The Future of Education
Overcoming Game-based Learning Teaching Barriers: The Preliminary Stages of a Teacher Action Research
Pier Daniel Cornacchia, The University of Milano Bicocca (Italy)
Abstract
Game based learning (GBL) is a motivating and engaging approach to foster students’ learning (Plass et al., 2020). However, teachers complain that there are many social-organizational barriers for the implementation of game integration, which can be overcome with training (Ces et al., 2025). Hence, Teacher Action-Research, following the 5 Crespi principles (Asquini, 2018), is chosen as the methodological pathway to foster meaningful research and professional development processes. A community of primary school teachers in the Lecco province in Italy asked to be trained to help them use games in their didactics. After 5 initial instructional design, game analysis and focus group discussion sessions throughout 2024 and early 2025, these teachers defined lack of colleagues’ collaboration, due to their traditional teaching style, as the most common obstacle for game integration. To understand this issue’s dynamics, 8 in-training teachers played a role-play game (Boal, 2002), which consisted in the staging of a discussion among colleagues who disagree on game use. The scene was then analyzed to look into the portrayed issue, considering different perspectives. Thus, they devised solutions to overcome these challenges and they staged them as well to have a sense of their potential. The overall thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2021) of the transcribed scripts of the role-plays and of all the focus groups shows that colleagues’ resistance toward game classroom use shouldn’t be belittled but understood, because it often comes from emotional and pedagogical insecurity. In conclusion, game-based teacher training strategies such as role-plays allow for a better understanding of teachers’ issues and how to address them, as they highlight relational complexities.
Keywords: Teacher Training Research, Game-based learning
REFERENCES
Asquini, G. (2018). La ricerca-formazione: temi, esperienze, prospettive. Franco Angeli.
Boal, A. (2002). Games for actors and non-actors (2nd ed). Routledge.
Braun, V., & Clarke, V. (2022). Thematic analysis: A practical guide. SAGE.
Ces, P., Doyen, A. L., Duflos, M., & Giraudeau, C. (2025). Board games in the elementary classroom: teachers’ perspectives. Educational Research, 67(2), 190-211.
Plass, J. L., Mayer, R. E., & Homer, B. D. . (2020). Handbook of game-based learning. Mit Press.
