How Games and Life Skills Can Revolutionize Learning

EDITOR’S NOTE:

In today's fast-paced world, traditional education often fails to equip students for real-life challenges.

Meet Zachary Reznichek, the innovative mind behind the Teacher-Gamer Handbook. Zachary is revolutionizing learning with his dynamic approach that incorporates role-playing games (RPGs) and project-based learning.

These methods transform education into an exciting adventure, helping students develop vital skills like teamwork, problem-solving, self-discovery, and resilience.

For homeschooling families, Zachary's ideas are a game-changer.

He champions authentic, ethical, and inclusive education that reconnects learners with nature and nurtures the whole person.

His blend of academic, physical, social-emotional, and creative learning through RPGs and other interactive methods offers a refreshing and motivating way to inspire students.

This approach fosters a collaborative and supportive environment where learners can thrive and confidently prepare for the future.

We invited Zach for a quick interview to learn more about his projects and learning philosophy.

Enjoy!

What are the most important skills that learners need to succeed in the 21st century?

How to write. The ability to express yourself in any and all contexts allows you to navigate your future no matter what Century you are in.

How can we make education more engaging and relevant for all learners?

By making it authentic and relatable to learners.

Through ethics, inclusion and sustainability (the three key values of the Biophilic Education Alliance) learners must be challenged to develop life-skills, explore their identities and realize what we need to do to become a multi-planet species.

A great place to start is by implementing a role-playing game program in any and all schools.

What are your predictions for the future of education, particularly in the homeschooling and alternative education space?

That role-playing games (RPGs) will be the next wave to facilitate social emotional learning (SEL) and project based learning (PBL).

Remember when mindfulness swept the planet? RPGs in Schools is the next wave, because it has so many things to offer and is so robust integrating all subjects around it. RPGs is truly transdisciplinary.

What inspired you to write the Teacher-Gamer Handbook?

I just realized that generally speaking, students really do not have the opportunity to explore their identities and yet they are expected to work so much out about themselves. RPGs in schools is an incredible opportunity to take risks, try things, fail, try again, collaborate to find solutions and celebrate group success.

Also, there were so many life-skills I was teaching and I was trying to figure out how to put them all together authentically.

Image 2 shows a class entirely immersed in a deep discussion of what their characters want to do next in the face of a major dilemma as the propose various strategies to move forward.

How can the Teacher-Gamer Handbook be adapted for use in homeschooling communities?

Because the methodology and approaches explored in the TGHB are kinaesthetic, academic, makerspace and social emotional there is something for everyone and all together there is a system of developing 36 life-skills over a few years.

It is not supposed to be the curriculum itself. As a complement to any curriculum, it facilitates many core facets of developing resiliency and adult readiness. Among many other things, it explores SEL implicitly (where something like pastoral care explores SEL explicitly). It allows learners to take risks with their identity exploration through a character without feeling the nerves of getting on stage (where something like theatre explores identity much more out in the open).

Also, when mentors engage in 'collaborative play' with learners, a new level of trust develops because there is so much failure, recalibration and success. When the same student encounters a problem in something more academic, they are much more likely to bring up their difficulty with the mentor and be open to finding solutions (as they did together in the game learning context).

Image 3 shows kids with foam swords engaging in playing battle. The rules were originally proposed by me, but within 6 months this cohort of students entirely self-governs their foam swordplay.

What is the core philosophy behind Da Vinci Life-Skills' 'living' curriculum, and how does it differ from traditional education models?

Driven by the need for change and using research to guide us, we put together the Biophilic Education Alliance (BE All) as a new vision for the education of the future. A Biophilic Education system that focuses on the love of life and creating sustainable, inclusive and ethical environments where students can learn about what interests them, be valued for who they are, discover their talents and develop into confident adults. We embrace using AI and robotics as tools, but more importantly we remember our connection to the natural environment, guided by the wisdom of our ancestors and indigenous local knowledge and culture.

We promote an equal blend of: academic learning with critical thinking and reasoning; physical and practical learning with movement and technical skills; social emotional learning with self-management and teamwork, and creative/intuitive learning with ideation and problem solving. We aim to nurture the whole human being as an integral and interconnected part of the wider local and global ecosystems, to focus on collaboration over competition and build thriving communities.

We have built a new Da Vinci Life-Skills Curriculum and Assessment Framework to help support schools and home ed hubs make this needed transition and a BE Mentor Development program to support teachers’ shift from a knowledge rich curriculum to an experiential and project-based learning system. Instead of moving into adulthood with stress filling their minds, we help young people develop the capacity to engage wholeheartedly in the learning journey that is life.

Our figurehead, Leonardo Da Vinci, did not see the world through siloed subjects, he explored the world with an insatiable childlike curiosity, Whether it was science, art, geography, maths or linguistics, he was a polymath, systems thinker.

We have created five transdisciplinary pathways that blend traditional school subjects and the learning objectives from the UK National Curriculum with students' interests and 21st century life-skills. Each pathway contains a collection of engaging and challenging projects that relate learning to real world contexts:

The PERSONAL EXPLORATION pathway (PEP) involves individual passion projects and group projects designed by the students with support from their mentors. Learners are guided with the lead questions: What do you want to do? Make? Get better at? And what problems do you want to solve?

The PRODUCTION pathway creates content that is presented in the public sphere, such as a science museum, gallery exhibition, film or fashion show.

The ENTERPRISE pathway models how to put something useful and sustainable into the community and encourages students to start an enterprise or design products by exploring industrial and civic design, engineering, robotics and coding.

The FOOD pathway investigates the journey of food from the earth to our plates and the proper waste management to make the experience cyclical. We grow and cook food, and explore local and global food trade, nutrition and health. If possible, we work with the community to form a farmers market and a CSA (Community Sustained Agriculture program).

The MULTIVERSE GAMES pathway explores game and character design, game mechanics, creative writing and team building using the robust world-building aspects of RPG (Role Playing Game) adventures in historical and fantasy contexts to develop social emotional learning (SEL) experiences and to explore identity and communication skills.

I generated this with my Da Vinci LIfe-Skills partner Rosina Dorelli as we talked about what a biophilic school might look like.

As an education innovator, what advice would you give to parents and educators seeking to create a learning environment that truly inspires and engages children?

Work together with others in your community. Reach out and find out what others are doing or already started. Make partnerships. Share the work, the risks and the collaborative wins! Do something inclusive, ethical and sustainable. Make it a model that your kids can co-create with you and learn from. Make something you all can be proud of.

This image is from Empathy Middle School Bali, where as the director we have co-created a space and environment where everyone feels fun, safe, engaged and proud.

Speak your heart.

How can we be stewards of the planet if we are not stewards of our community? How can we be stewards of our community if we are not stewards of ourselves?

Take more time with your self. Be gentle with yourself. Learn how to sit quietly through mindfulness, resting peacefully in solitude after heavy athletic activity or martial arts.

Get out into nature and leave your devices behind. Bring a journal and some paintbrushes. Just hang out in front of a landscape. Or go all in and go camping. This experience will give you new impressions about yourself, others and the world.

Join a games group. If you have already joined a games group, move up into an RPG group. If you have already done both of those or you just want to do something totally SEL immersive, join an improvisational theatre class or "improv group". So much can be learned when you put yourself out there.