Session 2, Friday class:
The class enjoyed the Kahoot! game that I designed to review the Manifesto, especially the historiographical ideas in it. Things were a bit chaotic because we were missing our Karl Schapper, the leader of the assembly. Thankfully, August Hermann Ewerbeck stepped up to be the president pro tem. The Bakunin character gave an excellent speech on how the state cannot be trusted because it is an instrument of the bourgeoisie and ergo it is useless for workers to organize themselves as a political party. There were some other good speeches, but that one was by far the best. Still, it was interesting to me what a difference there was between this class, which has not had the extensive coaching on what I what from a speech, and the speeches students gave in during my Athens game last semester, during which I both made clear what my expectations were during class, in the rubric and gave them time together to work on those issues.
Helen McFarlane and William Lloyd Garrison produced good newsletters. But while these are very entertaining for me to read, I wondered what I could do to make the other students pay closer attention to them. What I loved about this assignment is that it seems as if done well, would be a great example of historiography in action: the students would be providing two very interpretations of the same event.
William King made his arrest, choosing to arrest Marx. The students did some excellent gaming of the rules as well: both the followers of Marx and the Bourgeois Socialists realized that if William King and Marx voluntarily gave up their votes, their sides would not be at a disadvantage.
Nonetheless, even with these shenanigans, the voting was overall pretty quick. What was interesting is that Ewerbeck failed to convince herself that she had enough votes to adjourn the meeting, which prompted the anarchists to propose returning to the topics from Session 1. There was some interesting discussion there.

Session 2, Monday class:
Again, there were some key absences, specifically Bakunin. There was also the problem that some characters weren’t in the previous class and had not done sufficient work to catch up with the rest of the class.
The Kahoot! quiz went well, but it also became clear that the votes awarded for this work, combined with the absences, combined with the extra votes from the BINGO game in Session 1, decided the votes for the day.
The speeches were not of the caliber I wanted. It was clear that the students were too reliant on their character sheets and were not engaging with the text.
Neither of the journalists distributed their newspapers. What was really surprising was that William King decided not to make his arrest: he did some vote counting and had determined that it made more sense for him to not disrupt things.  
For this class, I had the sense to create some reflection questions in advance. I gave the students ten minutes to write out some answers and then had them discuss them in small groups. What surprised me was how honest a number of them were about how negatively they had been trained to view Marx and anything associated with him and how they didn’t see much of that in the text itself. In terms of the game mechanics, there was a push for characters not to have their views on everything written by the rules.

I've reviewed my Marx game from last semester and I've made some big changes:

• It's now two classes long
  
• Students have individualized projects

I've hosted my first class today and I will do another round of session 1 tomorrow.
I'll post the full rules soon, but if you read this summary of the students' projects, you'll get sense of what this game will try to accomplish.

