Purpose
The purpose of Quests is to enhance students’ exposure to different careers and apply social-emotional competencies, such as responsible decision-making, through a project-based learning experience. The new learning experience aligns with Read to Lead’s focus on the whole child by creating different types of learning experiences, allowing students to practice and reflect on their social-emotional skills, and increase their occupational identity, while still reading critically. This strategy was recommended and approved under the guidance of Digital Promise advisors in accordance with the grant we received to do this work in 2019 and supports the Composition Projects: Multimodal strategy.
Description
Quests are a digitized curriculum that enhances the learning experience that students receive from playing the games. It combines RTL’s previous extended offline curriculum and projects into an on-platform, student-led, and teacher-trackable experience.
A Quest is a digital learning experience that gives youth the opportunity to better understand specific career fields more deeply through applied learning and extends learning from the games. Quests explore challenges from the viewpoint of careers tied to the Read to Lead suite of games. Each Quest will be composed of four distinct challenges that each end in a submission of work. Challenge materials and submissions will have a different media and response format, truly making this a multimodal experience.
Quests incorporate specific instructional strategies taken from Digital Promise LVN that support literacy skill development. They are also aligned to the common core standards and the CASEL framework:
Common Core Writing Standards: Quests support students' literacy skill development by addressing Common Core Writing Anchor standards that are not used in the games. Writing is a core pillar of literacy skill development and quests provide an opportunity for RTL to address more common core literacy standards. This ensures that when students engage with both games and quests together, they will practice a range of common core literacy anchor standing, including reading and writing.
CASEL SEL Competencies: Additionally, Quests are aligned to the same CASEL SEL competencies as the games. The quests are not aligned to career exploration standards but rather use career exploration as a hook to engage students in their learning similar to our strategy in RTL games.
How to Implement
Quests are designed to be completed in tandem with playing at least four Read to Lead games. These can be easily assigned with our pre-curated playlists that target specific goals.
Before embarking on any Quest, students will be required to complete the Strengths Finder Quiz where students self-select their unique personal strengths and character traits. Students will be asked to reflect through writing prompts on how they apply their strengths to different challenges.
Quest challenges must be completed in order and will culminate in a final submission of work bringing together all the learning from previous challenges and allowing students to see themselves in that particular industry.
Each challenge should take 20-40 minutes to complete, and all of the materials and submissions are accessed and completed within the Read to Lead platform. A Quest does not have to be completed all at once, but rather a student could complete the challenges over a series of days.
Once a Quest is completed, students will earn a badge!
Student work for each challenge can be found within the dashboard