Alpha Players and In-Class Group Work

File this under “designing board games is a lot like teaching”…

I was recently reading the new issue of Senet magazine, a publication whose tagline is “board games are beautiful.” The issue featured an interview with Matt Leacock, designer of the popular cooperative board game Pandemic. In a cooperative board game, all the players work together to defeat the game. There’s no single winner; either everyone wins or the game wins. What happens when one player starts telling all the other players what they should do? That’s called the alpha player problem, and it can really take the fun out of a cooperative game.

Leacock was asked about the alpha player problem and what a game designer can do about it. “The designer… has a responsibility to create mechanisms where everyone can shine and one player can’t dominate.” What are some mechanisms that can prevent or at least minimize the alpha player problem? Leacock identified three strategies:

1. Hidden information. Structure the game so that no one player has access to all the relevant information. “It’s difficult to be domineering if the other person has autonomy or ownership of that information,” Leacock said. He also noted that hiding information in a cooperative game can feel artificial.
2. Wicked problems. If the game is hard enough, no one player can run the table. Leacock described his forthcoming cooperative game about climate change, Daybreak, which I mentioned here on the blog last fall, as hard in this way. “There are so many moving parts that trying to internalize the entire game state is very taxing.”
3. Nuance problems. These are challenges in a game “where there are many right answers.” Leacock said he enjoys these kinds of challenges, since they “lead to lots of discussions.”

As I was reading the Leacock interview, I couldn’t help but think of analogies to the college classroom. When integrating group work in a class session, there’s a risk that some groups will have an “alpha student,” that is, a group member who takes charge in an unhelpful way. Not only can this make for some uncomfortable social situations, it can also deprive other group members of opportunities to learn.

How can teachers try to prevent or minimize the alpha student problem? Leacock’s three game design strategies transfer very well to educational settings!

1. Hidden information. When students are given access to different resources or different ways to prepare for group interactions, no one student has all the information needed to tackle the group work. Consider a jigsaw activity where each member of a group brings different ideas or resources to the table, drawn from a previous set of group interactions. Or consider structured reading groups, an approach that involves giving different group members different roles to play as they prepare for and participate in group work.
2. Wicked problems. Giving students a sufficiently challenging or complex problem, one that no single student can solve, can create a sense of interdependence. Researchers in the Netherlands led by Femke Kirschner studied how individuals and groups went about solving both low-complexity and high-complexity problems. In their 2011 study, they found that group work had little relative impact on student learning over individual work for the low-complexity tasks. For the high-complexity tasks, however, group work shined.
3. Nuance problems. When there’s no single right answer to a question, it’s a lot harder for one student to dominate group discussions. That can still happen, but if you’ve framed the problem at hand as one that permits multiple interesting and useful answers, there’s more reason for all the students in a group to weigh in and share their perspectives and ideas. And these problems exist in all fields, even “high consensus” fields like the natural sciences. There are often multiple ways to get to a single answer, or ethical questions to explore.

How do you go about structuring group work to avoid “alpha students”? Do your methods map onto any of these three strategies?

For more on the intersection of games and teaching, see my “Learning at Play” blog posts or my Leading Lines podcast interviews with Patrick Rael, Max Seidman, and Kimberly Rogers.

The Perils of Lecture Class

Since I don’t have enough going on (apparently), I recently started another newsletter. It’s called Intentional Learning, and it’s focused on strategies for learning and academic success at college. I spend most of my professional life talking with faculty and other instructors about teaching and learning, and I thought it was time to take that conversation to students.

The Intentional Learning newsletter comes out every Wednesday on LinkedIn. You can read it right here, and, if you’re a LinkedIn user, you can subscribe there, too. It’s written for students, so if you have students in your life that you care about, feel free to share it with them!

The latest issue on lecturing and active learning has gotten a fair amount of attention on LinkedIn, so I thought I would cross-post it here on my blog. 

The Perils of Lecture Class

“I wish Bruff would just work problems at the chalk board like other math professors.”

Ask any professor who has been teaching for a while about the student evaluations they receive at the end of each course, and they will immediately recall a few choice comments. Some of the comments are positive, like this one I received a few years ago: “I was so excited about this course’s podcast project that I shared my episode with my grandmother!” Some are hard to interpret, like “excessively politically correct” (in a math course?) or “Bruff Riders 4 Ever!” (I think that was positive.) And some are just frustrating to read, like the one above wishing for more chalk-and-talk.

That comment came from a student in a statistics course I taught with about a hundred students, mostly engineering students who were taking the course to fulfill a requirement for their major. They weren’t overly excited to be there, but I knew that going in, and I tried to make the course both relevant to their future careers as engineers and engaging as a learning experience. That meant I didn’t just work problems at the chalk board. Every class session asked students to actively participate in their own learning.

A typical class might involve a pre-class assignment with a few textbook pages to read and a couple of simple math questions to answer. Class would start with polling questions, where I asked students to respond to multiple-choice questions about the concepts for the day using their digital devices and to discuss some of the harder questions with their neighbors. Then we might move into group work for a while, maybe tackling a worksheet full of math problems or creating a data visualization with a partner. When I did work a problem at the chalk board, it was only after the students had a chance to try the problem themselves, so they could better understand my solution.

I was practicing what’s called “active learning instruction.” It’s usually held in contrast to traditional lecturing, aka “continuous exposition by the instructor.” Professors don’t practice active learning instruction just to make classes more lively. There’s a ton of educational research showing that these practices lead to greater student learning and student success, whether you measure that by course grades or persistence in the major or graduation rates. The student asking me to work more problems at the board? They were requesting an instructional approach that’s demonstrably inferior.

But I can’t get too frustrated with this student. This student probably thrived in chalk-and-talk classes, both in high school and college. That’s what they were expecting, and I asked them to do something very different, something that involved more work during class, and maybe something that didn’t feel all that useful to the student. And this student is hardly alone in viewing active learning instruction this way.

A team of researchers at Harvard University led by Louis Deslauriers ran an experiment where students were randomly assigned to one of two class sessions, one taught via traditional lecture and one taught via active learning. Same topics, same physics problems, same worked examples, just different instruction. The researchers quizzed students over the material and surveyed the students about how they felt about the classes. The result? Students learned more in the active learning classes but they felt they learned more in the lecture classes!

Here’s how the researchers put it in their article about the study: “Students rated the quality of instruction in passive lectures more highly, and they expressed a preference to have ‘all of their physics classes taught this way,’ even though their scores on independent tests of learning were lower than those in actively taught classrooms.” Does that sound familiar? My stats student said basically the same thing.

Should we generalize from this Harvard study? Maybe not. Harvard students aren’t like students elsewhere. But wouldn’t you expect Harvard students to be pretty savvy about learning? If they can be led astray by the comforting familiarity of traditional lecturing, I think anyone can. And I certainly hear from faculty colleagues at other institutions (that aren’t Harvard) that they encounter the same student pushback about active learning instruction.

What’s the takeaway here for college students? One, learning is hard work. If it feels super easy, it’s probably not actually changing your brain in useful ways. Two, we’re often pretty poor judges of how well we learn, especially when we’re newbies in a particular area. Three, if you show up to class and there’s not much to do other than listen to someone else talk and maybe take some notes, then you might not actually be learning much.

But you knew that, right? You took a bunch of Zoom classes during COVID where all you had to do was listen to a talking head, and you realized that wasn’t working for you. And now you’re back in a physical classroom and the talking heads are talking and you’re wondering if it’s worth your time to show to class. Next week in the newsletter, we bring this conversation about active learning and traditional lecturing into 2023 to see what it means for showing up to class in college today.

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