I suspect that my class today highlighted a key problem with the Flashpoint style game: that the preparation time and reflection time is disproportionate to the amount of game play. My game is designed to take two class sessions. I did only 10 minutes of preparation the day before, which was scandalously little. The game nonetheless worked, but I suspect that was due to the care with which I assigned the roles.
For example, I chose as Karl Schapper, the president of the assembly, one of the most out-going and studious students. She did an excellent job of reading the instructions and preparing her banner for the class. She also came up with a creative form of the Magic Circle for beginning the assembly: during the roll call, she asked each student to recite the League’s motto. This was brilliant because it hammered home the importance of the motto to the organization. Furthermore, several of the anarchists refused to recite the current motto, instead reciting the motto that wish the League to adopt, “Workers of the World Unite!”.
Furthermore, I inadvertently did a great job of selecting the role of Karl Marx, who has to give a spontaneous explanation as to why he is or is not choosing to modify the Manifesto before the League votes on it. The student who took this role has experience in model UN, so he was comfortable with giving speeches and took the reading assignment seriously. After class, he talked to me about how he wished he had done better in his speech, but he was holding himself to too high a standard.
Unfortunately, due to the minimum amount of preparation, many of the speeches were not of the caliber that I wanted. The student who played the role of Marie Duclos Fretageot prepared an excellent speech, but even that one could have been better with more evidence taken from the text.
That being said, even with the limited amount of preparation, this class really leaned into the conflict and drama inherent in the game. The Bakunin character relished his role as firecracker, frequently butting into debate. But it was also clear that he had a decent understanding of Bakunin’s ideology: he was quick to point out when others were supporting hierarchy of any kind.
A big failure was the vote on the proposal. I thought that I had carefully prepared the vote so that the Marxists, Anarchists and Feminists would have the numbers and the incentive to vote on the Manifesto, even if Marx had changed it. However, in the game, Marx’s followers were enraged that he was willing to make concessions to the Christian Socialists. In fact, in the game, Marx decided to cut out Section III.1.A, Feudal Socialism, which contains some of the fiercest attacks on religion in the text.
Another failure was that the debates did not focus on the frame that I wanted for the text. I currently teach the Manifesto as part of a crash course in theories of history. Therefore, I have a couple of key points that I want students to remember about Marx’s theory of history. Namely, that Marx presents his history as:
•    scientific and objective
•    there is a single narrative that explains major change through all human history
•    that single narrative is class struggle
•    Marx uses this single narrative to predict the future
Instead, the major issues of debate were Marx’s attacks on religion. This isn’t too surprising, as one of the faction are the Christian Socialists. However, I think that I need to make them a smaller faction. Probably the next time I modify the game, there will be two main factions: the followers of Marx and the Bourgeois Socialists. I’m torn if I still want the other main groups, the anarchists, feminists and Christian Socialists, to be factions. Likely, the game will better stay focused on this main issue if they are indeterminates instead.  

This fall, I have the benefit of leading two classes through Threshold of Democracy after having played the game as Meletus during the Reacting to the Past conference this summer. I also simply have more confidence as a Game Master after now having lead four previous classes through this module.
The main difference for me this semester is that I’m more confident in the durability of the game, most especially the idea that all the roles can accommodate strong and weak students. In previous semesters, I had studied the character sheets closely myself and then assigned them based on what I had learned about my students over the course of the semester. This fall, I assigned pretty much all the roles randomly. That is, I assigned each role a number and suit matching to a deck of playing cards and then drew a card for each student. When I was done, I did move two roles around: Heriodon and Lithicles. Due to Herodion’s secret objective, it is a role better suited to certain students. Likewise, Liticles is also a hard character to assign, as some students do lean into the absurdly hard objective before them, but many of them do not.
Likewise, in previous semesters I had manipulated the assignments of president and heralds so that it did not interfere with students’ speaking schedules. This time, I decided to use the assignment of roles to hype up the game: after we had reviewed the responsibilities of heralds, presidents and archons, I had the students draw their responsibilities out of a hat. That worked well and I would definitely recommend it.
Another major difference is that while in previous semesters I had been forced to confine my preparation for the game to two classes due to snow days, this semester I voluntarily only scheduled two days of preparation. My classes are 75 minutes long. I found that 225 minutes was too much time for preparation, but that 150 minutes was more than fine.
This made sense to me as I considered how other professors have the fortune to teach classes that are only 45 or 55 minutes long. Three of such classes are equivalent to two of my 75 minute classes.
Finally, timing is something else that I’ve become more comfortable with reacting. I now expect students to React for between 40 and 60 minutes. This timing is obviously also a result of the number of students in my class. My classes are capped at 20 and so in Threshold of Democracy I always have three students in each of the four factions and then three to eight Indeterminates. Because few indeterminates, especially the ones that are frequently assigned like Gorgias and Thucydides, have Major Speeches, the class discussion often focuses on one major speech from each faction.
I therefore come to each class with discussion questions for the assigned readings for that day as well. While it can be hard to transition to class discussion after the drama of Reacting, I have the students do some in class writing before hosting the discussion. This seems to work well.
Plus, this semester I designed re-usable name tags for all the characters. You can download them here.
 

