Hope collection

How can secondary English teachers effectively integrate digital games into their teaching practices to enhance student engagement and learning outcomes?

Practical Advice/Tips for Practitioners

• Provide targeted professional development 
  Offer continuous, classroom-focused professional learning to enhance teachers’ confidence and practical knowledge in selecting and integrating digital games effectively into English lessons.

• Clarify curriculum connections 
  Clearly identify and articulate specific curriculum outcomes achievable through digital games to guide teachers' planning, assessment, and justify their educational value in English classes.

• Adopt critical and creative approaches 
  Encourage the use of digital games to critically examine social issues, ideologies, and diverse perspectives, enhancing critical literacy and creative expression among students.

• Balance engagement and literacy skills 
  Use digital games selectively to balance student engagement with explicit literacy skill development, ensuring gaming complements rather than replaces fundamental literacy learning objectives.

• Evaluate and select quality games 
  Develop clear criteria for selecting educationally valuable digital games, ensuring choices align with English curriculum goals and address diverse student needs and contexts effectively

Abstract

Digital games can support learning across many levels and fields of education. This article shares findings from a study of Australian high school English teachers designed with a mixed response questionnaire about using digital games in the classroom. The findings identified polarised teacher perspectives on the role of gaming in formal curriculum, tension in teachers’ ideal and enacted use of digital games, and a need for in-practice professional development on digital games. Implications include the need to optimise digital games use for learning in teaching and teacher education, and to address perceptions on the validity of gaming for classroom learning.

Full paper access

Gutierrez, Amanda, Mills, Kathy, Scholes, Laura, Rowe, Luke and Pink, Elizabeth. (2023). What do secondary teachers think about digital games for learning : Stupid fixation or the future of education? Teaching and Teacher Education. 133, p. Article 104278.

Contact the researcher

Associate Professor Amanda Gutierrez’s
amanda.gutierrez@acu.edu.au

Learn more about Associate Professor Amanda Gutierrez’s research