Video game design for professional learning constitutes a special form of design research (Collins, 1996; Cobb et. al. 2003). In design experiments, researchers build and deploy interventions, based on research-based assumptions about intended practices, to investigate how complex learning occurs within authentic social settings. In turn, designers develop a deeper understanding of the theories that guided their initial designs (Barab & Squire, 2004). 

Video game design research is a new path of research that addresses a critical gap in professional preparation programs such as school leadership. The traditional menu of classroom learning, seminars and practica served by education leadership programs provide inadequate training for many school leaders (Levine, 2005). Students learn about cases, theories and heuristics in courses and seminars, and learn to navigate specific school environments in practica, but often are unable to make a principled connection between theories and practice.

Video games build on a long tradition of tools used by leadership preparation programs to address this gap, from role playing activities, to problem and case-based learning activities (Bridges and Hallinger, 1995; Merseth, 1997) to board games (Making Change, 1989) to computer simulations (Hallinger & McCary 1990).  Through school leadership games, we are working to take the next step, providing both in-service and practicing leaders with rich and responsive microworlds for cultivating effective practice.

Our initial game development project Teaching Evaluation is a “proof of concept” game that focuses on the practices of teacher evaluation. Reform-based teacher evaluation practices present an interesting challenge for school instructional leaders.  While teacher evaluation programs promise the ability to access, monitor and correct teaching practices in context, without clear, legitimate access to how reformed teaching practices play out in classroom teaching, it is very difficult to provide the support necessary to help teachers learn new practices.

Evaluation programs are also important for accountability purposes.  Schools and districts need quality evaluation programs to control staff quality and to provide grounds for dismissing poor teachers. However, traditions of teacher autonomy and the traditional separation of summative and formative functions of assessment have traditionally undermined the potential effects of evaluation (Natreillo, Pallas & McDill, 1990). Teacher assessment has been used to “weed out” poor performing teachers rather than to hold all teachers accountable or to improve the performance of all teachers (Darling-Hammond, et al., 1999; Haney, Madaus & Kreitzer, 1987).

While we would not argue that evaluation practices can be essentially reduced to how evaluators fit classroom observation evidence to general observation frameworks, we would suggest that a lack of knowledge about how to select proper evidence and communicate effectively with teachers can reduce evaluation from an instructional to a political process (Halverson, Kelley & Kimball, 2003).

Research that details the practices evaluators actually use to engage in standards-based evaluation practices (e.g. Halverson & Clifford, 2006) demonstrates how evaluators customize rubrics to filter observation data and assemble reports, and shows how leaders use evaluation as a process to build faculty good will rather than critique.  Teaching Evaluation operationalizes the practical and theoretical assumptions about teaching built into standards-based evaluation frameworks, and constructs a learning environment to guide players through the process of observation, assessment and follow-up conversation that constitute the evaluation cycle.

Video games are dynamic environments that allow players to experiment with identities, acquire and navigate complex symbol systems, and engage in many forms of learning by doing (Gee, 2003).  School leadership games can illustrate how experts frame and solve complex problems, while also tracing the typical mistakes made by novices and the developmental path practitioners take as they develop leadership skills including and exceeding simple management. Recent developments in learning assessment suggest that task-models situated in games may provide a valuable means to measure complex cognitive performance (Levy & Mislevy, 2004; Mislevy, Sternberg & Almond, 2002).  The development of school leadership games provide just such a framework for analyzing the skills and knowledge of both novice and expert practitioners, and the completed games create opportunities for professional learning at all levels of practice.