This time the initial Kahoot! game and lecture went twenty minutes, so the game definitely felt rushed. What was strange to me was that although what ended up getting cut was the debate, the students still felt rush during the preparation.
 
This time around, it was the feminists, Christians and bourgeois socialists that had the most outgoing students. William Lloyd Garrison in particular had a great time explaining how the League’s old motto, “All men are brothers”, was dividing the proletariat against itself by ignoring women workers, and that by adopting the motto “Humankind is one” they could begin to address this problem.
 
What was also interesting to me was that during the reflection, the issue of perspective, which had dominated the reflection portion of the other case, did not come up at all. Instead, the students fixated on how the factions had little incentive to vote other than for their own proposals. This was a particularly interesting reflection given that at the last minute, the bourgeois socialists and the Christians made an alliance to vote for each others’ proposals to eliminate section III.1.A, which attacks Christian socialists, and section III.2, which attacks bourgeois socialists. The other class failed to make such alliances.
 
I suspect that what made these alliances seem particularly weak was that the anarchists abstained on both of those proposals, which resulted in a tie. Because I ruled that proposals could only pass with a majority, these abstentions were critical.
 
Like last time, the debates focused on the first section. Interestingly, even though the classes had similar amounts of prep time, the Wednesday class was prepared with alternative names and slogans. The Thursday class was focused on the speeches and sort of winged the process of actually creating an alternative name or slogan.
 
The question of timing again suggests that the most logical thing to do is have the debates focus on either the name questions or the edit questions. On the one hand, the edit questions I suspect force the students to do more critical reading of the text in class. On the other hand, the naming questions are valuable because the politics of the different questions become hyper visible: this time, because the bourgeois socialists had a good debate among themselves during their discussion, they of course understood that the feminists proposed motto, “Humankind is one”, fit their politics. I don’t know why they still refused to vote for it.
 
Leaning into the dramatic nature of the game, I think what I need to do is have the first debate be weighted towards changing the name of the group. That is, have something like four out of the five factions be in favor of changing the name of the organization to the Communist League. The vote from such a debate would not only be historically accurate, as the League did vote to change their name to the Communist League and the motto, “Workers of the World Unite!”, it will also bring some momentum to the second debate. The second debate I’m okay being tilted towards a stand-off.

I played my new mini-game on the Communist Manifesto - the rules of which are here - with my 8AM class today.Below are my field notes:

We began the class with a Kahoot! quiz that reviewed some of the key concepts in the Manifesto that relate to Marx’s theory of history. Importantly, I did not simply review the answers to the questions, but instead use it as a jumping off point for a short lecture that centered around Marx’s theory of class struggle and how it prompted the transition from feudalism to capitalism and how it will prompt the transition from capitalism to communism.
 
Key thing: I forgot to explain that ‘bourgeois’ is the adjective and ‘bourgeoisie’ is the noun. Furthermore, students continue to be intimidated by pronunciation.
 
With this short review, which took around fifteen minutes, we then transitioned to the mini game. The introduction and review of the rules took a shorter amount of time than I thought; definitely closer to five minutes rather than ten minutes. I did give them the full fifteen minutes to prepare. This was necessary to clarify rules and expectations, as especially as relates to the factions’ secret goals.
 
Almost important: students have to work to identify with their faction and to collaborate with their fellow students. However, they immediately latch on to the individual identity of their character. I continue to believe that it is fundamental for Reacting to the Past games to provide backstories, preferably grounded in history as much as possible, for each of the characters.
 
Unsurprisingly, the debates took a while to get started, but they did eventually get heated, with some of the students with a background in debate or performance leaning into the perspective of their characters to interrupt the other students.
 
There was confusion about how proposals work: I should clarify that it is not enough simply to present a speech, but that one also needs to make a proposal that the League can vote on.
 
During the first debate, the students did not realize that it was possible to broker alliances with other factions. By the second debate, there was a beginnings of an alliance between the Anarchist Faction and the Feminist faction, but it was not enough to influence the vote.
 
