Last week, our field experience came in the form of planning and setting up our very own Escape Room based on Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper. Our “students” were peers at Stony Brook, but they gave us an idea of how a real English class would respond to such a lesson; we even had an example of a student who was not engaged, and found that they all did things we didn’t expect. As we watched a livestream from the other room, we learned a lot about the value of such a lesson and what needs to be fixed for the future. We also experienced how applicable and beneficial backward design is, even when creating something that wasn’t a traditional lesson plan.
It’s very difficult to predict how your students will react to certain things. When planning this, I thought about how the narrator first examined the patterns in the wallpaper and didn’t start to rip it off until the end of the story, so I didn’t expect that their first instinct would be to immediately rip all of the wallpaper off and crumple it up. To me, this shows that not only should teachers have contingency plans, but we should accept that things won’t always go as we plan (or even backup plan) and that we have to go with the flow. There were other ways for the participants to find the clues that were written on the wallpaper, so it didn’t derail everything.
However, they still were unable to figure out the puzzle that I had created, and this to me was a big lesson on background knowledge. I had gotten the idea for my puzzle from reading A Series of Unfortunate Events as a kid, where word replacement is a code used to significant effect in the story. Had I been faced with this puzzle, I would have known how to solve it because of my background knowledge, and I assumed that participants of the room would be able to as well. But my students didn’t have the same background knowledge that I did, so they didn’t know what to do with my puzzle. Had I been more aware and not assumed that they would know the same things I did, I could have made the puzzle more accessible.
The students were not able to solve the escape room, because in our planning we had underestimated the difficulty of our puzzles. Perhaps this problem could have been avoided if we had tested the puzzles more carefully, or started our planning earlier. However, I feel the lessons we learned from doing this initial lesson will help me plan a more accessible room if I ever do this again.
That being said, Dr. Galante pointed out that this was much more valuable to the planners than to the participants, and to that I have to agree. My classmates and I know The Yellow Wallpaper backwards and forwards from reading and rereading to come up with puzzles and details to incorporate. If I were to use this type of activity with a future class (which I would like to!), I would have the students themselves plan the escape room instead of me coming up with it and having them solve it. I think this would get students really engaged with the text and would prompt analysis that they wouldn’t even realize they were doing.
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