Morgan Seely is a Shelby County Public School (KY) teacher at Painted Stone Elementary, starting her educational career in 2011. Seely believed strongly in evidence-based practices from the start, but the launch of Shelby County's Profile of a Graduate in 2017 helped spur her journey toward centering student agency and competency-based education in her own classroom.
Playing TTRPGs is a part of Seely's household family fun. She began considering how to incorporate them into her classroom in the spring of 2024 with her fourth graders. One student was particularly passionate about the Titanic, which led to a classwide mini-adventure where students experienced the difference between the survival rates of first-, second-, and third-class passengers. Later in the spring, with the help of her husband, Seely used a simplified D&D gaming mechanic where student characters had to apply their math knowledge to solve quests. It led to Seely vowing to do a more extensive use of TTRPGs in her upcoming 2024-2025 school year. Of course, I was delighted to hear all of this!
When we talked in the summer of 2024, Seely shared that she wanted to kick off with a character creation activity, with the plan to play several academic-based adventures throughout the year reusing the same characters. Once again, her husband helped devise a simplified D&D-like system that seemed appropriate for her upcoming fourth graders. A student chooses a "species," which automatically creates two statistics of Armor Class (AC, or how hard it is to get hurt) and Health Points (HP, or how much hurt you can take before you have to sit out for the session). A choice of "ability" -- what is called "classes" in Dungeons & Dragons -- adds a bonus to their AC or HP. Students choose two items of equipment from a given list or can present their reasoning for something else. Lastly, the students have to write a backstory biography about their character and explain the significance of their two pieces of equipment. (Copies of Seely's Slides for directions and her character sheet template is available in a Google folder here.)
I came early in the school year when Seely introduced me as a guest teacher who knew about a special kind of game where you need to depend on your imagination to co-create stories. Would the students be interested in playing this game? (Posing this kind of question is one of the many pieces of evidence proving Seely believes in a community of learners that has voice in the direction of how and what they learn.) The students nearly unanimously said yes. Cut to about a month later in mid-September, and I came back as an observer and helper for their character creation kickoff activity, with a title Slide announcing that today we would be "Bringing Learning to Life Through Our Imagination."
I was impressed and caught the fever of their enthusiasm from the start. Imaginations were visibly on display, as students became deeply invested in how their biography, physical description, and explanation of their equipment intertwined. (Just like adults, coming up with names was the hardest part; I advised a student, "Maybe you could go with Jack Potter as a good wizard name?") When students were ready, they queued up in line to have Seely help generate a portrait of their character in an artificial intelligence image tool. This became a great on-the-spot lesson about prompt engineering, as students quickly realized the more details you provided, the better result you got. A clever tech management strategy that Seely used was digitally distributing the character templates to each student as a Slide that was linked back to a master slide deck for the teacher; this meant Seely could view all the student characters in one place, as well as easily drop her AI image for a particular student's character sheet. One student (who happened to be Seely's son) led a handful of his peers who had finished early on how to map a dungeon. It foreshadowed Seely's goal of having student "game masters" lead small groups through adventures in the future. It should be pointed out that Seely was very mindful of the age and maturity of her students -- she reminded them that "kindness is the most powerful ability you can have" and that whatever obstacles may lay ahead in their adventures, we were "defeating" adversaries, not "killing" them. As Seely wrapped up the activity and brought them back together as a whole group, she had the students reflect how the day's work was aligned to an academic reading standard.
Even if this character creation activity was the end of the road, it still would have been a worthy learning experience. But Seely promises to have her fourth graders role-play with these characters in academic quests to come. I can't want to visit again and see them in action!