The main disappointment was that none of the proposals passed. Furthermore, because the factions would essentially align 3-2 or 4-1 against the proposal, the tally of the vote results were not particularly close. It’s clear to me know why Reacting to the Past uses indeterminates rather than an odd number of factions.
 
In the brief review, all the students commented on how this exercise forced them to look at the text from a different perspective, which they express a struggle in doing so. Surprisingly, even the students with a background in debate and performance named this as the hardest part of the exercise. Somewhat surprisingly to me, nobody named the complex rules as the hardest part, or the fact that this was radically different than how we have conducted class in the past.
 
The other thing I am debating is whether to have the debate focus on a single question. My suspicion is that it is essential for the point system.

In my history 101 class, we read Marx's Manifesto as part of our first unit, which is essential a very short introduction to the philosophy of history. While in the past semester, I was happy with the lecture and discussion questions that I've created for this topic, I decided this year to follow the muse and create a mini-game on the Manifesto.

The basic premise is that the students are members of the League of the Just in 1848. Marx has just completed writing the manifesto and is presenting it to the league. The league has to make two decisions: whether or not to endorse the manifesto as written, or require Marx to rewrite sections of it, and whether or not to change the name of their organization based on the ideas in the manifesto.

This is loosely based on history: Marx was a member of the League of the Just, which was founded by the Christian socialist Wilheim Weitling. But that organization changed their name and their motto in 1847, that is, prior to Marx writing the manifesto.

The basic gist of the game is that there are five factions, and each has two goals as relates to the two questions of the name of the organization and the questions of the rewrite.

You can find my rules for this game here.
The mini-character sheets for the individual characters are here.

Because in my first game of the semester, the students in both classes had ended with about fifteen minutes left in our hour and fifteen minute block, for this class I had prepared some in class writing in case the class went short again.
 
Happily, this was unnecessary.
 
In both classes, Herodion was the president of the Assembly. In both classes, Herodion used this power to add some time to the agenda on the topic of women. The different results were quite interesting, and are indicative of the complex gender dynamics when recreating the past through competitive role-playing. 
 
In terms of logistics, because the number of votes per character changes so often in the game, I decided to help the presidents and heralds with this form.
 
8AM: The Socratics and the Solonian aristocrats strike enough of an alliance with Lithicles and Gorgias that they are able to restrict the Assembly to property owners. In their speeches, the Pericleans had offered some compromises to the Thrasybuleans, but these two group fail to actually work together. With the newly smaller electorate, Gorgias proposes state funding for the education of voters. This fails. Then Herodion opens the floor to the discussion on women. The speech was a bit short, but Herodion had obviously read the room correctly: the proposal to expand the electorate to include citizen women who own property passes! At first assurances were made that a) there were such women and b) there were not many of them.

What was fascinating about this vote was that this class is split between men and women about 60/40, the result of there being a preponderance of engineering students because this General Education class fits into the demanding engineering schedule.
 
9:30: The Socratics and Solonian aristocrats similarly strike enough of an alliance to restrict the size of the electorate. Interestingly, because of a poorly worded law, which does not indicate that one must be an Athenian in order to vote, but instead simply a “property owner”, the metic Lysias wins the franchise! This Herodion aims lower, teaming up with Gorgias to get state support for the education of women. This proposal fails. They recoup some dignity by getting the Assembly to pass a resolution offering moral support for anyone who pursues education.

In this class, the ration between men and women is close to 40/60. My current thesis is that the class with more women was more comfortable accurately reenacting the patriarchal expectations and biases of Assemblymen than a class with men.

Standing in front of my students while wearing a Halloween costume chiton, I was nervous about what kind of speeches they were going to present on the issue of pardoning the supporters of the Thirty Tyrants. I had checked in on both classes the night before, and for my 8AM class, only two out of four people had posted in the required discussion board their planned speeches. The 9:30AM class had three out of four people.
 
