeons and Dragons to play Dungeons and Dragons. The first time I ever played a version of this game was in my eighth grade English class with my little pod of tables where we were just going back and forth, saying, Okay, this happens in the story. What do you do next? Then I would say, what I would do next, and then the kid that is telling the story would go and find a way to embarrass me. But you know, Dungeons and Dragons doesn't have to follow those rules. You can just take bits and pieces of it. So what I'm imagining is next year, when we're going over the American Revolution, we are going to role play one of the major events in American history. Maybe we'll role play some of the events that happened in Boston leading up to the American Revolution, like the Boston Massacre. You're a person in the crowd watching this all go down. You don't see exactly how it starts, but you see people are throwing snowballs. You see all of a sudden a puff of white smoke, loud bang, and people scattering, running. And we kind of go through these historical events as if we're there. And then the kids still get to have this freedom to make the choices in those events of what they would do. So that's one version that I'm thinking of. Another pie in the sky dream is something along those similar lines, where we're still playing out a major historical event in a role playing session, but their goal is to fix something wrong in the historical event. The historical event is not going how they were taught, so they have to fix that problem. That's that's the pie in the sky dream. You know, there's always considerations you have to make with making sure you get to all the content you need to get to. But in a perfect world, I'd be able to spend a day or two on something like this. 

Toni Rose Deanon  59:50  
Yeah, I love that. I love that concept. And I know teaching history too, you kind of have to also be aware and mindful of how to do like those role playing and then the different. Perspectives, right? But I really love this problem solving piece too. Of like, hey, sounds not right? How can you fix it? What would you do different? Oh my gosh, yes, Travis, love, love, love, love, I'm excited. I want you to, like, keep me in the loop with all the things that you're doing. I know that you have about two, three weeks left of school, so I hope you rest a lot this summer, and that you create all the cool things for next year so that you and I can jump on another podcast and have conversations about the changes that you've implemented the following year. 

Travis Hammer  1:00:31  
Yeah, I would absolutely love to, it's so good to be able to talk to you again and to catch up a little bit. Can I just say also I really appreciate this opportunity to be on this podcast. It's not often that people just give me about an hour's worth of time to straight up just talk about D and D, which is, on its surface, fantastic already. But I also really appreciate the way that you've been kind of taking this weird, meandering way of me saying things and putting it so succinct and clear. Thank you for being an excellent host. Toni Rose, I really, really appreciate it

Toni Rose Deanon  1:01:05  
well. Travis, this is all you, honestly, you've expanded my brain. It is something that I am now curious about, because I've known about it, but I've not been curious about it, and so now I'm like, Ooh, I kind of want to know more. So thank you for giving me your time and your energy and your expertise and also your excitement, because I feel the excitement on this call So Travis, just thank you so much for sharing your experiences and expertise with us. I really, really appreciate it. Thank you.

Travis Hammer  1:01:35  
Thank you, 

Toni Rose Deanon  1:01:36  
listeners. Remember you can always email us at podcast@modernclassrooms.org, and you can find the show notes for this episode at podcast dot modern classrooms.org, we'll have this episode's video uploaded on modern classrooms YouTube channel and transcript uploaded by Friday, so be sure to check back to access those. Also, we are asking our listeners to leave a review if this podcast has been helpful in supporting you to create a human centered learning environment through a blended self paced and mastery based model, it does help other folks find it. Thank you all for listening. Have a great week, and we'll be back next Sunday.

Zach Diamond  1:02:13  
Thank you so much for listening. You can find links to topics and tools we discussed in our show notes for this episode, and remember, you can learn more about our work at www.modernclassrooms.org and you can learn the essentials of our model through our free course at Learn.modernclassrooms.org you can follow us on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram @modernclassproj that's P, R, O, J, we are so appreciative of all you do for students in schools. Have a great week, and we'll be back next Sunday with another episode of the modern classrooms project podcast. 

Transcribed by https://otter.ai