Overall, I would say that the students succeeded, but that I’m still getting my bearings with the game. The bad news: both games concluded after 45 minutes. What’s frustrating about this is that in my ideal world, most of classes would be 55 minutes long. Alas, the American university system, in order to accommodate overscheduled instructors and students, has for the most part shifted to the two day a week class. This means that all my classes are an hour and fifteen minutes. I find this amount of time frustrating as I always leave exhausted, but the unit is really too short to justify a break. Next week I'll have some in class writing based on the assigned reading prepared in case we go short again.
 
What was interesting was how different the two classes were. The students in the 8AM class gave shorter major speeches, but very much got into the back and forth of debating proposed legislation. IN contrast, the students in the 9:30 class were hesitant to speak outside of their major speeches. Perhaps the thoroughness of the speakers intimidated the others. I did remind them that they are risking votes if they do not speak, but that did not sway them. We’ll see how much they like voting at a disadvantage on Monday; hopefully it will goad them to speak up during class.  
 
Below are short summaries of either class:
8AM: Anytus, Periclean Democrat, proposes a modified amnesty law for the supporters of the 30 tyrants: they are immune to prosecution based on their past loyalties, but neither can they serve as leaders in the democracy. Despite being watered down, this proposal met fierce opposition from Lycon, Follower of Thrasybulus, a student who had been quiet the whole semester but has really taken to the role of democratic leader eager to avenge his son. Lycon and Aristocles get into a back and forth, with Aristocles, Follower of Socrates, who took exception to Lycon’s extensive pleading based on his own life’s history. Ultimately, Anytus’ proposal prevails.
I slip the Followers of Thrasbulus a note suggesting that they propose a law sponsoring the construction of a statue honoring the heroes who overthrew the Thirty Tyrants. The Followers of Socrates raise some objections about the cost, but the proposal passes overwhelming.
At the beginning of the class, the Herald Thucydides had drawn the chance encounter of “doubling the taxes on metics”. Aristocles, leaning into his role as the heel, speaks in favor of this proposal, saying that Athens can use it to pay for the new statue. While Thrasybulus speaks in favor, leaving unmentioned how the statue would almost certainly include him, I pass a note to the Socratics asking to justify this tax with Socratic ideals. Simon and Crito step refuse to support Aristocles. The tax fails, but with the Game Master’s 1,500 votes in favor, it was quite close.
We have a short debrief and the response was overwhelming positive: Thrasybulus confesses he didn’t think it was going to be this much fun and Lycon wonders why we haven’t been learning like this the whole semester.  
 
9:30 In his major speech, this Anytus also mentions a sort of compromise: letting any or all supporters of the thirty who have fled to Eleusis live in peace there, but forbidding their return. However, he doesn’t turn this idea into legislation. Instead, it is Lithicles, Assembly President for the day, who first proposes a bill offering blanket amnesty to followers of the thirty tyrants for their past support. The followers of Thrasybulus oppose this idea heartily, but make no inroads with any of the factions and -somewhat surprisingly given Thrasybulus’ dedication to the game (she came to class with a First Aid kit to dress as a wounded veteran) – they make no inroads with any of the Indeterminates either. Amnesty passes.
Liking the idea from the previous class, I pass a note to the followers of Thrasybulus about banning supporters of the 30 from leadership and sponsoring the construction of a statue honoring their overthrow. Thrasybulus and Meletus make convincing cases for both, leading to the Socratics and the Solonian Aristocrats voting in favor. I tried to get Xenophon to oppose the leadership ban by passing her a note, but Lithicles moved too quickly before should speak.
Lithicles did not enjoy being Assembly President and was happy to end the session after Gorgias got up to pitch services in rhetorical excellence.
In the debrief, there is much less enthusiasm than in the previous class. But then again, this class is overall quieter than the 8AM.

This semester I had set aside the standard three days of preparation for Threshold of Democracy. Unfortunately, in New Hampshire we had some snow this winter, resulting in three snow days for my History 101 class. With three fewer classes, I had to cut the third day of prep.
 
So today I tried to squeeze together three aspects of prep:

• Review the remaining rules (I hadn’t covered the roles of president, herald and archon yet)
• Get the students into factions to plan their strategy; I designed an exercise based on the Spectrum of Allies tools that organizers use
• Have the students practice their speeches

 
Rules review:
The slides for the lecture are here. Unfortunately, I haven’t had time to add either images or animations. But the upside is that I can freely share these slides without having to worry about copyright.
 
Faction Planning:
For this exercise, I broke the students into their factions and asked them to choose one piece of legislation that their faction wants to pass and then answer the questions on this handout. The exercise asks the students to place on this spectrum all the characters in the game. The spectrum organizes the other characters based on their support or opposition to this piece of legislation. The second part of the exercise asks the students to imagine how they could shift their opponents. That is, whether or not they could change the wording of a particular law or exchange some sort of favors.
I think this exercise would have worked better with more time. Sandwiched between the lecture and the prewriting work, the students really only had fifteen minutes. Some of them did do good work, but much of it was researching the stances of the factions or the indeterminates. While the students do need to know that, my real goal for this exercise was for the students to do more advanced planning.
The other issue is that I wish that I had made it clearer on this exercise whether or not I want the students to list whole factions or individuals.
Furthermore, I should really create a separate exercise for the indeterminates, as forcing them to use this same tool didn’t really work as they are not collaborating to pass a particular bit of legislation.
 
Prewriting:
I asked all the students who have to give a speech at any point during the game to come to class with some form of prewriting for this speech. The idea being is that they could use some time with their faction to review what they’ve written so far as well as get feedback on their performances. Specifically, feedback from the other students using the categories that I will use when grading them. This exercise seemed to work well for the students who did the prewriting, the exception being the indeterminates.

I also re-imagined how to teach the preparation classes. Specifically, I wanted the different factions to begin with a fair amount of solidarity and also a solid understanding of what they want and how to achieve it. Part of the problem is that the first time I led this class, I did not foreground the point system. I understand this hesitancy, as it could lead to classes being too focused on the points and not on the collective story. However, I think I lost out on the competitive nature of my students by not doing so.
 
Here’s how I set up the first day of preparation:
1) Lecture that introduces the mechanics of the game
2) Mini-Game: Meet ‘n’ Greet Challenge
3) Strategy Session with Faction 
 
1) Lecture I’ll post these slides once I have a chance to pretty them up
 
2) Meet ‘n’ Greet Challenge
As part of the homework for this class, I asked the students to read their assigned character sheets and to come to class prepared to answer these questions:

• Your character’s name (I noticed last semester that it often took a student many times to become comfortable with Greek names)
• Your character’s faction
• How your character makes money
• An interesting detail about your character; if you can’t remember one, invent one!

I then challenged them to get in character and to meet as many other students as they could in five minutes. I simply used the honor system for how many people met, but I could imagine designing a worksheet to track this. I awarded 50 extra votes to the person who met the most other people.
I felt good about my character assignments with the winners: in both my classes, it was Lithicles who won (in my first class, he talked to 14 other students in under five minutes!)
 
3) Strategy Session with Faction
I broke the students into their factions and gave them about thirty minutes to complete this assignment sheet. Some of the stuff might seem overly basic, but earlier in the semester I had had them complete group work I know that communication was an issue, so I figure forcing the students to decide how they will communicate makes sense. I also wanted them to take some responsibility for figuring out when their assignments are due.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the students surprised me with how they completed this sheet. In my 8AM class, the Socratics, in part due to some prompting by Lithicles, didn’t simply research potential allies by reading the descriptions of the factions in the book: they found the Solonian Aristocrats and started hashing out deals for upcoming votes.

Obviously, the Indeterminates don't work together as a faction, so I came up with a different sheet for them that tries to get them to simultaneously private reflect on how to accomplish their secret goals AND find a study buddy to help them keep track of deadlines.

Handouts:

• Factions
• Indeterminates